A Couple of Days in Dublin, Some Divorced Dad Rock and some Film Photography

1 day ago
9 min read

Showing my Personal Photography Work, including some Film Photography

For the past few years, I have been struggling with where to post my personal photographs. I have signed up to Squarespace more times than I can remember, convinced that this time I am definitely going to build a separate website for all of it, but it always ends up falling flat. I get excited about the idea, spend far too long thinking about layouts, fonts and how it should all be organised, and then eventually lose interest before I have actually posted anything worthwhile.

Social media does not exactly help either. It has slowly turned into a cesspit of AI-generated photographs, recycled advice and endless posts titled “10 Tips on How to Do This” or “5 Reasons Why I Do That”. I am sick to the teeth of it, although I am fully aware that I am also guilty of adding to the problem with the same Canva templates and carefully planned content that everybody else is using.

I do not want to come up with catchy hooks, spend hours recording and editing Reels and then wait to see whether more than three people are eventually shown the one photograph I actually wanted to share. I do not want every thought to become a content strategy or every photograph to need a lesson attached to it before it is allowed online.

It is absolutely exhausting.

So, rather than building another website that I will probably abandon after a fortnight, I have decided to start sharing more of that work here. The trips, the ordinary days, the cameras I am messing around with and the photographs I take when nobody is paying me to take them. This feels like a much better place to begin.

My Favourite Photos

Since writing this blog post, I have received the photos back from the lab and I want to keep you engaged so going to show them here. If you want to see all the photos (even the ones that are massive failures) both the full sets and my thoughts about both film stocks are below.

Dublin, 14 to 16 July 2026

Thanks to the shady tactics of Ticketmaster, it somehow worked out cheaper for me to travel to Dublin to watch Breaking Benjamin than it did to catch them here in the UK. Absolutely mental, I know, but in the end it worked out perfectly.

It gave me the chance to meet up with Louis, who I had not spent any proper time with since early 2025 at The Photography Show in London. Louis and I travelled over separately, me from Blaenau and him from Cork, and stayed in Dublin for a couple of days. That gave us more than enough time to wander around the city, eat far too much and generally make the most of being there before heading to the gig.

This was only the second time I had ever been to Dublin, and the last time was mainly spent on the piss, so it was refreshing to go back and see the city with sober eyes. It turns out there is quite a lot more to Dublin than stumbling between pubs and trying to piece the weekend back together afterwards.

I had never seen Breaking Benjamin live either. I have listened to them for years and have probably listened to them religiously for the past 15. They are one of those bands I have wanted to see for so fucking long, so finally getting to stand in a room and hear those songs live was unreal. Getting to experience it with Louis made it even better.

As good as the gig was, though, what really made the trip was everything around it. We ate ourselves into oblivion over the course of the weekend, so apologies to Harry when he eventually sees the food log. We tried foods I never thought I would willingly put in my mouth, including chicken feet, which is not a sentence I ever expected to type. We did the Jameson Distillery tour, found some banging coffee and spent a couple of days wandering around the city with no real rush to be anywhere.

The gig was fucking phenomenal, but the whole trip felt like much more than travelling over to watch a band. It was a few days away with my closest friend of 20 years, experiencing a city together and doing things we probably would not have bothered with if we had simply flown in for the evening and gone straight home again.

Going Analog

I knew I wanted to take some photographs while we were in Dublin, but I did not want to lug my bigger cameras around with me. I took my old Canon PowerShot A720 IS, but even having that with me felt a little… meh. There was nothing wrong with it, but it still felt too close to the usual digital process of taking a photograph, checking it, taking another and then deciding whether the first one was good enough.

While I was travelling over, Louis mentioned that he was going to buy a disposable camera. BINGO. That was exactly what I wanted too. I'm gonna do some Film Photography.

It has probably been about 20 years since I last bought one and, fuck me, they have gone up in price. Even so, I knew that not having a digital camera would be exactly what I needed. I would still come home with photographs from the weekend, but I would not spend the whole trip constantly checking them or reshooting everything until it looked perfect.

As I am writing this a week later, I still have not seen the photographs, but I am ridiculously excited to get them back. I have no idea whether they are sharp, properly exposed or even remotely well composed. Some of them could be complete rubbish, but they will be what they are.

That is exactly what made taking photographs on the trip enjoyable. I was not trying to build a perfect collection of travel photographs or come home with a carefully planned visual story of Dublin. I just photographed the weekend as it happened.

Remembering What It’s Like to Shoot Personal Photos

Photography has been part of my work for years, but I have not always been particularly good at taking photographs for myself. Most of the time, when I pick up a camera, it is because I am photographing a wedding or doing something for a client. There is a purpose behind it. Somebody is relying on me, and the photographs matter.

That is obviously a good thing, but it is very different from taking a photograph simply because I want to remember something. Using the disposable camera reminded me of that. There was no pressure for the photographs to be useful at all. Yes, they will be shown on here, but literally just as memories of a weekend away with an old friend, shared in my little corner of t’internet. And that was enough.

