This has been a weird year for me. Photographically speaking. It’s nearly the middle of June, and yet, I’ve taken far fewer photographs than I normally do. Months of relentless weather and the mental fog that comes with living through an anxious, uncertain world have all taken their toll. In this post, I look at how distractions, self-doubt, and even a frustrating gear issue gradually chipped away at the simple urge to go out and shoot. Along the way, I get distracted by broader cultural issues, including the uneasy role AI is playing for many of us, but I do bring it back to photography and why it matters now more than ever. It’s quite philosophical, honest. Oh, and there are some photos too!

The start of this year has been a bit weird for me, photographically speaking. I haven’t taken a large number of photographs for various reasons. The terrible weather being one of them. However, over the first six months, I have taken a few street photos, and while there aren’t many, I thought I would share them here.

As I was sitting down to write a happy new year post, I realised that it was already a week old. Mind you, if you watch or read the news at all, it feels more like six months old. Anyway, my wife and I spent the first few days on a little break in one of our favourite places in Co. Wexford, which is about two hours south of us here in Dublin. We stayed in our favourite hotel, which has amazing views out over the estuary of the river Slaney.

I’ve been going back over old photos in my library and pondering the past year. I actually got out to take photos quite a bit this year, but I have been really bad at sharing the projects that I was shooting. These include photographing a local stately garden throughout the seasons, visiting a national park at sunrise and sunset and a trip to Scotland to see lough ness. So, as they’ll never see the internet light of day otherwise, here’s a quick overview and some images I took over the past year.

Way back at the end of March of this year (2025) I was in Berlin for a couple of weeks. I blogged about this before and promised to post the second part of that, and then promptly forgot all about it. Well, better late than never! So here is part two of that trip.

I was recently in the wonderful city of Edinburgh for a few days, and while I was there I was taking some photos of the cityscape from the viewpoint of the castle. Now, I’ll have a bigger photo essay on my Scotland trip in the future, but when I got back home I was looking at these thinking that they would make great faux miniature shots.

Back at the end of April I was in London for a few days, so as always I took the opportunity to get a few photos and some video while I was there. I didn’t really go very far from our hotel in Southwark, pretty much staying to the south bank, but even here there is plenty to see just walking up and down the Thames.

A few weeks ago I got to spend some time in Berlin, and so of course I took the opportunity to try and photograph the city whenever I had a chance. While I actually had a bunch of different cameras with me, I ended up taking quite a lot of photos on my iPhone. I will cover the other photos I got with both my Fujifilm and Canon cameras in a later post, but for now, I thought I would collect all the iPhone ones into a single story!

Lough Ennel in Co. Westmeath is a pretty unassuming lake in the Irish Midlands. It’s not particularly large by international standards, and if you were to ask the average person on the street here in Ireland, they’d probably tell you they’ve never heard of it. But recently it’s become somewhat famous because of a natural phenomenon that occurs there every evening during winter. A spectacular starling murmuration.

I had been quite looking forward to our trip to Switzerland. I had never been to the country before and was pretty excited about the adventure. Our journey, while not specifically for photography, had the promise of lots of photo potential, but unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. We travelled to a little town outside of Lake Zurich and on to the City of Geneva, also on a lake!

In early January my wife and I decided to get away for a few days to relax before the new work year started. We headed to a nice relaxing retreat in Co. Wexford, and while the trip was mostly for a holiday, of course we snuck in some photography time! The last time we were in Wexford we had visited the beautiful and famous Hook Lighthouse in the south of the county, but we had done so at noon during the summer, so the light was a bit flat. This time we aimed to visit it at sunset, to capture it in better light. So we set off on the drive down the peninsula towards hook head and its namesake lighthouse. We were not disappointed.

As many of my long-term followers have probably noted, I haven’t posted nearly as much in this past year as I have previously. While my blogging has been tapering off for a while, 2024 was undoubtedly my least productive. In this post, I wanted to touch on that a little bit as well as cover some of the more positive things from the past year too. I also wanted to share some photos and other tales that I never got to share in 2024. This will probably be a long post, so buckle up, or maybe get some coffee!

Recently, I’ve been on sort of a Landscape and nature photography kick, so on a recent weekend, we headed to one of my favourite places to photograph on the east coast of Ireland, a place called Glendalough.

Every time I go to New York, I end up spending an inordinate amount of time in Grand Central station. Mainly, because we usually end up staying nearby, and it is a handy throughway to other avenues. But it’s also because it’s kind of a magical place. It is like something out of a movie, and it probably has been in many. Every time you walk through it, there are stories happening all around you.

A little while ago, we decided to take a few days break away from the hustle and bustle and headed off on an adventure. We wanted to go somewhere out of the way. Where we ended up was probably about as far away as you can get in Ireland without actually leaving the mainland or going on a ferry. For the longest time I had wanted to visit the top of the island, and so my wife booked us into a hotel on the northernmost peninsula in the northernmost county in Ireland: The windswept and very beautiful Inishowen peninsula in Co. Donegal. And what a place it is.

In part one of this series, I talked about my visit to the Danish capital of Copenhagen last May. In this second part, we travelled on to the Swedish capital of Stockholm and were treated to an unusually warm early May weekend, which led to an amazing few days in the beautiful city.

Earlier this year, I had a chance to visit two of the cities I’ve always wanted to see: Copenhagen and Stockholm. Ever since visiting Oslo a few years ago, I’ve really wanted to see the rest of the region and Copenhagen and Stockholm were on the bucket list. So, when I got the chance to see both of these cities, I jumped at the chance. This wasn’t going to be a strictly photographic trip - I was there with my wife on a business trip, but it was still an opportunity to get to visit these wonderful cities.

With the new year already begun I thought I’d take a brief pause to look back on the last year in terms of photography.

As the last vestiges of summer have now long faded away, my favourite time of the year for photography has come. I love Autumn, and indeed winter, for shooting street photography, because of the light. The low sun here in Ireland creates a beautiful golden character to the light and as the season turns from Autumn to Winter, and the sun gets lower, you get beautiful long deep shadows.

I haven’t really been taking that many photos over the past few months for various reasons, which has been a bit frustrating for me. I do have a little collection that has been slowly gathering over the past few months, and so it’s time to resurrect a long-running series, that I used to do ages ago: “Random Acts of Photography”.