Great Blasket Island & an Tiaracht, Co. Kerry

Four frames. That's what I came away with from an hour on the pass between Mount Eagle and Cruach Mhárthaín, hands frozen, hood slapping me in the face, one hand on the tripod to stop it going over the edge. But the sky that afternoon was extraordinary, and I wasn't leaving until it gave me something.

Infrared changes everything up there. The Atlantic drops to near black, the cloud highlights push almost pure white, and suddenly the tonal range in the sky becomes the whole photograph. The Great Blasket holds the lower frame like ballast, its whale-back shape familiar and solid. An Tiaracht catches hard sidelight from the south, bright on one face, falling dark on the other. They anchor the composition, but the real work is happening overhead. Big cumulus banks rolling in from the southwest, breaking apart, reforming, each one lit from above with a bright crown and a dark underbelly.

I've stood on that pass dozens of times and always pointed the camera down at the islands. This time I tilted fifteen degrees higher than usual, and the whole image changed. That's my favourite thing about infrared. It can reorganise a scene you think you know well!