Tag: St Mary’s Cork

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The Stories of God’s Bus

Outside St Mary’s there was this bus.

Photographer Cork
God’s Bus. St Mary’s, Pope’s Quay, Cork

To me there seemed to be a whole bag of stories relating to this bus, the people on it, the people who own and maintain it, where it’s been and what it’s doing outside St Mary’s on a Thursday morning.

And I’d love to know.   And I’d love to photograph them.

But what came over me as I walked past the bus was a familiar old feeling of intrusion.  It’s one I used to feel when I saw something like this on my holidays – I was fascinated, I knew there was a great story waiting to be told, I could even see some captivating photographs waiting to be taken, but I was inhibited by not wanting to intrude: I had no real right to pry for the sake of a good photograph.

My curiosity isn’t stronger than someone else’s privacy.

I thought that perhaps this would change now I do this for a living. I’m a full-time professional photographer now.  But clearly for me that doesn’t give me the right to be nosey for a photograph no-one has asked me to take.  Even  if it will be fantastic.

Maybe it’s my English background.  No doubt many other stunning photographs have been created without such qualms.  Maybe the people concerned would have been more than happy to tell me their story and let me photograph them.

But the best thing about doing this professionally (for me) is that people ask you to photograph them and tell their story.  It’s the asking that makes the difference.

So I shot this ‘from the hip’ without the people on the bus noticing and went about my own business.  That probably says a lot about me but I’m OK with that.

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St Mary’s, Popes Quay

Photographsm of Cork
Just something about those steps

So on my morning off I went off to drop in on friends who have just opened up a food business on Popes Quay.  It’s a long time since I walked that quay and I was stopped in my tracks on the steps of St Mary’s.  Something about these steps drew me in and I took out the camera and the 24mm lens and took a few pictures.

It’s one of those occassions where the light and the geometry of the steps – newly wet from a shower – just stuck me.

Now it’s no surprise to most people that I prefer people to architecture.  People are just more interesting and the more time you have with someone the more interesting they become and my challenge in life is to convey that character in a photograph.  And I’d normally be looking at a shot like this and looking at who to put into the frame to make it make sense and where to put them.

But I quite like this image.  I tried it in black and white but it looked too much like a drawing.

On a technical note, not much has been done with this image.  I made some adjustments in Lightroom to even out some minor distortion in the 24mm prime lens, adjusted contrast and colour and that’s about it.  The intention is just to sligtly exagerate the natural flatness of the tone of the stone work and contrast with the colour of the doors.  I decided not to clean up the gum, the cigarette butt or anything else.