I could just make out the outline of Errisbeg in the darkness as I approached Roundstone, and when I parked I started to doubt my own plans. My intention was to climb Errisbeg in the twilight in the hope that I may get high enough to get a shot of Dog's Bay and Gurteen Bay as the dawn broke. But it was only just getting light and the mountain looks far more formidable  when you're looking up at it than it does on the map. Having recently borrowed a digital luggage scale I knew that my fully laden camera bag weighs nearly 11.5kg so I left the tripod and one camera body in the car to

I've been visiting County Wexford for over 10 years (my wife is from there) but it was only this June that I learnt about the Portlairge wreck in Bannow Bay when I read about it in a blog post on Kieran Russell's website. I was very excited about having such an interesting subject to photograph only 10 minutes away from where I stay when in Wexford and at the tail end of October I finally got my chance on the morning before my family and I caught the ferry to Wales for my brother's wedding. It had been a long time since I'd photographed something that required checking the tide times.

This was taken yesterday morning at Barna Quay. Whilst taking it, I was speaking to a local man. He took me for a West Connemara man, before I told him that I was actually from Wales. I was surprised by how pleased I was by his assumption. I mean, I'm very proud of being Welsh and have never pretended to be otherwise, but it's nice to think that I've settled into the area to such a degree that a Galwegian thought that I was from the same county. I was never mistaken for a Dubliner in the nearly 6 years that I lived there. I guess feeling at home in Galway must be starting to show.

So you spy something that you'd like to photograph. You do the recce, working out your angle, where the sun's going to be, which lens and filter you're going to use, and so on. Then you turn up on the day to find that, actually, your plan's not going to work at all, and you end up shooting something completely different; and either end up with something better, or nothing at all. The former is what happened with these images. The first was taken in Spiddal. I'd actually planned to shoot from the other side of the quay, facing in from the sea. I was planning on the sun illuminating the