St John’s Point Lighthouse at Sunset

A Beautiful Sunset, Witnessed Alone

On 7 February 2015, I made the journey from Belfast to St John’s Point Lighthouse near Killough on the County Down coast. It was a little over an hour from home and somewhere I had photographed a couple of times before, although I have returned many more times since.

I was shooting alone that evening. This was before Boris and before I travelled in a campervan—I had simply packed my camera equipment into the car and set off on a day trip.

Every time I have photographed St John’s Point, the lighthouse and surrounding coastline have appeared under completely different light. On this particular evening, everything came together. The sky filled with deep reds, warm oranges and soft purple tones, while the remaining daylight reflected in the rock pools beneath the lighthouse.

It remains the prettiest sunset I have ever witnessed.

The Loneliness Behind the Photograph

Despite the beauty unfolding in front of me, I remember feeling lonely. Sunsets have something inherently romantic about them, and I felt sad that I was there alone, with nobody beside me to share that moment.

Conditions like these are never guaranteed in Northern Ireland. The weather can change quickly, and sunsets with this depth of colour are comparatively rare. That made witnessing it both exciting and deeply emotional.

Although I was alone, I knew I had captured something special.

A Favourite from the Beginning

By then, I had been shooting digitally for around five years. As soon as I saw this photograph, I knew it was my favourite image I had captured to date—even surpassing my award-winning photograph of a heron on the River Bann.

Looking back, I sometimes wish I had already moved from photographing in JPEG to shooting and developing RAW files. A RAW file would have given me greater freedom to refine the colour, light and detail years later.

Yet that limitation is also part of what makes this photograph special to me. It is largely an in-camera image, created with careful exposure and composition rather than extensive editing or pixel manipulation. The finished photograph remains remarkably close to the sunset I stood alone and watched more than eleven years ago.