Two herons, two very different moods. The first one had clambered up into the bare branches like it owned the place, scruffy chest plumes blowing about and that sharp yellow eye scanning the park below.
The second was posing in profile on the netting above one of the enclosures, side-lit by late sun that caught every layer of grey and white in its plumage. Fota is full of exotic species you’ve travelled to see, and then you spend ten minutes photographing the local heron because it simply will not stop being photogenic.
I scrambled out onto the rocks at Santa Cruz in Portugal taking photos of various views and then climbed up to a rock platform where I was greeted with this view in front of me. I had an ND filter, but no proper tripod, only a small “plate tripod” that just about did its job of stabilising the camera for 5 seconds. It was a difficult job finding a flat surface to place it on in this area!
The Atlantic had gone from a churning, hissing mess to this smeared, milky surface that looks almost solid. The cliffs on the left held steady, of course, all those layers of ochre and rust glowing under a flat, hazy sky that refused to commit to either bright or grey.
A figure perched on the rock just below me, completely oblivious, which was a small bonus as it gives you a sense of just how big these cliffs really are. Santa Cruz was quiet on this late April afternoon but the sea was anything but that, so a glacial shutter speed was called for.
I had a fifth-row seat for Paul Young at St. Luke’s last night. It was sold out, so it was worth getting in early for the “From No Parlez to The Secret Of Association” tour. The clue was in the billing: this was pitched as intimate conversation plus acoustic versions, not a greatest-hits run-through. Judging by the chatter and occasional heckling that drifted up from the rows behind me, plenty of the room hadn’t read that bit.
Forty years on from a debut album that went straight to number one and a follow-up that did the same, Paul’s voice has paid a toll for his long career, and you can hear it but the stories more than carried the evening. The one that stuck with me was him describing the Freddie Mercury tribute concert at Wembley in 1992, looking up at that crowd clapping in unison, and feeling like he got to be Freddie Mercury for five minutes. He’s also still moonlighting in his tex-mex outfit Los Pacaminos, which somehow makes complete sense once you’ve spent an evening in his company. Treat it like a night in someone’s front room rather than a concert and it’s a lovely time.
St. Luke’s was built in 1837 as a Church of Ireland parish church and was gutted by fire in 1887 before being rebuilt. It was deconsecrated in 2003 and reopened as a community arts and music venue, which is why a 19th-century Cork church now regularly hosts eighties pop stars and indie acts under its restored timber roof.
Window seats earn their keep on flights like this one. We were somewhere north of Lisbon, climbing north towards Ireland, when the sun decided to put on a show off the right-hand side of the aircraft.
The horizon went from a deep, almost bruised red, up through that signature aviation orange, and finally settled into a clean morning blue at the top of the frame. That single wispy cloud hanging across the middle felt almost too well placed β like it had been brushed in afterwards. Shooting through a scratched, double-glazed plastic window is never ideal, but every now and then the light is generous enough that the window stops mattering. This was one of those mornings.
Worth the early alarm getting up early for a flight to Stansted and then on to Cork.
You can tell a dog has just walked past by the geometry of the smiles. Two heads turning at the same angle, the kid in the patterned fleece still oblivious, a smoothie stall behind them advertising Mango Mix and Berry Bliss like it’s any other Friday.
Diego is a small chihuahua and entirely unaware that he’s a one-dog charm offensive. He just trots along beside me at Bantry market and the world rearranges itself around him. I didn’t pose this. I didn’t even ask. I was a step behind with the camera, saw the moment unfold, and got it before either lad turned back to whatever they were chatting about.
Daniel Buren’s wall at Tottenham Court Road does most of the work for you. It’s fifty feet of saturated circles and diamonds, all bouncing off those merciless black-and-white stripes.
I just had to wait. Two strangers soon obliged: he slumped against a blue diamond mid-text, and she tucked into a green circle taking what looked like a fairly stoic phone call. Neither registered the technicolour cathedral behind them, which is the bit I love. London’s at its best when an artwork worth millions becomes the wallpaper for a moan about being late. Exit 4, Charing Cross Road, way out though you could argue the people in the frame had already mentally left.
Valencia in late October had just been rinsed by a quick shower, and the pavement was still glossy when this little party walked past me.
The two women had gone all-in on the traje de flamenca. The ruffles stacked like waves, fresh blooms pinned into their hair, and a peach-coloured shawl folded neatly over one arm. The gentlemen kept it simpler: black suits, red ties, and what look like cofradΓa medallions hanging from green ribbons.
Even on a calm evening when I took this photo, a moored boat moves about if given enough time. This long exposure shows the slight movements that show the water isn’t quite as still.
There’s no wind to speak of, the surface looks like polished slate, and yet the boat is nodding away to itself, tethered to that bright red buoy like a child trying to stand still for a school photo.
I didn’t know there were bison at Fota Wildlife Park, but near the end of my walk there with Henry we stopped at a field containing these large beasts!
I wonder if they were overheating in their winter coats in the warm April sunshine, but I suspect the cold wind that blew through at intervals cooled them down.
TIL that every European bison alive today descends from just twelve individuals. The species was hunted to extinction in the wild by the 1920s. The last truly wild one was shot in the Caucasus in 1927, and the entire global population was painstakingly rebuilt from a handful of captive animals across European zoos. Only 50-60 survived at one time in zoos across the continent. There are now several thousand, mostly in Poland’s BiaΕowieΕΌa Forest, with smaller groups in places like Fota helping spread the genetic load.
I caught these two coming out of the crush on Gerrard Street, London, last summer.
The blonde in the GANNI tee looks like she’s mid-anecdote; her friend, in a white off-shoulder dress with a tiny veil pinned over a leopard headband, has the slightly stunned grin of someone three hours into a hen weekend and starting to enjoy it.
London Chinatown is a brilliant place to wander in a bridal veil. The pavement is so packed nobody quite registers it, and you can stand under a lantern eating something fried with an L-plate fluttering off your bag, and it just sort of fits. I barely noticed them before they were gone again into the crowd, swept away on a ladies weekend in the city.
Cappagh Beach at half-six in the morning is colder than I’d planned for. We’d driven down to Kerry the night before and I was up in the dark, heading out the door and shared the journey from Dingle with Freddie at the wheel. I forgot my wellies, but while I cursed my lack of preparation, I didn’t miss them at all once I got there.
Then I got down onto the sand and the sky decided to put on a show. A single pink contrail (or maybe a ribbon of high cloud, I genuinely couldn’t tell) drew a perfect diagonal across the blue. The tide had pulled back and left the sand glassy, so the whole scene came doubled, sky and reflection arguing politely about which was the real one. I set up the tripod, and the 2-second timer on my camera, and stood there for six seconds at a time while the rocks held still and the clouds didn’t.
The sun never properly broke through, you can just see its glow trying behind the heaviest bank of cloud, but honestly, this kind of muted blue hour is what I came for. I had my doubts over how good the light would be that morning, but I was pleasantly surprised. It wasn’t one of those sunsets you’d imagine were accompanied by dramatic orchestral music. It tiptoed into the day. The quiet ones are the ones I keep coming back to.
A London street sweeper, fully kitted out in orange hi-vis, has parked his cart, bristling with upright brooms like some sort of municipal hedgehog, outside the Brompton Oratory and is holding a big black umbrella over himself for shade. It was roasting that day.
Umbrellas aren’t just for the rain. They are very useful portable shade!
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