Inch Beach, Dingle, Co. Kerry

I needed a photograph of Inch Beach. That's the honest truth of it. I'd just opened the gallery in Killarney in 2011, and you can't sell photographs of Kerry without Inch on the wall. Families carry that place with them, generation after generation.

The trouble was, I'd been there several times and never come away with anything worthwhile. From the strand itself, it's pleasant enough, but you lose the scale entirely. That remarkable sand spit pushing out into Dingle Bay, the curve of it, the way the waves arrive in long parallel lines mirroring the shape of the shore. None of that reads from sea level. So I drove partway up the hillside until I found a vantage point that opened everything up.

Kerry weather was doing several things at once, as it does. A squall building over the Slieve Mish mountains, heavy cloud pressing down across the bay, and then this break of brightness off to the right catching the surface of the water and lighting up the sand. The green-grey Atlantic, white lines of surf advancing in formation, dune grass in the foreground. In a large print you can pick out individual surfers and walkers on the strand.

I've returned many times since but never bettered this one. Sometimes the first real attempt at a place, when you're seeing it fresh and with a bit of urgency, produces something you spend years trying to match!