Skip to main content

Ireland Day 4 - County Cork

Today we started with breakfast at the B&B at 8:00AM.  Breakfast consisted of a fresh omelet with ham, cherry tomatoes, cheese, and mushrooms, Jim didn’t have mushrooms in his, well as fresh scones and tea.  After breakfast we headed up to Blarney Castle.

The drive up to Blarney Castle took about an hour.  Technically according to the tour company, and the voucher they gave us we should have done Blarney Castle tomorrow but that didn’t make sense with our plans.  Thankfully the castle took our voucher a day early.  We toured the castle; it took a bit over 45 minutes to get to the top of the castle. Way longer than it took me last time I visited Ireland back in 2006.  I didn’t kiss the Blarney Stone this time, but Jim kissed it. He was like it took us forever to get to the top, might as well kiss the stone.  The trip down was a lot faster. Then we walked through the poison garden, the stable area, and of course the gift shop.  By that time, it was lunch time.  We ate at the Muskerry Arms Bar. We had sandwiches. They are all about their toasties (i.e., toasted sandwich) here.  Then we walked around the Blarney Woolen Mill briefly.  The place used to be a mill, now it is similar to a department store. Very disappointing.  We are really trying to find a small local wool shop, instead of something that is mass produced. Afterwards we headed back to the B&B briefly. 

Blarney Castle

On the Blarney Castle Grounds

After a brief stop back at the B&B we went over to the Lusitania Museum and Old Head. The Lusitania Museum is housed inside a restored Napoleonic signal tower.  The Museum is either considered one of the first or last places to visit on the Great Atlantic Way.  The view is very nice, we couldn’t go further out onto the peninsula past the golf course to the light house, since the light house was closed.  

Lusitania Memorial

View from Cliffs Old Head

From there we headed to Kinsale for dinner.  We stopped at the visitor center to get some dinner recommendations and pick up some maps. (I like physical maps.)  I can say for Kinsale being the foodie capitol of Ireland the menus outside the restaurants were not very inventive.  When someone tells me they are the foodie capital I’m expecting a variety of cuisine, maybe some fusion dishes, not lots of meat and potatoes. We thought about eating at the only Micheline started restaurant in the area, but they didn’t open till 6:00PM, we didn’t want to wait an hour.   We ended up eating at an Indian place, which was very good.  Afterwards we headed back to the B&B for our last night in the area before heading up to Killarney in the morning.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2024 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2025

This year felt a little off for me; I think it was because I was in a mental recovery mode.  I finished my graduate program in June and immediately went on a week-long vacation to Palm Springs.  I do not recommend Palm Springs in June; way too hot.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the graduate program mentally and physically exhausted me, which I think showed in some of my creative work.  But being able to work with great people like Natalie Hanrion , Coralinx Cosplay , and Anastasia B kept me motivated.  While I didn’t attend as many Cosplay Photo Shoot events as in the past, the ones I did attend were helpful in keeping the creativity flowing.  I also took some time this year to reflect on a few things and will be making some changes for 2025. In 2024, I shot 6241 frames, which is a 30-percent decrease from last year.  I edited 3187 frames, which is a 40-percent decrease from 2023.  I think this year, I started focusing on being very min...
Post a Comment
Read more

First Session of 2025 - Queen of Hearts

My first official shoot of 2025 was with Lady Cels on January 4 th , to shoot her Queen of Hearts cosplay based off the NoFlutter Design. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 1 FJ400 Westcott Strobes 60-inch umbrella with sock 1 rectangular soft box 1 bell reflector grids 2 C-stands 1 Platypod Sandbags Backdrop stand Savage Primary Red Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps   Gold ring wedding altar pieces Playing cards Flowers Styrofoam block Scotch tape     The set up The inspiration for this shoot was obviously the Queen of Hearts, but I took my set design cues from the original NoFlutter drawing.  I wanted to create something similar to the swirls used in the background of the image, so I started looking at wrought iron garden fences and ended up on gold we...
Post a Comment
Read more

Night Queen

On September 28th, I did a session with May.   This session’s theme was designed around a Halloween headpiece I made a couple of years ago but never got to shoot.   The vibe of the overall shoot was dark queen. For this session, I used: Photography Equipment Props/Miscellaneous Cannon R6 24-105 mm Lens Transmitter/Trigger 2 Phottix Strobe 2 rectangular soft boxes grids 2 C-stands Sandbags Backdrop stand Fuzzy grey backdrop Spyder Color Checker Card A-clamps 2 trilevel plant stands Fake candles Goblets Fake flowers Black fabric Silver fabric Large Styrofoam block Dowel Rods Skulls Fake moss Dry ice   The set up I tried to keep this setup simple in nature.  I started with the base of a fuzzy grey backdrop to which I added a “throne” made from a large Styrofoam block, some dowel rods, and a piece of black fabric.  To that I added two flower pot hol...
Post a Comment
Read more