Mount Usher Gardens, Ashford, Co. Wicklow, Ireland, October 2008

[Paddy Tobin]

Autumn colour, reflections on a beautiful river, an excellent selection of trees all make Mount Usher a lovely place to visit at this time of year. And the opening of an excellent cafe recently has made visits even more enjoyable.

Paddy

[Paddy Tobin]

Posting is very slow for some reason so I will continue with a few photographs at a time.

Paddy

[Paddy Tobin]

A few more...

[Paddy Tobin]

Continuing...

[Paddy Tobin]

Really finding it hard to post photographs, rejected as being too large a file...

[Maggi Young]

Sorry to hear you are having problems with posting, Paddy... i notice that all your files are around 200 plus kb..... so that is close to the maximum size for each pic so that is most likely the reason.


 Great photos.... your weather was good, I see!

[Paddy Tobin]

Last one

[Paddy Tobin]

Maggi,

Perhaps, I am making some mistake with my resizing. I resized all to 640 X 480 which is the usual I believe. However, at this size I was having difficulty posting even one photograph. The last one above took three attempts.

Yes, it was a nice day at Mount Usher and it is a lovely garden, not great on plant content except for the trees but the garden is under new management and it is obvious that some money is being spent on it as the general maintenance has improved greatly and there has been additional planting to broaden the interest. Worth a visit if you are within striking distance.

Paddy

[ranunculus]

Absolutely STUNNING pictures, Paddy.  You may have had problems posting them, but I am so glad you persevered!
Love the suspension bridge image.  Love them all.

[Lvandelft]

Beautiful autumn colours Paddy!
And I always learned that Ireland is "green" 
Must have had the wrong 'teachers' in this case.

[ashley]

Great pictures Paddy; I like Mount Usher very much and these capture its atmosphere well.  I suppose any plant collection can be improved but I have never been particularly aware of a lack of maintenance at the gardens.  Maybe this is because the informality of the 'Robinsonian' style sometimes differs only subtly from the wildness of much of my own garden!  A key difference of course is that beauty in the latter tends to be accidental

For those who don't know it the following link may be of interest: http://www.mountushergardens.ie/

[Ian Y]

Paddy, when you resize your pictures you all need to select a smaller compression.

On the JPEG option select medium compression which will give perfectly good results for the web and should greatly reduce the file size with out effecting the image size.

[Luc Gilgemyn]

Wonderful pictures Paddy ! 
What great gardens these seem to be !!
Thanks for your patience posting these restful images !  They do man a world of good after a hectic working week. 

[ruweiss]

What a paradise, it is so beautiful to see the difference to our cooler climate.
Thank you for posting.

[Paddy Tobin]

Many thanks for your comments. It is indeed a wonderful garden and we make a point of visiting a few times each year. This is no bother as it is very conveniently located on the main road from Waterford to Dublin, a regular journey.

Ian, I think you may have hit the nail on the head. Yes, I did reduce the size of the photographs to 640 X 480 approx but I then saved at the hightest quality, i.e. the lowest compression as this is my normal practice when saving my photos.

A question for Cliff re photography: this was a particularly difficult day for taking photographs as the light at river level was quite dull while the light at treetop level was very bright indeed, so a huge contrast between top and bottom of photographs so that the river level would be underexposed or the treetop level overexposed. Any suggestions on how to cope with this? I know there is a graduated filter available but haven't used such yet. The suspension bridge photograph was one of the easier ones to take as there was no need to take in the sky, so the light was evenly balanced throughout the frame.

Paddy