county cork

TESTING WebP IMAGES

Because of unpredictable weather conditions I was not able to complete some of my projects and failed to photograph in detail many areas that I had intended to visit or had visited previously. For example I had intended to photograph St Nicholas’s Church.

The street “Nicholas Church Lane” is located in the southwest of Cork. It is about 45 meters long.

St Nicholas’s Church is a significant mid nineteenth-century Gothic-Revival Church, with much original fabric intact. Designed by Welland, with steeple by Atkins and transept windows by Hemmings. Built to replace earlier church on same site. Deconsecrated, and internal fittings and fixtures stripped out in early 1990’s.

The church is described as follows: “Detached Gothic-Revival Church, built 1850; formerly Church of Ireland, now closed and deconsecrated; having slate steeply pitched roofs and limestone roof to steeple, squared limestone ashlar walls, stepped buttresses and cut limestone verges, with open timber roof to gallery and timber panelling to Chancel; set in elevated site with graveyard, limestone ashlar gateways to Cove Street and to Nicholas Church Lane, cast iron gates, with overthrow to Cove Street gateway; currently undergoing renovation.”

On April 17, 1921, Constable John Cyril MacDonald, a twenty-eight year old single man from 31, Whirring Stone Road, Fulham, London was walking with a female friend along Cove Street when two men approached them, heading towards Barrack Street. As they passed, one of the men jumped on McDonald and pinned his arms behind him. The other pointed a revolver at him which he tried to knock away but was shot in the face. As he lay on the ground he was again fired at a number of times. As the men then ran off down Cove Street, the girl rushed to the fire station on nearby Sullivan’s Quay to summon an ambulance for the dying man. However, he succumbed to his wounds five days later. McDonald had been a soldier prior to joining the Black and Tans and had been in Ireland for four months at the time of his shooting.

This page is experimental in that I have used WebP format images in order to see if they work with WordPress.

WebP is natively supported in Google Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, the Opera browser, and by many other tools and software libraries. Developers have also added support to a variety of image editing tools.

WebP is a modern image format that provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images on the web. Using WebP, webmasters and web developers can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.

WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.

Lossless WebP supports transparency (also known as alpha channel) at a cost of just 22% additional bytes. For cases when lossy RGB compression is acceptable, lossy WebP also supports transparency, typically providing 3× smaller file sizes compared to PNG.

Lossy, lossless and transparency are all supported in animated WebP images, which can provide reduced sizes compared to GIF and APNG.

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GLENBROOK PIER AND NEARBY

This was my first time to photograph the Passage West area of Cork and almost everything went wrong. Because of Covid-19 travel restrictions the bus service was limited and to a much greater extent than I had been advised. The bus on the outward journey terminated early for some reason or other and initially I did not know where exactly I was and I could not get my iPhone to connect to any network.

When I returned to the hotel and examined my logs I discovered that I had walked from Passage West Pharmacy to Cross River Ferries and back to the bus stop at Carrigmahon Hill. I waited for close to an hour for a bus to appear and it broke down on arriving at the stop.

Glenbrook was originally a seaside resort with buildings like the Turkish Bath-houses which became established there. The first of these was the Royal Victoria Monkstown and Passage Baths, which opened in 1838. This was followed by Dr Timothy Curtin’s Hydropathic Establishment. Passage West, which also has a maritime tradition, is next to Glenbrook and the two are somewhat indistinguishable as there is no obvious border between the two.

It is from here that Captain Roberts set out and crossed the Atlantic in the first passenger steamship, “The Sirius”. A plaque, along with a piece of the ship, commemorates this journey and is sited next to the Cross River Ferry in Glenbrook. The old railway line, once a method of transport ferrying customers to the summer resort town and the Turkish baths, is now a walking trail next to Cork Harbour.