I did not need to worry about whether the light was perfect, whether everything was technically correct or whether the photograph would impress anybody. I just pointed the camera at something I wanted to remember and pressed the shutter. It turns out photography can actually be quite enjoyable when you stop examining every photograph as though it is about to be presented as evidence in court.

Buying a Kodak Snapic A1

By the end of the first day, I had already started looking for a reusable film camera with the same simplicity. We bought the disposable cameras at Conn’s Cameras in Dublin and, naturally, when you pop into a camera shop, you have a look around. It would almost be rude not to. While we were looking, we spotted the Kodak Snapic A1.

It is a very basic film camera, which is exactly what I wanted. Apart from the shutter button and turning the flash on or off, there are literally no other controls. It has a fixed shutter speed of 1/100 and a fixed aperture of f/9.5. Where you are shooting and how bright your photographs will be are almost entirely dependent on the film speed you use. If you have the wrong film loaded, tough titties.

At first, I knew I wanted one, but I did not quite want to fork out for it straight away. By the time I reached the end of the roll in the disposable camera, though, I knew it had to come home with me. I bought it because I wanted a camera that removed as many decisions as possible. I already own cameras that can do almost everything, but sometimes having endless control means spending more time thinking about settings than paying attention to what is happening in front of me.

With the Snapic, there is nothing to adjust and nowhere to hide. You frame the photograph, decide whether the flash needs to be on and press the button. That is about the full extent of the creative control available. Using it feels completely different from using my digital cameras because there is no screen to check afterwards, no zooming in to inspect whether everything is perfectly sharp and no taking another six photographs just to be safe.

Once the shutter has been pressed, the photograph is taken. Whether it is good, bad, blurry, underexposed or accidentally contains half of somebody’s thumb is a problem for another day. There is something strangely freeing about that, especially when you are used to cameras that let you endlessly correct, refine and second-guess everything.

The camera is light, uncomplicated and easy to carry around. It can sit in my pocket or bag until something catches my attention, without making me feel like I have deliberately gone out to produce something important. The disposable camera reminded me that I do not always need the best camera I own. Sometimes, I just need one that I will actually carry with me, and one that will slow me the fuck down.

I have no idea where this will lead yet. I am thinking I will use it for trips away, but maybe I will also photograph ordinary days at home, walks, family life or things I would normally ignore. That uncertainty is probably what I am enjoying most.

Sharing More of This Work

At one point, I was considering starting a completely separate website for this kind of work. I have been inspired by Austin Kleon and the way he shares his work, ideas and creative process rather than only showing polished final results. A separate website sounded exciting, but I was advised by a few people to keep everything together, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made.

Starting another website would probably have meant designing it, endlessly adjusting it, deciding how everything should be organised and spending far too long choosing fonts before I had actually posted anything. Knowing me, it would have been a very efficient way of avoiding the actual point. Keeping everything here means I can simply start sharing it.

Some of what I post might be finished work, but some of it might be photographs from trips, experiments with different cameras, thoughts about photography or things I am still trying to work out. It does not all need to lead somewhere or fit neatly into a portfolio. I think there is value in showing more than just the photographs I am paid to take. Wedding photography is a large part of my work, but it is not the only reason I care about photography.

Sharing personal work gives me somewhere to document what I am exploring, what is inspiring me and how my relationship with photography changes over time. It also gives me a reason to keep picking up a camera when there is no client waiting for the final gallery and no expectation that the photographs need to achieve anything.

People usually arrive here because they are looking for a wedding photographer, but the photographs are only one part of choosing who to work with. Couples are also choosing somebody they will spend a large part of their wedding day with. Somebody who will be around their family and friends, join them during quieter moments and see a lot of what happens behind the scenes.

Sharing more personal work will hopefully give people a slightly better idea of who I am outside of weddings as well. More importantly, it gives me somewhere to share photographs without turning every single one into a Reel, a list of tips or another Canva template desperately fighting for attention.

That alone feels like reason enough to keep doing it.

Getting the Film Back

Since writing all of this, I have finally had the film back.

I absolutely love the photographs from the Kodak Funsaver camera. They are exactly what I hoped they would be. A little rough around the edges, imperfect in (many) places, but they actually feel like the trip. Even if some are WILDLY lacking in, well, anything... Looking through them took me straight back to wandering around Dublin with Louis, eating far too much food and generally just pointing the camera at whatever happened to be in front of us.

Here is the collection from the Funsaver below.

The Harman Phoenix II I put through the Snapic was a slightly different story. I really like the camera itself and I am still glad I bought it, but I do not think that particular film stock is for me. Some of the colours and exposures just did not quite land how I hoped they would, and I found myself much more drawn to the look of the disposable camera.

That is half the fun of messing around with film though, I suppose and have since thrown a roll of Kodak Gold 200 through it. I am still figuring out what I like, what works with the Snapic and what kind of photographs I actually want to get from it. The camera is definitely sticking around. The Phoenix II probably isn't.