Yesterday while the sun was shining myself and Sarah decided to go to Glendalough to go to take some photos, it was down in Glendalough just over a year ago that we went on our first photo outing together and so it was due a revisit.

The upper lake always grabs my attention as soon you get up to the sandy area there, the views are stunning looking up valley so much so that we decided to walk all the way up to the top of the valley and up the mountains at the end. It was a long walk but so worth it and hopefully over the next few days you will be able to see why.

Anyhow I was down at the beach before that walk and decided to take some photos looking up the lake, when this woman flew past me chasing ducks into the lake. I have no idea what she was thinking really but I was glad I was in the perfect position to capture this photo.

My first image to upload to McAWilliams.com since I changed the layout about, heres hoping it works!

This is a photograph taken in Kells on the morning of one of the heaviest frosts I have ever seen in Ireland, thankfully that winter is well and truely behind us now and the weather is looking great for a good summer so far.

Big changes are afoot at mcawilliams.com and posting will be pretty slack for the next while while I code up a new version of the site, I am doing this for a few different reasons to make posting for me easier believe me, using a plugin for my pictures through wordpress has proved to be more hassle then its worth, and also a rejuevenation of the site will encourage me to blog more often. I really want to see if there is a way of incorporating my twitter account with the comments section now on wordpress as that seems to be where the majority of comments now take place. I am sure there is a way it could be done but I think its going to be a messy thing to try to install somehow.

Anyhow I have so many photos that I Have not posted this being one of them from last year on a trip to the Guinness Storehouse.

Thank you very much Mike and John for a very special day.

Obviously since I take photographs and do occasionally print, this was something I was very interested in. On arrival to Istanbul I was brought over to the hotel where the main event was taking place. Here we all learnt what HP had in store for us and honestly I can say hand on heart it is very impressive stuff altogether.

My market would be the consumer market and we were shown the HP ENVY100 e-All-in-One which is a sleek, slim-line printer,best way to describe it would be it kinda looked like a VHS or DVD player, We were told that this was to complement modern home décor. It features a high-resolution touchscreen display, is incredibly quiet and has a really cool automatic paper tray (this has to be seen to understand, think robots). The ENERGY STAR qualified HP ENVY100 e-All-in-One is the planet’s first PVC-free printer and is expected to be available in selected countries next month for €249.

The main thing pushed by HP is connectivity to the web, thus allowing you to print from anywhere you like, even from Mobile phones! You can browse the web on some selected models, you have apps for connecting to RSS feeds, google and the like. This stuff blew me away. Basically HP have set up ePrint which is also known as HP’s cloud! For anyone not aware of Cloud technology one way to describe it is that its a virtual server in the sky. As an example imagine this, you are out and about and you take a photo on your mobile phone well you can email that image to a recipient or now with HP, email it to the printer directly! so if you wanted to send a photo or document somewhere you can, but not only that, have it printed too! It really is that easy.

One question that did come up while I was there on my twitter stream was, what about the cost of ink? which for me as a consumer would be a very valid point and one of the main reasons I would not print as much as I would like. Unfortunately even though these new amazing printers are very affordable, which is something HP are very keen to announce, will people be interested in printing more if the ink is still at crazy prices. I was informed that those prices remain as they are. Well for me, who would not be printing out documents and things, but more so photos, thus using lots of ink, this was a bit of a let down for me.

This aside I really want to thank the fantastic team in HP for a wonderful insight into all things HP and for taking such good care of me while in Istanbul, but the biggest thank you must go to Donnchadh here in Ireland for getting in touch with me in the first place, I really appreciate it.

There is so much more to tell about this trip and I will do so over the course of the next few days, but back to this image. Well on Thursday myself and 2 others went to visit the city itself and we went to the blue mosque which is what you can see here. We did not go in since the queues were so long and we were on a tight schedule, but I must say the exterior was impressive.

If you have any questions though about the new HP range, please comment and I will try to answer them as best I can.

More photos from Istanbul to follow.