The west of Ireland - it has great people, great food, great entertainment and great scenery and that all makes for the perfect location for photography.

From a foggy day in the west of Ireland.

It was an hour before sunset and heavy rain was doing its best to disrupt the photography workshop with CT from the USA.

The rain was also helping to keep this lake full and the islands floating in the thick fog.

Sometimes it is easy to think of landscape photography in terms of the right light, the golden raking sunshine illuminating the countryside in front of the lens.

And it is true that landscapes with lighting like this are without doubt impressive and beautiful.

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 rugged landscapes in the west of Ireland make for great landscape photography.

Here, small fields of green have been created by generations of farmers clearing stones from the land. 

Old cultivation ridges can be seen inside the fields where, in centuries gone by, farmers created what are known as lazy beds.

Another beautiful evening here in the west of Ireland and what an evening it was.

Any of you who joined me for a chat earlier will have seen and heard how calm the conditions were, just a few ripples on the surface of the water created interesting reflections of the passing clouds overhead.

And the sun sets on another day, another Saint Patrick's Day in this case.

To anyone I was chatting to earlier, here is the finished sunset image. 

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 have been a lot of rainy, windy and stormy days this winter. We have now passed Storm Imogen making the next official storm number ten of the season.

Today though was a beautiful day, I awoke to frost and clear reflections on the lake. The sky was blue as fasr as could be seen so I took a drive around the west of Ireland, clearly not all of it as that would be impossible in a day. It really would!

I took a little trip to Ireland's Wild Atlantic Way that runs along its west coast.