I set up two cameras on tripods  – one with a wide view and one with a more close-up view of the same scene. Each camera was fitted with a remote shutter device. One camera took a picture every 8 seconds, the other every 20 seconds. Once the remote shutters are activated, I don’t need to do anything except wait.¹

Now, hanging around on Salthill Prom isn’t exactly hardship, though the breeze was a bit on the nippy side. I had loaded up my iPod with a load of podcasts, so thanks to Terry Gross, Blake Esken, Rico Gagliano & Brendan Newnam, and a host of others, the morning passed quickly (I rarely get time to read newspapers anymore – except occasionally online – but I am totally sold on podcasts). In addition, I have yet to set up a tripod anywhere on the Promenade without someone coming over for a chat, so I had some company on and off over the morning (and if you should see me on the Prom – or anywhere else – standing beside a bunch of cameras clicking away to themselves, be sure to come over and say hello).

The absolutely essential equipment for doing timelapses, apart from the cameras and tripods, are plenty of memory cards and batteries.  The timelapses in the videos below consisted of 791 and 1191 photos respectively, and took up about 20Gb of storage. Between the constant clicking  and the cold, the cameras went through the first set of batteries  in 2 hours.

That’s where another vital accessory came in very handy. I had left the spare cards and batteries back in the house, so, after a quick phone call, my missus agreed to get up and bring them to me. Of course, since I taken the car, she had to walk the 3 kilometres to actually deliver them to me [and walk another 3kms back home again afterwards]. And while she was with me , she fetched  a cappuccino and breakfast bap from Coco’s coffee shop nearby [ that's the other really great thing about doing a timelapse on the Prom - you're always close to a great cup of coffee]. B & H don’t supply wives, but if they did, I’d order a Langan.

Here are the timelapses – the first shows the Prom in a wide view (the camera was located at the walkway in front of the Waterfront Hotel) and the Bailey Point complex is visible at the left of the picture, and Seapoint can also be seen. Click here to view. The second video is a close-up of a huge rock [also pictured above] visible at low tide (also visible in the wide view) – click here to view.

¹The timelapse is created by uploading all of the pictures onto a computer and using Quicktime software  to create a video. Watch them in HD mode if possible.

There has not been many clear nights over Galway city this winter. From a photographer’s point of view, that is a bit frustrating, but from a human point of view, it seems a bit churlish to complain given the very harsh winter conditions visited on the rest of Europe over the last month or so. Last week, the sky cleared for a while, the moon lit up the rocks and the steps around the diving board in Salthill, and a very bitter wind kept most people from walking the prom. Here is a short timelapse video taken while I was taking pictures down at the diving board.

Rainbows are caused by both the reflection and refraction of light. As rain falls, some of the sunlight shining on raindrops gets reflected, as each raindrop acts like a tiny mirror. Each raindrop also acts as a tiny prism, so the reflected light is also refracted. The amount of refraction depends on the wavelength of the light. Each colour in the visible light spectrum has a slightly different wavelength, which causes each colour to be refracted differently in a raindrop. That is why we can see the different colours in a rainbow. The picture above was taken early yesterday morning in Salthill – you can see the Burren hills in the background. It shows a few different phenomenon relating to rainbows. The first is obviously the rainbow itself – the really bright one.  Secondly, a second fainter rainbow can be seen further out (with the colour pattern reversed) – that is a secondary rainbow caused by secondary refraction within the raindrops. It is not an unusual occurrence – I’ve seen double rainbows lots of times. What is unusual is the third phenomenon visible in the picture – what looks like a middle rainbow at a different angle to the other two. This is a reflection rainbow, caused by sunlight reflecting off a large body of still water – in this case, a very calm Galway Bay.  The sunlight  reflects first off the sea and then hits the falling raindrops from below, causing a different refraction [and therefore different shaped rainbow] to occur. Reflection rainbows always intersect with ‘ordinary’ rainbows at the horizon. In this picture, there is actually a secondary reflection rainbow, though it is very faint [it also has the colour band in reverse order].

The beauty of a rainbow is literally in the eye of the beholder – the location of a rainbow is dependent on the observer. A rainbow always appears directly opposite the sun, so an observer always has his/her back to the sun when looking at a rainbow. If you were to draw a triangle between yourself, the top of your shadow and a point on the rainbow, the angle facing you would always be between 40 and 42 degrees, for the primary rainbow and between 50 and 53 degrees for the secondary rainbow..  For reflection rainbows, the angles are the same [for primary and secondary rainbows] – the shape is different because the light is coming from the ground [i.e. a still body of water] rather than directly from the sun in the sky.

You can see the full rainbow in this picture [click on link] which is a panorama of 4 images merged together in Photoshop. A very good explanation of rainbows is available on Youtube click for Part 1 or Part 2.