I didn’t plan this one, like the photos of Blarney from a few days ago. It’s the kind of shot you only get when you’ve nabbed a window seat and the cloud cooperates. We were somewhere over the Waterford coast when Ardmore slid into view below, the whole headland laid out like a quilt someone had thrown over the cliffs. The fields are the real star here: every shade of green and brown, all stitched together by hedgerows into that unmistakably Irish patchwork.
You can pick out the town tucked into its bay, the beaches catching the light, and the cliffs taking the brunt of the Atlantic. The low cloud drifting across the middle almost ruins it and somehow makes it instead. The land peeking through like it’s not quite ready to be seen.
The red building does the heavy lifting in this one. Squat, breeze-block, with a corrugated shutter rusting at its own pace and a smear of white graffiti for company. It used to be a shop. Hard to picture now, with the shutter pulled down for good and the paint going chalky, but at some point I remember there were HB ice cream stickers on the wall.
This was Myrtleville in October 2016, on one of those flat-light afternoons. The beach and sea are just down the hill and the village feels like it’s having a lie-in. The bright yellow defibrillator cabinet bolted to the wall is the most modern thing in the picture, which I find quietly funny: a shop that’s closed, a building that looks like it’s held together by paint, and then a small piece of life-saving kit doing duty where the door once opened for customers. The two-storey house behind it, with its lit windows and pebbledash gable, has been watching this junction for generations.
Blarney, from the secondary school and Woolen Mills to the Castle
Digging through the archive I found these two aerial photos of Blarney from September 2016, and the first one stopped me. See those fields that border the houses on 3 sides? They’re now Cluain Ard with houses, gardens, driveways, the lot. Back then it was still being farmed, with the older estates hugging the edges.
The second frame is some of the village laid out like a model: the secondary school and its car park bottom left, the filling station tucked in the middle, the Woollen Mills sprawling off to the right, and up top, and it’s almost startlingly green, is the Castle, the grounds and Blarney Lough. You spend years walking around a place at ground level and forget how compact it all is from above. Worth pulling these out before another decade rolls over and another field changes shape.
We visited Sherkin Island more than ten years ago and walked the narrow road to the other side of the island, to Cow Strand and then on to Silver Strand. I’ve been back a few times since but I think this is the only time I saw a horse on the beach.
A Jet2 737 comes in low over the beach at Playa Honda, undercarriage down, engines glowing pink in the dying light. The approach-lighting pier marches out from the lava coast like an unfinished bridge, each platform waiting to flash its sequence and guide the next arrival onto runway 03 at Arrecife. I took this in January 2020, a few short weeks before the word “Covid” started elbowing its way into every conversation and the holiday traffic into Lanzarote dried up almost overnight.
Looking at it now feels a bit like looking at a photo of someone the day before they got bad news: everything still in its right place, sun setting beautifully, plane on schedule, no idea what’s about to happen. The 737 didn’t know either.
The structure on the right is the approach-lighting pier for runway 03 at Lanzarote Airport (ACE). It has to extend several hundred metres out over the sea because the runway threshold sits right at the coastline, leaving no land on which to mount the standard ICAO approach light array. It’s one of a small handful of airports in Europe where the approach lights are essentially built into the ocean; Madeira and Gibraltar have similarly creative solutions to the same “we ran out of land” problem.
Videos To Watch
Take multiple short exposures (with some blur) merge them together to get a longer exposure.
You will not take any good photos today. Focus on seeing, not achieving.
Be good. (Don’t be annoying)
Think happy, be happy. Grab a coffee if you’re not feeling it.
123 Compositions. 1, 2 or 3 elements to draw the eye.
The moment before or after might be better than the “decisive moment.”
Lightning does strike twice. Something random may happen again shortly.
Understand your triggers.
Your personality shines through in your photos.
Collect quirks.
Always have your camera ready.
Do it everywhere.
Ditch the sunglasses.
Keep it simple, f/8 and be there.
Take the photo. Think about it later. Caveat: Use your moral compass and don’t take a photo.
Anticipate moments before they happen.
How could this (photo, moment, scene) be better and more interesting?
Interesting quote: “A photograph should be more interesting than the subject and transcend its obviousness” – Jeffrey Ladd.
“Photography is not about the thing photographed. It is about how that thing looks photographed.” – Gary Winogrand.
I shot this on Princes Street in Cork back in 2016, and I had it filed in my head all this time as a Starbucks-versus-Starbucks gag. The wellness sermon in the window was contradicted by the Frappuccino in the hand.
Turns out the window belongs to Rocket Man, a salad and juice bar, which means the slogan is just an honest pitch for what’s inside. The joke isn’t the shop being two-faced; it’s the woman walking past it with a competitor’s plastic cup and a New Look bag, completely uninterested in being nourished, satisfied or energised on Rocket Man’s terms. Three brands sharing a frame, none of them in agreement.
The black-and-white striped barrier slices the scene in half like a referee, the leather jacket and ripped jeans give the date away within a year, and the lower-case earnestness of the window text feels very 2016 indeed. Ten years on, the Frappuccino lid is the same shape, the uniform has barely shifted, and I owe Rocket Man a small apology for misreading their window.
I spent a few minutes watching this white-tailed eagle do absolutely nothing, and it was riveting. It sat on its branch at Fota Wildlife Park like it owned the place which, fair enough, when you’re the largest bird of prey in Ireland, you probably do. The dark backdrop did me a favour here, throwing all the attention onto that pale, scruffy head and the hooked yellow beak.
A moment later he launched into the air and flew off to another part of his enclosure.
I was visiting Fota Wildlife Park with Henry recently when he spotted these two in an enclosure and I genuinely cannot get over how small a little grebe chick is. It’s basically a wet pom-pom with an attitude.
The adult, all chestnut throat and businesslike beak, was patrolling the surface and the chick paddled over, demanding food with the kind of cheek only baby birds can pull off.
I love how the second shot caught the wee one drifting solo, perfectly mirrored on glassy water, looking pleased with itself for absolutely no reason.
This part of Oosterdokseiland was a building site back in 2011, and I rather enjoyed picking my way around the fencing. NEMO’s great green copper hull sits across the water like a ship that has run aground on purpose and this afternoon it had a proper foil in the foreground: a battered Caterpillar 385B from Oudtzwanenburg’s demolition crew, parked on a churned slab of rubble and looking entirely unbothered by the architecture behind it.
Fifteen years on, and the island is all glass and bicycles, but I love construction sites. They’re a temporary view of the underside of modernity.
As I climbed up the rocks from the beach I spotted a lone fisherman in the distance. He hadn’t caught anything yet but in the bright sunshine I caught a nice silhouette.
It was Santa Cruz in Portugal, and a lovely day to be beside the sea.
I saw Dermot Henry perform at the Wavelength Rooftop Bar, attached to Cyprus Avenue, in Cork, last night.
Folk music isn’t my usual cup of tea but Dermot’s got a great voice and judging by comments on his YouTube videos, a passionate following.
The support singer was great too. He said his name a couple of times but every attempt to search for it online returned other people. If you recognise the man in the second photo, please let me know!
The man in the blue jacket has both hands on the jockey’s left boot, mid heave, and number 37 is halfway between earth and saddle. It’s neither one place nor the other. I love the awkward physics of a leg-up. It looks ungainly until you remember it’s the only sensible way to get a small, light human onto an animal that tall without a mounting block.
I have no idea how this jockey and horse did on the day. The photo is from 2024.
Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.
uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.
