I spotted her first, then the bush, then the coincidence. Walking through Palafrugell one July afternoon, I saw this lady carrying her shopping bag back from the market. I kept the frame cropped tight: no face, just arm, fabric, and the tanned, weathered hand holding a shopping bag off to the side.
This is probably a journey she has made many times before. This is a small snapshot of her daily life. How many times have you carried a shopping bag home? I’m sure she’d scoff if she saw this photo of ordinary life.
We pulled in at the Mirador de Guise y Ayose and after photographing the statues there like everyone else (I have yet to post those photos, stay tuned) I pointed the camera at this little red-ringed 40 sign keeping watch by the road. Which is funny, because the view behind it is the whole reason anyone stops here: the central spine of Fuerteventura folding down into the Atlantic, lit up like someone had turned up the contrast knob on the hills while leaving the sea a flat, hazy blue.
The sign made me laugh though. Forty kilometres an hour on a road where every bend hands you a new postcard? You’d be lucky to manage twenty. You know the Conor Pass in Kerry? The road surface is better in Fuerteventura, but all that separates you from the cliff beyond are small white blocks or thin guardrails. Take a look on Google Maps and switch to street view to see.
I shot the photo at f/8 but the hills are so far away they go soft behind the sign, and I rather like how the red ring anchors all that orange and ochre. A reminder, I suppose, that the best landscapes are the ones you slow right down for, sign or no sign.
The news broke this morning that Moya Brennan passed away yesterday, and this photo has been on my mind ever since I heard. I took it at Cork Opera House on the 2nd of March 2020, during Clannad’s Farewell Tour. What a strange, loaded date that turned out to be. Barely a fortnight later the country shut down, venues went dark, and the idea of standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a theatre listening to a voice like hers felt like something from another era.
They put on a fabulous performance that night, and I’m so glad we got to see them.
I stopped halfway across the Millennium Bridge and pointed the camera north, which turned out to be the same thing roughly nine thousand other people were doing that afternoon. I looked behind me and there was another group of tourists with their phones raised taking much the same photo I have here.
St. Paul’s Cathedral was in the background but I was interested in the people, contrasting the ever-present building with the steady stream of humanity flowing past me.
Several years ago I’d been wandering around the narrow streets of Palafrugell’s old town when I came across the Sant Martí de Palafrugell and I loved to see it in the early morning light.
The sky was perfectly clear which isn’t great but the surrounding streets were quiet and it seemed appropriate. Everything was still. The unfinished tower of the church caught my eye, making me think of the cathedral in Málaga.
The original church on this site dates from around 1019, but the present building was constructed at the end of the 15th century. There’s a Wikipedia article about it here, but you may need to ask your browser for a translation if you don’t speak Catalan.
The cloud had been sitting on the mountains all morning like a hat pulled down over its eyes, and then for about fifteen minutes the sun broke through low and side-on and set the entire rock face above Gougane Barra on fire.
The golds and ambers were almost absurd. It was the kind of light you’d dial back in post because nobody would believe it was real. Mist was still threading through the peaks, which gave the valley that layered depth you only get when the weather can’t make up its mind. Down at the lake, the reeds had turned the colour of tea and the water was calm enough to throw back a passable reflection of the whole show.
Gougane Barra is one of those places that photographs well on a grey day, but when it decides to perform, it properly performs.
There was a single boat on our little corner of the Lakes of Killarney. I’d walked down from O’Sullivan’s Cascade to join other photographers from Blarney Photography Club. They were busy photographing the same scene you see here and everything around them. We were enjoying the afternoon sunlight on a calm October day last year.
I walked past Blarney Autos this morning and clocked the “SORRY NO DIESEL” sign on a car blocking the diesel pumps there.
The fuel protests have been rumbling on around the country for days now, refineries are ringed by placards, and the knock-on is landing on forecourts like this one. It doesn’t help that roughly two-thirds of what we pay at the pump is tax of one flavour or another, and the war in Iran has shoved the wholesale price of oil the wrong way.
I sympathise but don’t support what they’re doing. It’s making the lives of other motorists miserable, but if you look at any post on Facebook about it, you’ll mostly find excited comments supporting them.
Ireland is far too reliant on a liquid from somewhere very far away. Hopefully this encourages new car buyers to go for EVs.
Someone chose to put two Union Jack armchairs and an exercise ball in their office window for all of London to see. I spotted this walking past an office block and the arrangement stopped me mid-stride. The chairs are proper wingbacks, upholstered in full flag regalia, flanking a slightly deflated-looking exercise ball that’s doing its best to fit in.
Someone in that office has a sense of humour, and I’m grateful they put it by the window.
Cork’s Pope Quay packs more character into two hundred metres than most cities manage in a mile. I was standing on the south bank with the River Lee between us, drawn initially by the sweep of that pedestrian footbridge. It’s a clean, modern arc that sits surprisingly well against the jumble of modern, Georgian and Victorian facades behind it. The shopfronts tell the story of the neighbourhood in bold strokes: Coffee Scape and its Eastern European treats in hi-vis orange, MYO with its painted kingfisher on sky blue, and the enduring Sloans at the end of the row. Above it all, Shandon’s steeple rises like a referee keeping order over the chaos below. The sky was doing its best impression of a dirty dishcloth, but honestly, Cork wears grey well. It makes the colours along the quay punch harder than they would under blue skies. One hooded figure on the bridge, a life ring on the wall just in case, and the whole scene had that quiet mid-afternoon energy where a city is just getting on with itself.
Fist in the air, beer in the other hand, in defiance of the rain that had been hammering down earlier. This is Las Fallas distilled into two men and a moment. I caught them mid-chant on one of the streets near the Plaza del Ayuntamiento. The man on the left had gone full traditional, with woven manta draped over his shoulders, loaded with pompoms and bandana tied tight while his friend had hedged his bets with a clear plastic poncho over the waistcoat. His Amstel was probably warm but he didn’t care. Valencia in March is meant to be about fire and gunpowder, and the rain didn’t stop the festivities.
A pigeon had taken up residence in the Dubray Books window on St. Patrick Street, wedged comfortably between Michael Palin and a Lonely Planet guide which is frankly better taste in travel literature than most of us manage. It sat there among the carefully arranged display like it had been hired for the job, unbothered by the Black Friday signage overhead or the passers-by stopping to gawp.
One woman paused mid-stride, peered through the glass, and you could see the exact moment the penny dropped: that’s not a prop. The little decorative robin beside it only made the whole scene funnier. A fake bird and a real one, side by side, and the real one looking far more at home. I’ve no idea how it got in, but it clearly had no intention of leaving. Fifty percent off stickered stock, and the pigeon wasn’t buying.
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