Park pond

Last night's on-the-town with my mate Alan went well to begin with. We had an enjoyable few drinks in one of our favourite meeting places and then tried a few places for food, all to no avail in the first three so we had to resort to a little italian place we hadn't been to before. It turned out to be very enjoyable (and unusually reasonable for Dublin), and we had a great time. From there we went on to the Mint Bar in the Westin hotel, where we'd enjoyed the jazz session before. It wasn't as good this time -- a new sax/clarinet player was far too loud and didn't know how to use the microphone. It got worse the more they played, and I found myself becoming more and more annoyed, which wasn't helped by Alan's extravagance in terms of the cocktails he was ordering (silly, silly money!). I gave up in time to get the 12.30 am Nitelink home and left him to it.

I was feeling a bit under the weather this morning (not from drink, but suffering from a queasy tummy which got worse as the day went on. The weather was reasonably okay, though, so I went out in the afternoon hoping to get some suitable material in the can which I could use afterwards for HDR experimentation. Conditions weren't at all suitable, though -- very misty, dull, flat light. I tried a few bracketed-exposure sets but nothing looked good enough when I transferred it from the camera. While playing around with a HDR app I suddenly realised that the tummy upset was getting more nagging and I decided not to go to the concert by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe which I'd been looking forward to for several months. (I heard later that it was wonderful, they got a standing ovation, the orchestra played three encores, and the concert didn't finish until 10.30.)

I stayed up far too late downloading and listening to music. It wasn't until Sunday evening that I took another look at the photos from the afternoon session. I had no choice but to abandon the idea of doing a HDR image, and it took a while before I even found a single image I was half-way satisfied with. Then it took quite a bit of post-processing to get it looking any way decent.