On a recent landscape photography workshop in Ireland's west we encountered a beautifully bright and colourful sunset at the coast of County Mayo.

Movement can add to a landscape and travel image, if it is in context and adds to the final image.

During a recent photography workshop we stopped to photograph a woodland scene with thin, straight, tall beech trees growing from a moss-covered wet hummocky floor providing the interest, a path meandering that leads the eye.

Sunrise on this morning's photography workshop on Dublin's beautiful bay.

The weather forecast was not favourable but was preferable to the following morning's forecast and other recent mornings where rain and heavily overcast conditions create conditions not of interest to the landscape photographer.

A return to County Cork took me to it's beautifully varied coastline that I have previously mentioned here.

Unlike on that previous occasion the weather was not cloudy and moody but bright and colourful highlighting the bright greens found in the littoral landscape.

There are many factors that contribute to making a good image. Not least among them is lighting, in fact without light we have no image and without good light we have a bad image.

No matter how many times you visit a location as a landscape photographer there is always something of interest, something different to photograph.

The subject matter might be the same, the image might be from the same location as your last visit and the weather might be as good as it was before but the scene is not the same and the image will be different.

Spring 2016 has been busy for Panoramic Ireland's photography tours and workshops in the Irish countryside.

The beautiful weather of recent weeks has brought challenges and opportunities, and the month of May has been better than those of recent years.

Here is a colourful image of a field of buttercups fringed by hawthorns and beech trees under a blue sky with soft, white clouds, taken in a quiet moment between sessions with tripods and filters.

The west of Ireland is as blessed as many parts of the world with beautiful sunsets, the sun dropping towards the horizon, its light skimming across a few thousand miles of ocean uninterrupted.

The sun sets over the watery landscape, flooded after a long winter season of heavy rain, the wettest winter on record in Ireland. Grasses slowly regrowing in a matter of hours despite being submerged under the cold lake water and abused by wave after wave for months over the many dark hiemal days.

There is nothing quite like an evening at the coast on a calm evening with a colourful sky and still waters reflecting all above.

What a week that was!

Friday saw me leaving home to head to a big field in Co. Laois for the biggest and best festival of the year in Ireland, Electric Picnic.

Packing the car with tent, sleeping bag, camera gear, laptop, clothes and everything else needed to keep warm, clean and well nourished I headed
off along with 50,000 others (not all in my car obviously) in the direction of Portlaoise then to Stradbally where, like last year, I parked up in the Red Car Park.