Ian Mcilroy Photography

05/09/2026

***SORRY - CAMERA IS NOW SOLD!!!***

Hi folks! I just wanted to come on and post this opportunity for my followers to have first crack at purchasing my second FUJIFILM X-T3 Camera Body. My new camera has finally arrived, and so it's time to find a new home for this beauty!

I'll not bore you too much with technical specs - you have Google for that - but it has a 26MP APSC sensor and all of that lovely Fujifilm goodness built in as standard! A selection of Fuji film simulations, like Classic Chrome, Velvia, Provia, Acros etc etc give you endless opportunity to create your own style of photo to treasure forever!

The camera is in full working order, and I last used it six days ago to photograph the Sunday service at our church. Tap this link to see some of the photos!
https://www.facebook.com/share/18yENY9B9r/?mibextid=wwXIfr

The sale includes the following:

Fujifilm X-T3 body only in black
Original kit box
THREE batteries (One is Duracell, but works just fine!)
Battery Charger
USB c cable
Front body cap
Fujifilm strap
Owner's Manual
Fujifilm EF-X8 flash unit
Arca-Swiss compatible L-bracket (with allen key)

NO lenses or SD cards are included in the sale.

The rear LCD screen has a glass protector attached, and I will give the camera a clean, and do a factory reset before packing it up.

This camera has served me well in the two years or so that I've owned it, and you can easily scroll back over two years of my page to see what it's capable of!

The shutter count as of the time of posting is only 3153 actuations, which is a tiny dent in the expected 200,000 lifespan!

Asking price for all of this is £550, so please get in touch if you're genuinely interested! Thank you!

26/08/2026

Today, with an hour or so to kill, I decided to go out for a wander with the camera, except this time I took the "wee camera" and a couple of old manual focus lenses.

I recently bought a Fujifilm X-M1 camera, which by modern digital camera standards, is somewhat of an antique! It was launched way back in 2013, and has the original 16MP X-Trans sensor - said to be the best sensor for photos which have that old filmic look to them.

I paired the camera to an old Tokina 28mm f2.8 prime lens, via an adaptor, as well as my Centon 28-70mm manual zoom lens.

Gleno Waterfall was the chosen location for today's expedition, and thankfully I had the place to myself, for a change!

A very relaxed hour or so later, I came away with a selection of images, some of which are shown in this post. It's so nice just to be able to slow right down, and take the time to frame up each image, manually focus the camera, and take the photo just how you want it! With this little old camera, and even older lenses, it's as close to shooting with film as you can get without actually shooting on film!

And I hope you like the results! Perfect imperfection in many ways, and every image here is straight from the camera. Not one bit of editing - apart from adding my name - has been done to any of them.

Maybe they won't find themselves on the walls of an art gallery anytime soon, but I enjoyed every minute of taking them!

20/08/2026

The early hours of this morning (around 01:00am) and my 2026-27 aurora season got off to a less than impressive start - but a start nevertheless!

Some beeping and tingling on the aurora apps was going on, along with some mild forecasts on social media. And with a night off work, well why not?

Problem was, clouds. Lots of them. But as it happened, two weather apps on my phone were in agreement that a clear patch of sky was heading my way, roughly in the vicinity of midnight/01:00am.

Nonsense! I stood there for an hour and this was the biggest cloud gap I got! Disappointing, but such is the fickle nature of aurora hunting. At least it was there, that vague diffused purpley glow beyond the clouds. It would just have been nice to see a bit more of it.

But as I said, that's my first of this season. Teasing and playing hard to get, but I'll be on the lookout for more chances to catch it as winter draws in again!

19/08/2026

Just sitting playing around with Photoshop, and i thought I'd have a little look through the hard drive to find a photo I've never posted before, and see what I could come up with.

And I found this. Carnlough Harbour in the morning sunshine, looking just about as quaint and colourful as I've ever seen it.

Believe it or not, this was actually taken in October 2021, and I just about remember being there to take the photo! It was one of those lovely early autumn mornings, with that distinctive chill in the air, despite the sunshine. The hills beyond the village still very green, hanging on to what they could before winter took its grip on the landscape once again.

Picture Postcard, or picture failure? I'll let you decide!

17/08/2026

14/08/2026

** SORRY, NOW SOLD!!**

fans

13/08/2026

To be honest, I thought that tonight's sunset was going to be prettier than it actually was.

And that was the problem.

Sometimes, when you've been doing landscape photography for a while, you start to look at the weather conditions on a given day, and build up these pre-conceived ideas of what a particular scene might look like, at sunset for example.

And that's what I did tonight. Sunset was around 9pm, and I was watching the sky from just after seven. Thinking that, with today's warm weather, and some light cirrus clouds in the general direction of where the sun was heading, the sky would just light up in glorious orange.

So off I headed to the Shillanavogy Road, with its lovely view westwards towards Slemish mountain. Bringing my camera, and pre-conceived photo with me. But the sky didn't light up orange at all. This bank of cloud was coming in from the west and ruining everything! Preconceptions went straight in the bin.

Then, for about a minute, the sun found this little gap in the cloud, and a little section of sky to the left of the mountain lit up in glorious colour.

And I got my sunset after all.

13/08/2026

Partial Solar Eclipse, 12 August 2026.

Sponsored by Duracell… 🤔

13/08/2026

Apparently, there was a partial solar eclipse visible over the UK last night. You might not have realised this, as there wasn't very much news or social media coverage of the event.

So, as always, I am more than happy to take one for the team, and bring you a photo of this phenomenon, even though I was stuck at work, and the clouds were doing their best to spoil the view.

Now I know that you probably won't have seen many images like this on social media today, since so few of us were aware of the event taking pace in the skies above our heads. So this is probably the best I could manage, given my circumstances at the time. With not having a proper solar filter for my camera lens, the cloud cover actually helped to soften the light, and produce a beautiful textured image such as this, with that warm glow in the background. Again, I bet nobody else managed to capture such an interesting image!

So anyway, I hope you once again appreciate me going the extra mile to produce such a unique and rarely seen photograph, while everyone else was carrying on with their day and not even noticing how eerily dim it got just after 7pm, when the eclipse was at its greatest. Did anyone else even know this was a thing?

Enjoy the photo, and try not to take my quirky sense of humour too seriously...😊

12/08/2026

Well, ok then! I might as well jump on the Eclipse bandwagon!

This is a photo I managed to take of the partial solar eclipse, which was visible from the UK on the morning of Friday 20th March, 2015.

Back then, I was still using Canon cameras, and I can tell from the photo metadata, that this was shot on a Canon 7D, with a 28-135mm lens. Actual camera settings were 1/1250th second, ISO 400, at an aperture of f22.

I was standing on the Promenade at Larne seafront, and the photo was taken at 09:24am.

As you can see from the photo, the sun was partially obscured by a thin veil of cloud, but this was actually helpful in filtering out some of the glare, giving me this reasonably sharp image of the eclipse in progress.

It's all a distant memory for me now, but I'm pretty sure that this is about as close to totality as we got here in N Ireland.

Sadly, after looking through my computer hard drives, this is the only photo of that day I can come up with. But at least I have something!

If you're out this evening hoping to spot the eclipse taking place, please remember to be sensible and take precautions to protect your eyesight and your camera! Enjoy the experience!