Pure Magic Kitesurfing’s new shop in Dublin.

Francois Colussi and Catherine Etienne opened their new shop to the public at around 6 on Saturday evening. It’s an amazing place altogether and I am not saying that only because most of the photographs hanging in there were taken by yours truly. Fantastic party to launch the new premises and okay, a lot of fun. Photos can be found here.

Apparently this is one of my best photographs, ever.

I can never figure that out.

Anyway, it was taken last week, on a Tuesday evening. We didn’t get a summer in Ireland this year, and the light dies earlier and earlier. The end result is that during the weekend I bought a new flash for the camera, a 580 EX Speedlite. I didn’t want to. I had a functional (but old) flash unit that, until I started getting frustrated with how things went this summer (No PKRA and no KPWT for Treasa this year either - this is so bad) that I just said to hell with it and bought.

Anyway, this was taken with a Sigma 10-20mm, and features, as is often the case, Francois Colussi. I wanted to achieve different things here, but it’s just not happening.

As for myself, I was supposed to have more kitesurfing lessons this week. I took a week off work because I can’t get there in the evenings to do them lately, and now, we have no wind again. I’m starting to feel decidedly depressed about it.

The main gallery has been updated. You’ll find most of the recent additions here in Recent Additions. There are also a couple of new albums called Irish Landscapes and Quirky.

Here’s something to glance at:

Sean Murphy hangs out of the sky on day one (day wind) of the Irish Kitesurfing King of the Bay comp in June 2008.

Most of the gallery content will be reorganised sometime in the next few weeks and the albums will get streamlined.

One of the things which interests me is how you can play with colour in the sunshine.

This is a quadtone.

When I started taking kite photographs first, I spent a lot of time taking photographs of a couple of very talented young kitesurfers. Sean Murphy was one of them. I didn’t see so much of him last year, but he’s back in Dublin for the summer, great, and I’m now shooting a little wider from the water.

Last weekend we had the King of the Bay competition in Dublin Bay - you’ll find results and stuff here on Pure Magic’s website - and although the wind was thin on the ground, there was enough for me to get some nice, nice photographs. I was lucky enough to get some great photographs. I like this one a lot, even allowing for the nice big drop of water on the front of the lens…:-)

(these things happen).

KiteLense.net, my previous “learning how to take kite photographs” website is shutting down. I am slightly sad about that, but to be honest I have too many strings to my bow at the moment, and too many things to try and manage, so little by little, some of the websites I run are being shut down. All the kite photography related stuff will come here, and the plan is to keep the gallery updated a little more often.

This is interesting in that Sean effectively half circled me which is why the horizon is slightly warped…it’s not a stand there and shoot straight shot.

I’ll be updating the gallery contents tomorrow - when I wake up - so that we have some new photographs to look at.

This weblog is not fully Internet Explorer friendly, mainly because of the photographs. If you are using FireFox or Opera, you will not have any obvious issues (I think - it looks okay to me), but IE is pushing the images down because of the flickr thing to the right. I may disable it and implement it in a slightly different way.

The WordPress theme is by Tony.

One other thing to note is that Dancing Shades of Light and KiteLense will both be shutting down some time soon. In a way it’s sad, but my hope is that by shutting the two of them down and moving the photography over here, I will a) drive more traffic into the gallery site and b) re-open Winds and Breezes.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Morocco with Pure Magic Kitesurfing.

This is about six kilometres up the road from where we were staying.

Ross Harte over a sandbar

Ross came to me and said he reckoned he could clear me. He and Sean Murphy both succeeded and we got a couple of nice photographs out of the trip.

Sean Murphy had a go too.

I took some lessons.

Francois Colussi on the last day. I’m getting type cast with the sepia shots.

Francois Colussi again, on the last day, this time in colour (state the obvious)

Waveriding…

the long walk upwind

Martin

Start of the downwinder

Sean Murphy rather close for comfort….

Friday morning, I will be off to Dahkla in Morocco with a bunch of friends including most of the Pure Magic team. Hopefully, while we are down there, nice things will happen and I’ll come back able to kitesurf.

In any case, the camera is coming with me so hopefully I’ll come back with nice photographs too.

So, some news is long overdue.

At the start of September, I went to the KPWT WaveMasters competition in Guincho for a couple of days. Got a couple of nice photographs but to be honest, there was very little wind while we were down there.

This was probably the most popular photograph I brought back from there:

Also went to La Baule where there was absolutely no wind whatsoever, so that was a write off. We also went to the competition in Guidel and although there wasn’t a huge amount of wind there either, we’d great un messing around.

This came out of there:

Steph Bridge came over to Ireland to teach some of our girls in October.

Next weekend is the last round of the Irish Kitesurfing Tour, in Banna. It should be interesting. In December I’m scheduled to go to Morocco with Pure Magic Kitesurfing. It should be fun.