成人快手

It was the stormiest winter in Ireland since 1847 according to a meteorologist I met afterwards, though he tends to spend his time in universities. When Andrew Murray called me from Norway and asked whether I could shoot the impending big weather about to smash into Ireland, I was amazed to hear it was flat calm in Norway. The combination of ten metre swells and 100km/h winds with big spring tides does the damage. The lunar cycle for some reason dictates that the really big spring tides occur at 6am and 6pm, so winter shooting will always be in the dark. This was day 15 of trying to document these monster swells. I’d seen plenty of drama but getting enough light to shoot it was very difficult. On one day I spent all the daylight hours of 9 to 4.30pm on the Burren coast, and in all that time there were literally 45 seconds of sunlight, during which time there were no sets of waves.

What was it that golfer said about the harder I work the luckier I get? Eventually I found a position sufficiently sheltered from the wind, with some grudging light and started to roll on these gargantuan waves smashing into the cliff. From nowhere a guy walked into the shot at the top of the cliff! I was about to cry, but looking at the viewfinder I realised "you know what? this is great, this gives the shot scale and tells the story". That was about 4.30pm in the very last of the light, and in the darkness of the full tide at 6pm I watched alone even bigger, angrier waves dwarf the cliff and smother where the guy had been standing.

In early December 2014, there was another North Atlantic low pressure about to hit Ireland and Scotland. I was pouring over weather charts and talking to locals up and down the coast, but it was hard to know where best to be. I decided to drive to south to Cork, but an hour down the road the storm took a shimmy northwards, so I turned for Donegal, just a six hour drive on our coast roads! On the way I stopped to watch Mullaghmore, a monster wave that’s home to the bravest of surfers on 40 foot days, but not today: it was just out of control. Lots of stops later, I got chatting to one of the RNLI guys in Bundoran, Co. Donegal, he smiled at me and said come back at 6am for the high tide and you’ll see some waves coming over that pier!

The word was good even if the only light was a lamp post on the pier. It was like the Hoover dam breaking when this mutant wave smashed into and over the pier. Even from their safe distance the RNLI guys made a run for it. It just seemed to go on forever, one of those rare moments as a cameraman when you feel truly satisfied, at peace even in the midst of all the chaos.