Tickets for Ireland's biggest music festival, Electric Picnic 2023, will go on sale this week on Friday 9th of December.

Some of the headline acts for EP23 have been announced and include Billie Eilish, Lewis Capaldi and Niall Horan.

Find more information on tickets here.

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It was high summer. the start of August and after photographing a river woodland I stopped to photograph this scene.

In front of me, on this hot day in the Irish countryside, a long scene of distant heather-clad mountains with green lower slopes and a vast field of golden barley.

A big sky filled with clouds allowed a little blue to show.

At the same time I photographed bees and thistles.

A few weeks later I saw a tweet, of an Irish painter that I had not heard of before, referencing a landscape from County Mayo in Ireland's west. It was Across the Bog, Mayo by Jeremiah Hoad.

And I was struck by the similarities between this fine oil painting of an Irish bogland scene and my own recent image of the barley field with mountains.

Even though my landscape photograph is not of Mayo, nor is it of a bog I do think there is a comparison to be made.

And while my image was not inspired by this artist's fine work, it is similar and definitely reminiscent of the oil painting.

Landscape photography does often emulate art and it is interesting that what subject matter painters have been representing on canvas over the centuries, photographers have been committing to film and screen.

I have been looking at Jeremiah Hoad's other artworks and am deeply impressed by this little known Irish artist.

If you are travelling through the streets of Galway you may well spot this unusual house with its horseshoe-shaped windows.

The quirky building was owned by horse-mad local man Michael Cunniss who spoke with Ireland's national broadcaster RTE in 1982.

A man before his time, Michael complained to the RTE reporter about the "...smelly old cars going along the road..." and he even kept a horse in the house that could watch TV through a hatch in to the living room.

It is common enough even today to see old forge buildings with horseshoe shaped doorways but nowhere else have I seen windows in this style.

Have you seen this house, or another similar?

What would have been Dublin's tallest building, to be built on the former City Arts Centre, seen here above on the left - the red brick building, has been refused planning permission by Dublin City Council.

In the image above the proposed building would continue out the top of the scene. 

Dublin City Council found that the proposed building would have a significantly detrimental visual impact on the River Liffey and its vistas.

Grant Thornton, the City Quay National School and the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin were amongst the principal objectors to the development.

The character of Dublin's most iconic building, the Custom House, would also be seriously impacted by the scale of the proposed development.

It seems in Dublin, that despite the city's traditional low height building policy, developers are trying to build high in the characterful city and not in the suburbs or urban fringe.