Walking on Long Strand the other day we doubled back across the dunes and back along the road. It’s a conservation area, and to promote plant biodiversity they have horses grazing the dunes over the winter. I looked up and saw these two cresting a large dune, silhouetted against the overcast sky.

This is a willow tree outside our apartment looking out over Loch Rannoch… real winter wonderland stuff.

…and this is a shot of Schiehallion taken from the banks of Loch Rannoch early one morning. It was the only day we saw the mountain; for the rest of our trip it was shrouded with low cloud.

Max 75 frames and mounts, needed – contact Paul O’Mahony for details

Paul O’Mahony, of MarketingWriteNow got in touch earlier today about a fantastic initiative taking place at the Clarion Hotel in Cork on Saturday 12 December from 9:30 to 15:30.

Help portrait is an international movement of photographers and other professional who are donating time, equipment and expertise to give something back to those less fortunate than them this Christmas. Here’s a video explaining the initiative.

The idea is to help boost the self image and self esteem of people who would never normally consider or be able to afford getting a professional photographer to take their portrait. Who’s that, you might ask? Well, according to the Help Portrait site it could include:

Who needs pictures? Anyone who wouldn’t normally have access to or be able to afford professional photography.

We suggest the following groups of people for starters…-

• the homeless
• orphans
• single moms (and their kids)
• single dads (and their kids)
• sick children
• sick parents
• the elderly
• army vets
• underprivileged families
• your neighbour?

Some of Cork’s leading photographers are already on board for Help Portrait, and they’ll be supported by photography assistants, make-up artists and a host of other volunteers on the day.

But the organisers are still desperately in need of support and sponsorship. If you’re in Cork, and would be willing to contribute time, resources, catering or a donation of cold, hard cash to support the initiative get in touch with Paul via the Marketing Write Now contact page.

And especially if you can donate / would be willing to sponsor photo frames and mounts for the event please talk to Paul before the end of the day tomorrow (Thursday 09/12) to get things sorted.

If your a blogger, twitterer or facebooker please help spread the word about this great event.

UPDATE: Read more about who was involved in Help Portrait Cork on Paul O’Mahony’s blog, and see some great photos of the action on the day over on Roger Overall’s blog

Best wishes and condolences to everyone in West Cork, Cork City and further afield whose homes and businesses were affected by the recent flooding….

In Ireland we don’t do climatic extremes very well.

Maybe it’s the inevitable consequence of a climate that consistently under delivers. We don’t get long, baking hot droughts, we don’t get bone-chillingly cold winters with lots of snow and ice, we don’t get anything extreme on the weather front, really… just a perpetually dreary middle ground.

As a result we’re rubbish when it comes to dealing with weather-related problems. In the summer we moan about the rain, but on the (very) rare occasions when the sun does shine for more than a few days the council starts running out of water. If it has the temerity to snow the entire country grinds to a shuddering halt until things thaw out again, and anything more than a stiff breeze has us running indoors to take refuge from falling trees.

But if there was one type of weather you’d expect the Irish to cope well with it would be rain. If Ireland had an official national weather, then rain would be it! And yet here, too, we fail miserably at the faintest whiff of extremity.

Last week it rained hard for a few days, and highlighted just how flimsy our drainage systems, flood defences and coping mechanisms really are. Huge swathes of West Cork and a substantial chunk of Cork City sank beneath the rising flood waters, thousands of homes were damaged, hundreds of vehicles stranded and countless commuters failed to make it home to their families.

In short, it was a complete shambles. And I was out in it!

I had to drive up to Cork airport and back on Thursday. The journey up wasn’t so bad, but the return trip was something else again.

According to the radio Bandon, and Clonakilty had become impassable, so I’d have to try an alternative route. I headed towards Macroom, then down the back way towards Dunmanway… and so began an “adventure” that I’d rather not repeat in a hurry, involving endless back-tracking, some hair raising floods that I managed to make it through, and one particularly bad one outside Dunmanway that I spectacularly failed to get through.

