On my recent photo essay from Hook lighthouse in Ireland, I was editing the images, and wanted something a little special for the cover photo. I had tried lots of different things, and in the end, the image I used went through several steps to get it to where it was for the final use of it. In this video I talk you through the steps I took from the starting raw photo to the finished image.

On the last day of our recent trip around the southwest of Ireland, we stopped at a Lavender farm in Co. Wexford. My wife and I have always been a fan of Lavender, and it featured in the flowers at our wedding, so it was nice to see where it comes from. It also always makes for good photos.

Like many people, while I’ve been lucky enough to travel abroad quite a bit, I haven’t actually spent much time exploring my own country of Ireland, and I’ve actually been to surprisingly little of the island. With Covid making international travel complicated and not something I particularly want to partake in right now, we recently decided to take a few days holiday in the southeast of Ireland. One of the most interesting places we visited was to the Hook peninsula to visit the famous Hook Lighthouse

This weekend we visited a stately home and gardens in Co. Wicklow (in Ireland) that has opened up to the public. Funnily enough, this was near to where I grew up, but I never even knew it was there. The Kilruddery estate, which has a “Tudor revival” style mansion based on a 17th-century foundation, and is also a working farm, and has beautiful grounds and gardens.

At the weekend we decided to go on an expedition in the car to the seaside. While we don’t exactly live inland, travelling around has become something of a chore now. On a July weekend, you might be thinking the beach would be packed, but at the height of a typical Irish summer, that wasn’t going to be a problem, as the temperature barely got above 16 degrees Celsius for the day, and the sky looked like something out of a science fiction movie. It did make for some nice moody photographic opportunities.

In this video I take you through my process of editing a landscape photo in Capture One, showing you the tools that I use and my thought process. The photo is one I took a while ago using my old Canon Eos 5 and it was a long exposure shot.

Autumn is by far my favourite time of year for taking photos, but sometimes I feel like I’ve done it all before. I’m always trying to do something different, to shake things up a bit, and so recently I had an idea. Instead of doing the usual and focus on the autumn colours, I would instead see if I could make some interesting images of autumn textures.

I was returning home from a week in a sweltering London last Friday, and we had taken the boat home. I was never so happy to see cloudy skies after the month plus long heatwave. As we approached the shore of Ireland, the moody sky and sea made for some great images. From my Streets of Dublin Blog…

The last time I went to Glendalough to shoot has ended up being the gift that keeps on giving. Every now and then I go back to my collection of images from the day and discover something else, or rediscover a shot that I’d dismissed. In this case I discovered a series of shots of the tree line that I had previously glossed over. 

A few weeks ago I wanted to photograph something a little different, so we headed out to a place in North County Dublin where you can see Dublin Port from the far side, as well as watch the boats come and go. We timed the trip so that we would arrive as the sun begins to set, and I was only travelling light camera wise. I went equipped with the Sony A6000, with the only lens being the kit lens. I also had the Canon G7XII with me, which I had initially brought just to shoot video, but I ended up shooting stills with it too.

Last Saturday we decided to go for an impromptu drive into the countryside around Dublin and north County Wicklow. We headed for the picturesque area of Blessington, and the famous lakes, which are nestled in the Wicklow mountains. The lakes are actually artificial and were formed 50 years ago by the creation of a dam which flooded the valley. They now provide hydroelectric power and drinking water to parts of county Dublin.

Last year I got up early with the aim of capturing the sunrise for the first day of the year. I took some nice shots of the light before dawn but it clouded over too much before the actual sun rose. Still, I wanted to make it a tradition, and so, once again, I headed to the same spot in order to catch the first rays of sun for 2018.

Autumn is now in full flow and it really is my favourite time of the year for photography. The Autumn light in Ireland is beautiful. The slow change of the seasons starts to bring a warm and golden light to the country as the sun is lower and lower in the sky. Throughout the season this effect becomes more and more profound. Combined with the colours this can make for some great Photography. 

Last weekend I went to one of my favourite spots in Ireland, the Glendalough National Park, which is home to some spectacular scenery and is a glacial valley in the Wicklow mountains. Along with the spectacular scenery, there was some spectacular light too. The weather was changeable, to say the least, and a continuous series of clouds and showers danced across the scenery.

I happened to be in the right place at the right time the other day to capture an amazing sunset. While travelling back on the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin, the sea was calm and the sky was beautiful, and as we reached the middle of the journey the sun set on the horizon, in a beautiful display of reds and golds.

I was in Galway yesterday, which was the longest day of the year, and I wanted to capture the sunset over Galway bay looking out to the Atlantic. As it was the longest day, it was kind of a special sunset, marking the end of the lengthening evenings and the start of the long march back to winter. Unfortunately it was cloudy, but there was still some nice light, and the beach at Salthill in Galway is dramatic in and of itself.

During my recent stay in the German city of Darmstadt, I was scanning google maps one evening looking for places to go, when I noticed that down the road from where I was staying, there seemed to be a rather large area of forest. This was strange in and of itself, because where we were staying was in an industrial estate, with big modern buildings, but just down the road was a huge forest. 

One of my photographic new year's resolutions is to take a more project-based approach to my photography this year, rather than the somewhat haphazard approach I took in 2016. With that in mind, the first idea that I came up with was to shoot the first sunrise of the new year.