Cliffs of Moher, Co. Clare

I drove three hours north from Killarney one evening because I'd just opened a gallery selling Irish landscape photography and didn't have a single image of the Cliffs of Moher. A fairly significant gap, as it turned out.

By the time I arrived, the cliffs were closed for the day. A sign at the entrance warned people to stay well back because of the wind. I read it, thought about it for roughly four seconds, and went in anyway.

Perhaps not my wisest decision. This wasn't jacket-flapping wind. This was the kind that genuinely tries to rearrange your centre of gravity. Being anywhere near the edge of a 200-metre cliff face in those conditions is objectively dangerous, and I was very aware of that with every step. I kept low, moved carefully, set the tripod on solid rock well back from the edge.

But the conditions that made it dangerous made it dramatic. The Atlantic was furious, white surf hammering the base of the cliffs in continuous lines. A faint break in the cloud off to the west threw just enough warmth into the scene to separate sky from sea, and that heavy diffused light picked out every sedimentary layer in the rock face beautifully. The whole line of them marching away southward into the distance.

I love the anger in this photograph. The ocean looks like it's trying to tear the cliffs down, and the cliffs look like they couldn't care less. Fourteen kilometres of sheer rock, hundreds of millions of years old, taking everything a bad October evening can throw at them. I got the image I came for, got back to the car without being blown off anything, and drove home. Problem solved!