The Bull in the Square

A sudden notion on the way home from Carl's last night made me stop and play around with some night-time shots. An important lesson was learned during the process, so I’m delighted I followed the urge. Because of the excitement it was 3:00 am by the time I got home, which is why I didn't need to get out and about today to do any blipping for St Patrick's Day as I would normally do.

To be honest, I probably would have dragged myself out if the weather had been somewhat better, but I wasn't really all that pushed anyway, and I was still on a bit of high after the early-morning blip session.

This just one of some 250 shots which I came home with. This is my pick of the bunch, while some others are available to view in a Flickr set. I began the night-time blipping odyssey in Seapoint, went on to Grand Canal Square from there and finished up near the Convention Centre and Spencer Dock.

On one of the corners of the Grand Canal Square is a restaurant called El Toro. Appropriately enough, they have a sculpture of a bull outside. I don't think I'd ever seen the bull at this time of night before, and I was really struck by the way it picked up the red and green lighting from the Square. Also, I decided on a bit of a big ask for the camera and tried for close focus on the ring in the bull's nose. The X100 was happy to oblige.

(Incidentally, the lesson I learned was not to leave the camera on Auto ISO with a maximum value of 3200, because it was just doing too well set up like that and kept on turning night into day. Switching things so I chose the ISO myself introduced me to a whole new world of night-time photography.)