BOTANIC GARDENS

One unexpected occupational hazard of pairing an extreme 180-degree field of view with the low Dublin autumn sun was that virtually every frame taken with the light behind me captured my own shadow. With the late-October sun hovering barely twenty degrees above the horizon, the fisheye optics stretched my silhouette into an absurdly elongated, gaunt figure creeping across the Victorian gravel and curling over the granite kerbs. At first, my instinct was to curse the optical intrusion; yet on Halloween, between the harvest squashes and the quiet graves of Glasnevin, the exaggerated, cape-like shadow assumed an unmistakably vampiric presence. Rather than fight the lens geometry or attempt generative cloning across radial paving textures, I opted to leave the 'vampire' intact—a suitably theatrical, if accidental, nod to Samhain that firmly anchors the observer within the scene.

And Now The Real Issue That I Encountered

Initially I thought the the lens would work well within the famous glasshouses but in general I was disappointed and had to take a break and consider a different approach which resulted in me wandering around the wooded areas of the Botanic Gardens photographing at random and then deciding if I could develop a technique which required a lot research on my return home. I now need to experiment a lot more in order to get the results that I had hoped for.