I have always and will always be thankful for Gougane Barra. It’s a wonderful place to visit when the hoards of dribbling tourists retreat and more than that, it always proves to be a great location for photos. But not only that, it’s only about an hour away so it’s convenient to get to whenever the urge (born mostly out of boredom) strikes. So now you’ll see why there is a seemingly constant feed of photos from Gougane Barra here.
This visit was no different; Well only in that this time I chose to mainly use my macro lens to capture the detail in the many stone statues, plaques and even the many hundreds of coins, old and new, wedged into the bark of trees around the church. Yes, that is frowned upon these days though. The cross that seemed to have thousands of coins in it has disappeared sadly.
Sadly, not long after I arrived a whopping great tour bus arrived and a good two dozen people alighted. Thankfully they didn’t last long in the overcast weather and soon scampered back to the warmth of their bus. Of course another great reason to make the journey is to drive up into the forest and practice yet more of those ‘running water’ shots. No shortage of rocks, streams and small waterfalls here folks!
To answer a question; Yes you do get looked at quite oddly while setting up your tripod in the middle of a stream. It’s worth it though, unless you don’t have a waterproof tripod I suppose. Couldn’t help feeling that at any minute the clip was going to give up and send my 30D and macro lens speeding toward a watery grave…
…but it didn’t! Couple more on Flickr.
[tags]gouganebarra, cork, ireland, irishphotos, irishblogs, church, Sigma 150mm Macro, forest, water[/tags]