I had the privilege last year to be asked by WWT Consulting on behalf of the National Parks and Wildlife Service to create images of Ballycroy National Park for the new visitors centre. The brief was complex. The displays required several huge panoramic images up to 7 metres long and almost 2 metres high and the scale of reproduction requied each image to be shot from up to 14 separate images which were then stitched together in Photoshop CS4 to create files of several hundred MBs.



Each shot had to be composed carefully to allow for the overlay of very position-specific text, graphics and interactive features.

It was one of the most enjoyable and challenging assignments I've worked on, requiring days of exploration in one of Ireland's wildest landscapes in order to find locations to suit the brief. 

 
I was in PC World the other day looking at external hard drives when a bank of laptop screens flashed up this image of mine. It's of herb robert and was taken in Cladagh Gorge National Nature Reserve in County Fermanagh. In fact it was the first image I ever took in Fermanagh.

It was licenced by Microsoft from my collection at Getty Images. Strange for a relatively simple image of an unassuming and very common little wild flower to be chosen for such a high profile use, but that's one of the great aspects of stock photography - you never quite know how images will be used over the years, and I am constantly surprised by whcih images sell and which don't.

With the advent of the vastly superior Windows 7 operating system in the last couple of months the days of Vista are numbered and with it the days of this image appearing on computer screensavers and wallpaper around the world.