Many of us will know the Swan Hellenic name but few will know that it has been given a rebirth, in 2020, with three new ships and varied itineraries that cover the globe.

The opportunity to learn, explore and in some cases contribute to knowledge is an important factor for many when choosing a holiday. Swan Hellenic have a long legacy of discovery tours, with their first cruise in 1954 organised for the Hellenic Travellers’ Club, which had been founded by Lord Byron in 1906. Head of Classics at London University, Francis Kinchin-Smith led the cruise and invited three guest lecturers for the 14-day cruise around the sites of ancient Greece.

SH Vega has just completed her inaugural circumnavigation of Ireland, stopping at Bantry, Dingle, Galway, Portrush and the Causeway Coast before heading to Skye in Scotland and down to Dublin allowing more people to see and experience Ireland's sights.

When I first see her from the Samuel Beckett Bridge looking down towards Dublin Port, she is moored at Cruise Berth 18 right beside the Thomas Clarke Bridge, more commonly known as the East Link and the Point / 3 Arena.

May is in my opinion the best month of the year in Ireland with fresh growth on trees and hedgerows, flowers in bloom including bluebells carpeting woodlands and hillsides all over Ireland just like in the image here.

May is also the month of the Bealtaine Festival, celebrating arts and creativity for older people, a program of thousands of events throughout Ireland for older people to engage with arts and crafts through learning and teaching.

This festival takes its name from the ancient Irish festival of Bealtaine, held at the start of May and which marked the start of summer in Ireland.

Running since 1996 it was indeed the first such festival in the world; previous years have seen the likes of Colm Tóibín talking about his novels and other works. 

Sidelighting, sunshine and shadow in the mountains from this week's visit to the wild landscapes of the West of Ireland.

We have had very fine weather this week in Ireland, with Sunday being the hottest day of 2023 so far.

I headed through the wide open spaces of Connemara to meet ES and JS who had arrived from the US, we met on location for an early morning photography workshop on photographing panoramic images.

And where better to photograph panoramas than here in the wide, wild west.

Both ES and JS are keen photographers although neither had made panoramas before. So for the morning here we made panorama after panorama.

First off the warm morning sidelighting and shadows on craggy mountains.

To learn how to photograph panoramas using your current camera including how to choose a location, camera settings and post-processing using multiple software contact me here at Panoramic Ireland.

A recent journey took me to north Tipperary and the town of Nenagh.

It's a fine, large town, though not the largest in Tipperary, that accolade goes to Clonmel in the south of the county.

Nenagh has a distinctive castle, or at least a tower - remains of the much larger original built around the year 1200 by the local Theobald FitzWalter, Baron Butler, whose descendents would become the Earls of Ormond and was constructed of limestone rubble.

It is tall, at around 25 metres, with additions built in the 1860s - the crenellations at the top.

Seen here on a bright spring day in this panorama with some of the walls of the original castle.

I discovered that Nenagh Castle is free to visit, and while visiting the town's tourist office I was informed that the local library, as well as the other libraries in Tipperary, also host free events and exhibitions throughout the year.

So I went for a coffee at the nearby Steeples cafe then headed to the library.

Irish jeweller and designer / maker Christina Keogh has an exhibition on in the library of beautiful silversmithing, gold and gemstones as well as traditional goldsmithing tools and will give a talk on Tuesday 18th of April in Nenagh Library.

Sidelighting in Ireland's Wicklow Mountains.

The scenic wilderness of the Wicklow mountain landscape is quite unlike anywhere else in Ireland, especially when combined with unusual cloud and weather patterns.

Here, sidelighting from late evening sunshine breaks through high cloud and illuminates the remote valleys.

2023 is a good year to visit Ireland, join Panoramic Ireland to photograph in Wicklow as well as Connemara, Dingle and Antrim's Giant's Causeway.

Dublin's Docklands underwent significant, almost complete redevelopment in the 2000s with the biggest names in the tech industry still building and locating in the area today.

Here in Grand Canal Square the public realm was designed by landscape architect Martha Schwartz and the choice of red paving blocks and these tall red glow sticks were designed deliberately to give a red carpet effect coming from Daniel Libeskind's 2,000-seater theatre.

On the right is the distinctive chequered pattern of the Anantara The Marker Hotel.

This is now a good-looking part of the city and the redevelopment has brought a lot of life into the area that was run down for many decades at the end of the 20th century.

Join Panoramic Ireland to photograph in Dublin at night on our award-winning photography tours and workshops.

It's an exciting time here in Ireland, Saint Patrick's Day has just finished, the Irish rugby team won the Six Nations and remains at number one in the world.

It is also the equinox, so we now move into the six months of the year when daylight is longer than darkness.

And while there isn't much in the way of summer colour just yet, the bright and fresh green of spring is on the way.

We're big fans of sunsets here at Panoramic Ireland, you'll find plenty of images of the evening golden hour throughout the site.

It seems that someone with artisitic skills and a spray can in Dublin is also a fan, after painting this sagely advice on a wall in the city centre of Ireland's capital city.

Join Panoramic Ireland to photograph more sunsets and get yourself away from too much Netflix, all you need is your camera.

High in the Irish mountains, three rocks sit overlooking an empty mountain landscape of peaks, ridges and valleys offering a good spot for a break to take in the view.

Okay, Ireland has no real height when compared with many other countries, but still for this island it's a high point with majestic views.

Perfect, you could imagine, for the three bears from the famous folk story to stop here and have a picnic whilst enjoying the scenic view.

Sometimes when working with images in Adobe Lightroom Classic, it is preferable to group similar images together into a stack so that all of the images are on top of each other with one on top.

In this case, I have been working on images taken in an exposure bracket or maybe if you had a sequence for focus bracketing.

Here there are five images taken with different exposures to give a final image with a wider dynamic range, or HDR and after processing these to create the HDR image I don't need to see the five source images.

Usually when processing in this way it is possible to have Lightroom group the images into a stack automatically.

But on occasions, either when forgetting to do so, or as in my case Lightroom failed to create the stack automatically, it is possible to add images into a stack manually.

Here are the steps to group images into a stack in Lightroom with Grid view (images below):

1. Select your images, here I have the five source images and one HDR image so six in total

2. Right click on the selection

3. In the context menu choose Stacking, then Group into Stack

4. That's it, or you can use the CTRL-G shortcut after selecting images

5. To expand the stack, click on the number badge at the top left

6. Right click on the number badge to bring up a context menu that offers options to manage the stacks