Fanad Head, Co. Donegal

Everyone photographs Fanad Head from the east. The classic composition with the Atlantic behind and Lough Swilly at your back. I've made that photograph myself, more than once. But I wanted the view nobody gets from the ground.

I worked my way around to the west and spent far too long chasing one specific alignment: the setting sun shining directly through the lantern room glass. Get it wrong by a few degrees and you lose everything. Get it right and the whole lantern glows gold, as if someone had just lit the lamp for the evening. I was running low on time and patience, adjusting by tiny increments. Obsessed, frankly.

What drew me to this angle is the diagonal line of the headland itself, the way it recedes from the lighthouse along the boundary wall of the keeper's buildings. The complex sits at the very tip, this small cluster of white walls holding their ground where the rock drops into broken water on both sides. You can see the exposure in it. The vulnerability.

The cloud had broken just enough along the western horizon to let that remarkable late Donegal light through. So far north, the sun barely drops. It just hangs there, low and golden, for what feels like an age. Have you ever noticed how the last twenty minutes before sunset in the northwest seem to stretch? I'm endlessly fascinated by it. This was one of those evenings where everything lined up, and I'm grateful I was there to see it!