This is one of my favourite photographs which I took. I had just bought a 100mm macro lens for my DSLR, a Canon 40D and I wanted to play with it. So I went looking for stuff, and it was a cold, cold evening.
I used to take a lot of photographs. It’s not yet obvious here but for a while, if you wanted kitesurfing photographs in Dublin, well I took them. I took photographs of kitesurfers in Australia, in Portugal, in Brazil, in Spain, in Western Sahara and in Dublin. I stopped around 2014. There were a couple of reasons, of which probably the main ones were:
- My back was hurting from the camera bag. It weighed about 20kg on average, and I carried it everywhere.
- Drones were coming on stream. I didn’t have the money to buy one, nor the patience to learn to fly one
- In around 2014, I had pretty much achieved every photograph I wanted to do. There was no real challenge left unless I went to video or drone shots. Both would have required money which I didn’t have.
Not long afterwards, I started learning to draw and for a few years, most of the photographs I took, I took with a phone. It’s still the case today that most of the photos I take are with a phone, but at some point, after wrestling seriously with a JPG and Photoshop, I went into Saturn in Luxembourg to find a compact camera that I could keep in my handbag, but which had the capabilities of RAW photo files. I bought a Canon G7. It’s now the camera I use if I am travelling or want something a bit more than the phone and it generates some great RAW files.
Some of the kiteshots I took over the years will make their way on to this site as I start to populate it. But, in general, I don’t miss that so much. It was fun and exciting for a while but it was also a lot of hard work. And carrying the equipment was increasingly hard. Long lenses are heavy. I wanted to switch back to travel photography (which, I sort of did until Covid happened and we all stopped travelling).
But there are a few stand out shots from my past and they will slowly make their way here.