I shot this photo quite a few months and all but forgot about it. It sat un-processed and forgotten in a dark corner of my gallery gathering electronic dust until I stumbled across it yesterday. The raw image didn’t look too promising, the whole thing had a very nasty red colour cast and didn’t look at all appealing. Some fairly extreme twiddling with sliders in iPhoto managed to turn this ugly duckling into a beautiful swan! The moral of the story, don’t be too put off when your shots don’t look great straight out of the camera! To give you an idea of how much editing had to be done I’ve included a small version of the original below.

If you’ve been following this series you’ll have seen Taghadoe before, this is the same round tower you saw silhouetted in Photo of the Week 5 – Nightfall in Taghadoe. It’s a real hidden gem located just a few miles outside Maynooth Village in Co. Kildare, Ireland.

Click to Enlarge

For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of the shot:

• Camera: Nikon D40
• Lens: Nikon DX AFS 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
• Exposure: 14.6 sec (using tripod)
• Focal Length: 18mm
• Focal Ratio: F3.5
• ISO: 800
• Camera Mode: Manual
• Exposure Compensation: -1.0

[tags]Photography, Maynooth, Ireland, Kildare, Taghadoe, Round Tower, astrophotography, stars, night[/tags]