It has been a challenging spring this year, the weather had not been entirely favourable.

Lots of rain, lots of wind and not much in the way of sunshine so here a fine day in Aprill by the coast on County Antrim's Causeway Coast.

Photography is always a challenge in Ireland, the weather really can be in your favour or against it but there can be no doubt about it, Ireland is always a fun place for photography.

Join me, Panoramic Ireland, to photograph on the coast throughout the year.

Bands of colour from the Irish coast in spring.

As the days get longer here in Ireland (well, a day is still 24 hours but the proportion of daylight is now getting longer and will soon be more than the length of night), the opportunity to photograph for longer during the day is to be welcomed.

The coast of Ireland is varied and in places is sandy, rocky, cliffy or often a combination.

Here, a stormy afternoon brings fresh winds and plenty of waves to the golden sands of the shore.

Below, a blue hour image from the coast.

Join me to photograph in Ireland, on the coast or in the mountains.

Ireland is not short of fantastic coastlines and of course as an Irish landscape photographer seascapes make up an important part of my collecton.

It should come as no surprise too that for the workshops and tours that I organise throughout Ireland, I recommend the coast often and get asked about the coast.

Here, a scene from a cloudy evening. After finishing up photographing some more well-known scenes from the Irish coast we set our sights on a tranquil scene of a calm Atlantic Ocean.

This image is one of my favourites from the evening's workshop.

Join me, Panoramic Ireland, on a photography workshop to Ireland's sometimes wild and sometimes serene coast all year round.

Blue hour and golden hour are the ideal times of day for coastal landscape photography.

Here, a small sea stack and vertical cliffs on Ireland's Atlantic coast catch the end of the evening's direct light, the warmth of which lends its name to the time of day - the golden hour as the light half of the year ends in Ireland.

Panoramic Ireland run seascape and landscape photography classes, workshops and tours all year round and right through the winter in Ireland.

To find out more use the contact page or email me.

There's a magic to be had photographing landscapes, a dependence upon the weather and, at the coast, the tide.

Planning for time of day, to catch the golden hour and the tide at the right time of course takes some of the uncertainty away but the Irish weather can provide interesting challenges.

As I mentioned in a previous post, in Irish tradition the winter has started with the beginning of the dark half of the year after Halloween.

But that doesn't mean that Ireland is not a destination for off season travel, on the contrary, with fewer crowds and some of the best light the months of November through to March are ideal for seascape photography in Ireland.

Here as well as shooting with the sun, we turned to photograph the sea cliffs with the sun setting behind.

It is a difficult photograph to shoot a landscape like this contre-jour but the movement and colour in the sky, coupled with some good post-processing has resulted in a fine image that is in contrast to shooting with the sun and its clear light (image coming soon in a subsequent post).

Making use of the texture and feeling of this deserted Irish beach at sunset.

I will be regularly running seascape photography workshops throughout the winter in Ireland, for more information contact me through the contact page or send me an email (up at the top of the page).

Standing atop steep cliffs high above the Atlantic Ocean, I watched the power of the incoming swell as it met subsurface changes.

A fairly calm ocean on a warm, late spring day yet this power came from almost nowhere.

It looks small just like a small crashing wave but, for scale, a guillemot flying low over the surging white water helps to illustrate the magnitude of just this one tiny part of the Atlantic.

Blue hour, especially the morning blue hour, is a special time for photography. At this time of year in Ireland photographing the coast before sunrise to capture that time when all appears blue, before the strength of the summer sun shines from beyond the horizon requires an early start.

It doesn't always look like this, indeed the heavy cloud seen here that adds to this image later became a block to the golden light of sunrise off the Irish coast.

But with this image from 04:15 in July, calm conditions were at least a bonus compared to previous days at Antrim's Giant's Causeway and over in the west in County Mayo.