A scarlet-railed bridge, a limestone arch, and a pond almost still enough to hand you a second bridge for free. I caught this one at Fota Wildlife Park, framed through a gap in the spring foliage, the fresh greens crowding in from both sides.
The contrast is what pulls me in. Those bold red posts and rails against the cool grey stonework and the soft greens all around, with the whole thing folded neatly into its own reflection on the water.
There’s a wire mesh tucked under the arch, presumably to keep the residents on the right side of the fence, which is a gentle reminder this isn’t just a pretty ornamental pond but part of a working wildlife park.
Thanks Henry for the walk around the park that Sunday morning.
The sun has almost set and still casts an orange glow on a clear sky.
I was down at Youghal Beach facing the afterglow, and instead of the big dramatic sunset I half-expected, I got this: a clean gradient running from deep blue at the top to a warm orange seam along the horizon, the sea wall, sand, and rocks flattened to a black band underneath. The twin-headed lamp gets to be the star of the show, Well, joint star, because there’s an actual one (or a planet, more likely) hanging up in the top-left, beating the streetlights to it.
A chimney, a pitched roof, and a sky lit end to end. I caught this little hut alongside the old Youghal railway just as the light gave up for the evening, the blue overhead sliding down into a thin band of orange at the horizon. Two stretched-out lenticular clouds hung there like someone had smudged them with a thumb, and that single bright point above the roofline, a planet, almost certainly, given how steadily it sat was the first thing out before the proper stars arrived. The hut itself becomes pure shape at this hour, all detail swallowed, just the outline of the chimney pot to give it character. Down at the bottom you can pick out the scattered house lights of the town settling in for the night.
There are no fancy gear tricks here. Expose for the night sky and let everything else go dark.
Friday night at the Savoy, and the place was buzzing. Joe of the band Fred opened things up solo. It was just him, an acoustic, a red tee and a flat cap, perched in front of a wall of Orange amps that looked far too big for one man and a guitar. Lovely, stripped-back stuff. He played some of the great Fred hits of so long ago and I loved it!
Then Stanley Super 800 took over and the room tilted: bassist front and centre in a tangerine shirt and tie (a brave wardrobe choice under those lights, and it paid off), keys to the left, the red kit thumping away behind, and a guitarist working the right flank. The blue wash and that battered red drum kit made for a proper feast of colour, and from where I was standing, somewhere in that thicket of silhouetted heads, it was hard to know whether to shoot or just listen. I did a bit of both. Good to see them again after so many years!
I was standing on Emmett Place with my neck cricked at an awkward angle, trying to work out where the real sky ended and the reflected one began.
Two people passed by and I’m sure they might have wondered what I was photographing with my head almost stuck to the window. Well, I’d noticed the crane that’s working on the redevelopment of the Crawford Art Gallery and it made a rather pleasing reflection in the plate glass window so this is just one of a number of photos where I tried to duplicate the world.
I almost walked straight past this clump of yellow without looking down. The Mirador de Guise y Ayose pulls everyone’s eyes outward, across the rumpled red hills, all the way to the hazy Atlantic but the real show was happening at my feet, where a burst of wild mustard had punched up through the volcanic grit. Fuerteventura usually wears its arid badge with pride, yet catch it after a bit of winter rain and the slopes turn an improbable green, dotted with white farmhouses that look almost lonely out there.
I crouched low, got the flowers leading the eye into the valley, and let the clouds brood up top. Five minutes later the light shifted and the whole thing flattened. Timing, as ever, is mostly luck dressed up as skill.
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.
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.
