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Cosmography

Sunshine Gothic

OK, barefaced misnomer. This is Romanesque architecture, older and more primitive than Gothic. In fact it is barely Romanesque, more Roman-ish; really just basic vernacular masonry with a little bit of decoration around the edges to classy it up. But it is a graveyard in the ruins of a monastery – Annaghdown Abbey, right next to the cathedral I spoke of – so the label is pretty inescapable.

There is something quiet primitive too about taking pictures. Like hunting or harvesting, if photograph weather comes along then you must take those photographs where you can. It’s just fortunate I was in a place like this on the first truly hot day of summer. Bagged me some nice wild images. A good photographer can make good images out of awful weather of course, but I’m not a photographer of any kind – I know because I tried to be once. I just want to take easy, pretty pictures.

All the ones in the last few months were taken on the Galaxy Note‘s 8 Mpx shooter. It’s very capable if not outstanding; I was more struck by the qualities of the images I got with the 5 Mpx one on my Nokia N900 – once you replaced its very basic default software with the custom FCamera drivers. But I think it’s made me take better pictures simply by virtue of its huge screen.

I always found composing through a viewfinder kind of awkward. I think I wasn’t able to take in the image as a whole when squinting at it one-eyed like that. I tried instead to fit points of interest into a frame. The big screen of the Note though, it’s… well it’s like it’s already a picture. I can just sort of wave it around until it’s a good picture. More than one nice shot I got was something I just noticed in my hand when I wasn’t aiming at anything. I guess it makes my composition less self-conscious – which in artistic terms translates almost directly to less crap.

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