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Like many people I started off young taking pictures, being given my first Kodak at the age of eight. My very first picture with it was of Big Ben in London as I got on a steamer to go down the Thames to see the Cutty Sark. My next was a Polaroid Swinger 2 (all the craze once). My brother Martin loaned me a Pentax to go on holiday to Calgary with, and he gave me Zenith camera for my birthday, a heavyweight of thing but it took great pictures.

I well remember the day my brother drove me over to Witney in Oxfordshire to buy my first Canon, the thrill of picking it up. It was an AV1, and I was thrilled with it. It was 1978 and I joined the Oxford Photographic Society, the oldest such club in the World, entering competitions to win the odd roll of film. A couple of years and I traded it in for an AE-1, then got myself a black one so I could shoot colour in one and b/w in the other. A couple more years and I traded them in for a pair of A-1s, touring the World with them, flying round the islands of Hawaii, California, camping in the Canadian Rockies all the time taking lots of pictures, getting through massives amounts of film. I was at race tracks in England like Silverstone, Thruxton and Brands Hatch shooting F-1 and World Sportcar events, panning shots with my 200 2.8 and close ups with a variety of other FD lenses. I wore the bodies out and replaced them with 2 more A-1s before getting an EOS 100. A-1 and EOS 100 saw me through the 90s, when I was busy taking pictures of the lighthouses of Ireland. In the late 90s I branched out and got a medium format camera, the fabulous Mamiya 7 which soon got me noticed due its powerful image rendition. The poor old EOS 100 gave up on me, the second mirror spring broke twice and I knew it was time to move on. I bought myslf an EOS 3 just when people were going digital, but I decided to wait awhile before going that way. I waited until July 2006 and went for a full frame 35m Canon EOS 5D which is more than adequate for what I do.

In the past 15 years I have published a book on lighthouses with all my own pictures 'An Eagle's View of Irish Lighthouses' , I have made a postcard of every lighthouse on the Irish coastline, I am constantly being asked for high quality images of Beara and elsewhere in Ireland, that go into books and publications, and I have also shot most of the signal towers in Ireland. Apart from this, as an artist, I have had several exhibitions of my oil paintings in places like Dungarvan, Dublin, Cork and Killarney.

I do what I do because it interests me, and I am passionate about exploring new ways to illustrate life being it on film, digitally or on a canvas.

John Eagle