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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The giants causeway is probably one of the most famous natural attractions on the island of Ireland. Located on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, the famous landmark is a series of volcanic rocks that formed into hexagonal columns. It’s somewhere I always wanted to see in person, with the formation being featured in geography text books when I was younger, not to mention practically every tourist board promotion for the region. Finally this past weekend, I got to see it in person.

My first reaction: “Is that it?”

When it comes to photography, I have a lot of differing tastes. I don’t just mean photographic genres, bur rather images that appeal to me. I like good composition and storytelling as much as the next person, but I also have an affiliation for colour and texture. And sometimes, Nature provides us with an abundance of both of these.

When you watch a travel show or even a YouTube video from a far off place, it’s easy to get envy for the exotic locations and fantastic scenery. It’s also easy to overlook some of the magnificent sights in your own back yard. And here in Ireland, we have a truly magnificent back yard. Ever since the pandemic hit, we’ve been travelling abroad less, and are slowly exploring more of our own country. A little while ago, we travelled through the mountains and valleys of the beautiful Connemara countryside, and I was blown away by what we saw there.

This time last year, I posted a story on this blog called “Virtual Spring”. We were in the midst of lockdown and I couldn’t get out to get any photos of the changing seasons. While autumn has always been my favourite season to photography, spring is a close second. I love as the bleakness of winter gives way to new life, and it clears out the cupboards of one’s mind, as it were.

We recently decided to head out to the mountains to photography a nice spring day in national park in Glendalough, Co. Wicklow, but when we got there a cloud had descended. Long with the still bare moss covered trees, our jaunt in the sun became a trip into a fantasy story in a mysterious forested land…

While my wife and I have travelled throughout the world, there are large parts of Ireland we haven’t visited. People often ask us about various famous locations around the country and we have to respond that we’ve never been. When Covid struck, and the world turned upside down, we aimed to fix that and began exploring our own little nation that much more. Last year we visited the southeast, and a few weeks ago, we decided to spend a little time exploring part of the west coast, and drove some of the famous “Wild Atlantic Way”.

Every year we like to get up early on New Year’s day and head to the beach to watch the first sunrise of the new year. It’s a little ritual to start the year, but unfortunately, it hasn’t always gone exactly according to plan. Last year, we couldn’t actually get to the beach, because of a strict covid lockdown, as it was outside the permissible distance. This year we did get there, but instead of a glorious sunrise, we were treated to stormy seas and winds. Not exactly what we were hoping for, but it led to some cool photos anyway.

I’ve recently been going over some old photographs and trying out some new treatments on them. A few years ago, while on a trip to Germany, we were staying on the outskirts of Darmstadt, and right near where our hotel was located, was a fairly large forest. I had taken lots of photos there at the time but I was never really happy with them.

As long as I’ve been taking photographs, Autumn has been my favourite time of the year. I love both the colour and the light, and there’s something cosy about the impending dark days of winter that makes it a special time of year. Recently though, loss has turned my favourite time of the year into a very difficult one.

Near to where I live is what is a rather remarkable place to find in a city. Called “Airfield”, it is a 38 acre site which features a 19th century estate, gardens and a fully working farm. Recently, on an overcast and rainy day, my wife and I paid a visit to the estate for a walk around the gardens, to get away from the outside world for a few hours and I ended up taking a ridiculous number of photos.

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.