Welcome to SnapShot

Hello and welcome to SnapShot, my new photography blog chatting about what I’ve been framing in my viewfinder and what’s been inspiring me this week.

I decided to start this blog for two reasons: to help motivate myself to get out and shoot, and to motivate myself to write. I love both writing and photography but struggle to stay confident and motivated about my work. Hopefully SnapShot will help.

I fell in love with photography about 15 years ago (maybe more like twenty, but who’s counting?!) when travelling around Australia and New Zealand, and I’ve only grown to love it more and more over the years.

However, I have struggled with fluctuating confidence around my skill and talent levels over the years and this has impacted my enjoyment of photography, which is something I hate. Logically I know that the only person causing those doubts in me is me but knowing it doesn’t make it any easier to ignore. That’s just not how the brain works!

I also love writing. I love the meditative feeling I get when the words are flowing across my brain and my pencil is moving easily across the page. The messier my handwriting, the more fluid the words. But I have the same struggles with self-doubt about my writing ability too. In fact, I decided to start this blog in February, but it’s taken me nearly six months to get up the courage to write my first post. Stupid I know.

I figured starting SnapShot might help me muddle through some of those moments of self-doubt and motivate me to persevere with two creative outlets that I love. Hopefully this blog can help me to find my photographic and written voices. Easy, right? And hey, maybe some of my images or words will resonate with others out there too.

So, on to the photography. What images am I making right now? Well I’m focussing mainly on Street Photography and was out shooting yesterday. I’ve always been really drawn to it as a photographic genre and have long been inspired by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Diane Arbus. I love capturing simple human moments, people lost in their own world just doing their thing.

I moved back home to Dublin in March after 16 years away. I landed in Dublin airport on the 20th of March, just as the global COVID-19 lockdown began – epic timing on my part. Ireland started to open up again in June, but things aren’t the same as before. People have to go about their daily lives differently now. This has somehow made it easier for me to settle back in Ireland. We are all on the same new learning curve together.

I’ve been using Street Photography to rediscover the city after all the years away, and in doing so am capturing Dubliners living their lives in a COVID world. As a northsider I’m most drawn to the north side of the city. It’s what I’m most familiar with. It also reminds me a lot of East London which was home for the past six years, so again there’s a familiarity there.

The urban landscape of Dublin’s northside is gritter than the southside, and I love that. There are so many interesting people to make photographs of too. Below is a selection of my recent Dublin Street Photography images, I hope you enjoy them. Please feel free to leave comments or questions.

I will be out again for sure over the next couple of days capturing more great Dubliners doing their thing. I look forward to posting about them in the next SnapShot instalment and discussing the genre a little bit more.