Paudies Photoblog

New Irish Online Motoring Show.
Episode two guest presented by yours truly.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Prepping for a session.

Had a GoPro attached to the side of my housing.

Only got one session out of it.

GoPro’s don’t float.

A Day In The Life from Paudie Scanlon on Vimeo.

Live music is awesome.

Well most of the time it is, it certainly helps if the band are good.

This band were.

I’d seen the gig advertised and thought iot might be a good one to go to. Two days before the sdhow a friend called and said a few mates were going to head along.

As much as I love going to gigs, it takes a lot of effort to get it together to drive into town after dinner on my own and stand for an hour or so not having anyone to talk to, although the camera does help with that. People automatically let you through to the front (most of the time) and you can concentrate on your shots and not even realise you have nobody to talk to.

Anyway a few mates were heading so I had no reason not to go. Oh except the start time.

Midnight?

Really.

On a Thursday?

Obviously I went. But it wasn’t easy.

The thing I normally do after dinner and watching some TV is go to bed, not get my gear together and head into town.

Man was it worth it though. The band were frackin awesome. Pretty much exactly the music I needed tohear that night.

And they got me stoked.  I love that about live music. It always pushes me to do something new and be more creative. I had loads of ideas buzzing around in my head after the gig.

Two of which actually came to fruitition. One is a something that will hopefully appear on the blog in the next few weeks, the other is the shot below that I went hunting for after the gig. It’s definitely a shot I wat to try again though.

Was having a chat with a guy last weekend and we got talking to about the level of local surfing, how good it was to have all these guys around pushing themselves on these new slabs, as it would have a great knock on effect for all the younger guys. He basically just said that none of it counted as they weren’t Irish. I couldn’t believe it, he was just making one sweeping statement that dismissed a huge portion of the waves ridden in the area based on the completely random chance of where a person was born.

When I started to challenge him on it he went nuts. Started shouting about them “coming over taking our waves”, “fuck them, they weren’t born here they can fuck off”.

I just don’t get people like that, it’s straight up racism. To be honest I just felt sorry for the guy, the poor stupid fucker. Why does the place you were born have anything to do with anything? How is it relevant?

Like everyone else I get pissed off with travelling surfers who just show up, hog the waves and then leave again. But that argument has been made plenty of times before. Respect is what it’s all about.

But this guy wouldn’t even acknowledge a “foreign” surfer who has been living here for years and contributing to the local community/economy. Apparently it doesn’t count because he has a different accent. Fuck thinking about it now gets me fucking annoyed again. The guy I was talking to actually wanted us to not use the foreigners business and wanted me to “not take photos of any of them either”. Moron.

I do love Ireland, I love living here. It’s an amazingly beautiful place with great uncrowded surf, but the fact that I’m Irish means pretty much nothing to me. I’d be happy saying I was from any country. I don’t see how it matters at all.

I do hate the fact that it seems to be a little bit ingrained in all of us though, probably because of our surroundings growing up. I’ve definitely said “fucking English” before and it annoys me that I have this completely unjustified feeling in me. It’s some stupid left over feeling in our country that has nothing to do with the current generation of people who just happened to be born on the bit of land on the other side of the Irish Sea.

Anyway here’s a number of shots of surfers from all over the place.

Tom Doidge-Harrison (Not from Ireland)

Dan Skajarowski (Not from Ireland)

Tom Wimmer (Not from Ireland)

Glen Hall (Not from Ireland, but does he count because he has a passport?)

Liam Joyce (Not born here)

Silas (Not From here)

Tom Lowe (Get out of it)