I’ve decided to something different with my PAD. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for some time now, and a new month is as good as time as any to start.
From now on I’m going to combine words with my images and I’m going to work harder at posting a freshly taken image each day.
For as long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated with pictures and words. As a child I loved to draw and paint, and my mother’s old Voigtlander camera and her collection of black and white photos sparked my interest in photography. I devoured books and, as an only child growing up in the Irish countryside, found companionship in pages which took me on adventures to far flung places.
When I gave up on my childhood fancy of marrying a farmer with a hundred cows, I studied journalism in Dublin and then returned to Dundalk, working first on the last paper in Ireland to be printed on hot metal and to carry nothing but advertisements on the front page, before joining the opposition.
I am lucky that I still enjoy going to work every morning but reporting allows little opportunity for more expressive writing, which is what I hope to do here.
But if you are hoping for confessional outpourings you won’t find them here: I value my privacy too much to share my personal life on the world wide web.
So, mostly it will be a collection of musings on the things which inspire my photographs and on what it’s like to live in Ireland today. One of the things which appealed to me most when I first stumbled upon PBase was the wonderful insight it gives into the lives of others living in different countries thanks the vision of the many many talented photographers who made up this community.
Today's image was taken on the last day of the summer holidays. It's been one of the wettest summers on record, not quite as bad as last year, but with little sunshine to warm our spirits. After a trip to the seaside village of Warrenpoint,
with its manicured park and pretty bandstand, we got soaked in a monsoon-like shower while walking the dog.