Ardnakinna is simultaneously one of the youngest and oldest lighthouses around the coast. The tower was originally constructed in 1850 as an unlit beacon, and was then converted to a full lighthouse by adding an ex-lightship lantern in 1965.
Seen here from the Irish Lights helicopter while returning from a visit to the Fastnet, the mouth of Bere Haven harbour is on the left and Castletownbere itself is in the background.

This is Illauncreeveen island in Glengarriff harbour. I'd been here on several other occasions and never really got an image I was 100% happy with. However, on this particular evening I was rewarded with some fantastic high-level cloud which caught the wonderful colours of the setting sun.
The Sugar Loaf mountain on the Beara peninsula is visible in the distance.

The Fastnet Lighthouse is one of Ireland's engineering marvels. There are several other images on this site which capture it from the air, the sea and from the rock itself, but this is one of the more unique. Made from inside the rotating lantern assembly itself, the strong graphic forms of the fresnel lenses combine with the diagonals of the ladder and other structures to show off the magnificent beauty of this early 20th century industrial masterpiece.
As I was composing the image, I noticed that every now and then a rainbow was projected on the pole to my left by the lenses. I made several exposures attempting to capture this split-second occurrence, and this one was successful.

The Fastnet is certainly Ireland’s finest lighthouse. Difficult to land on, and all but impossible to step from a boat for most of the year, this aerial view shows the typical angry sea that surrounds it.
Cape Clear Island is visible on the horizon, the closest point of land to the rock, often called the ‘Teardrop of Ireland’ as it was the last thing emigrants saw of their home country when sailing to America and Australia.

Made on the evening of March 7th, 2011, this image shows the International Space Station and the shuttle Discovery flying over the hills of Gougane Barra.
Just a couple of hours before, Discovery had undocked from the ISS to return to Earth for the last time. Discovery was leading the ISS in its orbit, so both took the same path across the sky and appear as a single trail. However, at the left side of the image, you can see the fainter trail that is the shuttle by itself - the ISS ended its track in this photograph where the line brightens again.
The orange-red light in the bottom center of the picture are the lights in the Gougane Barra valley.

This image was made at the same time as my blurred image of "Bluebell Woods, Cork", and in fact this is a vertical composition of that same scene.
Here, I've used a lens with a very wide aperture of f/1.2 to create a very shallow depth-of-field. The two closest trees are sharp, but the bluebells in the foreground and the backround are out of focus - this creates a three-dimensional effect that draws the viewer into the frame.
This effect is further aided by the natural vignetting of the corners of the frame, drawing attention to the center.
I like both of these images. Both have an otherwordly quality to them, but for very different reasons.

This image was made on a beautiful still evening - one of a very few we got in the late summer of 2008!
It captures the peace and serenity of this wonderful location - St. Finbar's Oratory on the island in Lough Gougane Barra. About an hour after sunset, night was closing in. There had been a wedding in the oratory earlier, and so the door was open and the lights on. Ribbons and other decoration can be clearly made out through the door in a large print.

I spent the first few days of May 2009 looking for an excellent image of a bluebell wood. These wonderful flowers appear in the spring and, when conditions are right, form a rich carpet on the floor of ancient woodlands.
I made many images which I was happy with, but nothing really stood out. I needed something different.
I'd seen images by one or two other photographers where they had achieved interesting results by intentionally moving the camera during the exposure. I tried this on my last visit to Courtmacsherry Woods, in Cork.
After quite a bit of experimentation, I got the hang of including the right elements in the frame and moving the camera so as to create a blur which complemented the forms in the image, rather than detract from them.
I'm pleased with the result. I hope you are too!

The finest lighthouse on the Irish coast, the Fastnet stands proud on an unusually calm fine Summer's evening.
A granite tower constructed of interlocking blocks, it's a virtual monolith which presents itself like the bow of a ship to the incoming Atlantic swells, dissipating their energy before they reach peak force.
So effective is the design and construction that it has survived the worst the Atlantic can throw at it for over a century with nary a scratch. In 1985, it was struck by a 48m rogue wave (the same height as the focal plane of the lantern). This stove in the glass of the lantern room and overturned the vat of mercury on which the lantern turns, but the structure took no other damage.