18th Nov 2020
This blog is being written in the middle of a second wave of Covid-19 cases in Ireland.
This virus was first identified in China in December 2019. At the time it wasn’t thought that it would have spread around the world. But spread it did, and there is hardly any populated place in the world left untouched by the virus.
The first case of Covid-19 in Ireland was reported at the end of February this year, and then as more and more cases were reported, it was only a matter of time before Ireland was added to the list of countries implementing drastic measures to curb the spread of the virus, beyond social distancing. And so it was, at the end of March, we entered our first lockdown, we could only go outside our homes for specified essential purposes only.
During the month of April, the daily case counts went up before they came down, and the restrictions were gradually eased in response to this during the months of May and June. However, from mid-August, we started seeing more cases, the picture gradually worsened to the point where, in mid-October, restrictions were reintroduced.
The current restrictions are scheduled to stay in force until the end of November, and scheduled to be eased in the run-up to Christmas.
It has been observed that many young people have been staging house parties and the like, apparently with no measures taken to limit the spread of the virus, i.e. face masks and social distancing, and people were blaming this for the second wave. Not surprisingly, the powers that be were advising against this.
I often travel around the country for photoshoots. During the times of earlier sunsets in the autumn and winter, I would do photography incorporating light trails at night. Examples of these would include long exposure images of road and rail traffic, but not limited to these.
However, these restrictions meant that for a while, I could not travel to many of the locations that I had planned to visit.
You can’t alter the wind but you can adjust the sails, so I had to work around the situation. For me, it was exploring other genres, including but not limited to close-up / macro photography, and these were featured in YouTube videos I made during the times of the restrictions in Ireland. There are many other photographers, who run YouTube channels, and admittedly with much higher subscriber counts than my channel, that are resorting to similar measures in response to situations in their countries, brought about by the virus.
Photography isn’t the only thing I could turn to, in order to keep my mind occupied. There are many other things in which I have an interest, including 3D modelling, web design, and coding. I plan to expand this website to include these topics in future blogs. I may do the same to my YouTube channel.
The software I use for 3D modelling is Blender, which is an open-source toolset for numerous tasks associated with 3D modelling, including motion graphics, animation, visual effects, VR and computer games. It has to be said that Blender is rather intimidating to those who have never used it before, or those who are used to other packages, like SketchUp, or even some of the commercial packages like AutoCAD.
The most effective way I found, when it comes to learning how to use Blender is through watching YouTube videos, like Blender Guru, CG Cookie and Blender Binge, because more often than not manuals and the like tend to be rather difficult to follow for the absolute beginner; someone with a reasonable knowledge of Blender would have a better chance of understanding the manuals.
The first time I wrote HTML code for a web page was in the early noughties, and initially this, together with CSS and Javascript, was the language I used in web design. At the time, the most popular programs that were around that mark up web pages in a WYSIWYG environment were FrontPage and Dreamweaver. Until about 2010, that was how I was designing websites, when a friend of mine told me about WordPress, which makes it a lot easier to design websites, formatting them more consistently.
Although there are numerous WordPress themes available online, some of which are free, others you have to pay for, all the themes I used on my website down the years, I have written myself, largely from the ground up, in PHP and CSS.
Not to forget coding, I am proficient in several languages, including but not limited to C# and Java, these languages I use to write PC-based programs, and in the last few years, Android apps, respectively.
I plan to write more blogs in the future on these subjects, for this website. Just as well I gave the website the name that I did, and not one that would focus solely on photography.