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).

It's winter now and my mind turns to coastal landscapes.

Here, one from the Antrim Coast of Sheep Island.

Crashing waves batter both sides of the small island, for millennia a well known landmark off this part of the Causeway Coast but now more famous from its appearance in HBO's Game of Thrones.

Sheep Island rises some 30 metres above the North Atlantic with mostly sheer cliffs, a thin layer of soil on top gives a green colour particularly in spring. In centuries past, local farmers would graze sheep out here being able to land only on the calmest of days.

Some doubt that landing a vessel here with sheep is possible, but on a calm day and good local knowledge this would be a difficult, but not impossible, task.

Sheep Island is home to a large proportion of Ireland's population of the northern European sub-species of cormorant and is a protected habitat.

You can just see the coast of Scotland, faintly on the horizon under the grey cloud to the right of Sheep Island in this image.