Luckily a sympathetic lady in a 4×4 took pity on me as I waded through the swirling flood-water. She towed me out, and somehow I managed to get the car running again. A few miles down the road I came to a bridge… or at least a place where there should have been a bridge. It was underwater.

I hit “detour” on the sat-nav, and a very proper English voice uttered “recalculating” for the umpteenth time that day, before sending me left up a side road. I drove for hours, backtracking when the water blocked my path. Wherever I could I turned uphill, figuring that at least then the water would be heading the other way. This proved successful, to a point, but with one fairly major stumbling block… the River Bandon still lay between me and home.

Thwarted at every crossing point I tried I finally made it to Ballineen, and my last hope of making it across the river. I was in luck: the bridge was still passable, if barely. Triumphant, I headed for home, and then ran out of diesel. I could have screamed… in fact, I think I did.

After much faffing about I managed to get a bit of diesel and limped the rest of the way home I glanced at my watch…it was 4:15pm, a one hour journey had turned into a four hour plus nightmare.

I can understand us not coping well with heavy snow or prolonged droughts… these are, after all, unusual occurrences in Ireland, but rain? Give me a break!

I realised whilst digging these out (and they’re not the best) that I have surprisingly few ferret photos in my library, and will have to remedy that over the coming weeks.

They’re lots of fun, quick on their feet, and full of mischief. They’d probably be great practice subjects for wildlife work.

The macro is something I miss on my Nikon D90 – and a decent macro lens is on the wish list.

The next was taken the weekend I got the D90, on a shopping trip to Cheshire Oaks outlet village. I was outside playing with my camera while my wife hit the shops. There were some starlings picking at bits of food discarded by passing shoppers.

While they aren’t everyone’s favourite bird, starlings have some amazingly iridescent plumage, and the detail is amazing.

Wonder what the equality ombudsman or whoever looks after that sort of malarkey would make of it… ? Not so much a glass ceiling, more a glass windscreen, I suspect!

View Great spots in West Cork in a larger map

Showing an insensitive, but I have to admit well founded lack of faith in my fishing prowess, our friends had brought along some fresh mackerel, just in case. We’d also packed a supply of emergency sausages, so we wouldn’t go hungry.

The fish weren’t biting, so I decided to switch the mackerel lures for a spinner and try my luck at that. As I turned I saw two people looking out to sea, obviously scouting the location for some reason.

One of them asked if I’d caught anything… which was fair enough. The other asked “Is your name Calvin?”

I was a little taken aback at being addressed by name by what appeared to be a complete stranger in a remote part of West Cork. It turns out this “stranger” was Cork Based commercial and wedding photographer Roger Overall, who I follow on Twitter, and who follows me. He’d recognised me from my Twitter profile pic, of all things.

We got chatting. Roger was out with landscape photographer @petercoxphoto scouting locations for a moonrise shoot they were planning later that evening.

After chatting with me and my Spanish photographer friend Alfredo Caliz for a little while they moved on to another location just along the coast, and we got back to the business at hand – sorting out the barbecue.

Here’s rather a fuzzy long distance crop of the two photographers in their chosen location a little way around the coast (Roger’s on the left).

And here’s the rock I was fishing from… perhaps one of the last places I ever expected to be recognised via my participation in social media.

We had a great barbecue on the beach, but had to pack up and get the kids home to bed before the moon made an appearance… you can read more about that over on Roger’s blog.

Shot from the car window in Union Hall. This fellow was feeding in the lagoon.

For such big birds (up to 1 metre in height with a wingspan pushing 2 metres) they’re incredibly nervous and skittish.

As I stopped and lowered the car window this one moved quickly away, and then took flight. This image is cropped from the full frame (handy having 12MP to play with).

The shot I’m really after is a perfect reflection of a hunting heron in glass-calm water… but it’s proving a tricky endeavour. In the meantime I quite like this shot.