…is the one you have with you. It’s an old saying but I find it’s very true.

I bought a Canon HDSLR with the idea of using it for video and photography but I’ve ended up concentrating on video because of the beautiful results. This means my go-to picture camera is the one I have with me, my iPhone 3gs.

Some of my favourite pictures recently have been the ones I’ve taken with my phone, like the ones below. The combination of a reasonable quality camera, that’s always in your pocket, with an easy and effective editing app, can’t be beat.

It’s the same for a lot people, most have a ‘good’ camera that sits in a drawer, battery half charged and only ever brought out for special occasions. But it’s our camera phones that are capturing those spontaneous moments, every day, that we weren’t expecting.

The great thing about Blanaid is that she’s always dressed-to-be-photographed, so every now and then we do some impromptu shoots. The one in pink was for the blog ‘Blaubushka,’ as part in their ‘Blogging for Boobs’ campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer by asking bloggers for pink-themed pictures. It was cold, dark and wet that day so naturally we decided to go to the muddy field in front of my house. The others pictures were grabbed while making our way through the garden of Blanaid’s new place.

I like to shoot outdoors, it just seems more natural to me. It generally gives the pictures a bigger production value than a studio shoot, much in the same way that a film shot on location will look more ‘money’ than one shot in a studio. It’s the reason I find it hard to watch studio shot dramas ranging from RTE’s The Clinic and Raw to Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds. The plywood walls and studio lights of a set never visually pass as a real bricks and mortar location. But hey, I’m raving a little here…

Blanaid goes into more detail about her clothes in the shoots here and here.

The great Irish model Karen Fitzpatrick and I had been talking about doing a shoot together. Then the country was besieged with snow, so we decided one afternoon to get out there and get some shots done in the snow because, we thought, who knows how long it would last. Little did we know…

Anyway, it was a fun shoot and she was great to work, especially given the conditions we were out in!

My good friend Blanaid Hennessy from blanaid.com asked me for a gritty, dirty shoot for her site, so off to a junk yard we went! She’s an incredibly talented stylist, model, ideas person, cook, friend…the list goes on.