Cork man Shane Casey has built up a massive archive of striking photographs, most of which depict farm machinery at work in the fields of his native county and the wider Munster region.
The pictures are hosted on Casey’s online Flickr account.
The archive of pictures is accessible for public viewing; no registration or password is needed to browse through the growing bank of images. Thanks to careful captioning (and titles), the archive is searchable – using keywords based on, for example, a machine’s brand or type.
For anyone with a keen interest in machinery, it provides an opportunity to see an incredibly wide and diverse range of tractors and machinery working in Irish fields – against the backdrop of uniquely-Irish landscapes.
There are thousands of high-quality pictures of modern machines tackling tillage tasks and grappling with grassland activities. There are also vast swaths of shots of ‘classic’ tractors, combines and even loading shovels, busy toiling away at all manner of jobs.
If you have a spare moment, it’s certainly worth checking out.
Keen interest in machinery
So what prompted Shane to start amassing this pictorial resource?
“I’m not from a farming background,” he explained, “but my uncles are farmers. Growing up in Rathcormac, you would see machinery all around you. I developed a keen interest in tractors and agricultural equipment from a young age.
I’ve been taking pictures since the early 1990s. I got my first digital camera in 2006; after that I started uploading to Flickr.
“My first camera was a basic Acer; nowadays I use a Nikon D7100. I use either an 18-105mm or a 55-300mm lens, depending on the shot I’m trying to get. The latter is really useful, as you can shoot from quite a distance; you don’t end up getting in a machinery operator’s way.”
“I have a personal preference for tillage equipment, though there’s a mixture of everything on my Flickr site. I have uploaded over 11,000 photographs now; most depict machinery at work in the fields.
“Most of the machinery shots are from Cork and the wider Munster region. There’s also a good selection of photographs – on various themes – from all over the country.
He says that he has backed up his treasure-trove of shots onto hard-drives. He explained: “It’s easy to store these now, as you can get portable hard-drives with terabytes of capacity. It was much harder years ago, when all I had were CD-ROMs.”
Though clearly passionate about photography and machinery in equal measure, Casey’s hobby plays second fiddle to a full-time job. By day, he works for West Cork Distillers. If and when time allows at weekends, or on the occasional long summer’s evening, he adds to his growing picture archive.
Below is a sample, selected more or less at random, of the 11,000 shots on Casey’s Flickr site. To see more, why not click here.
Casey also has a Youtube channel; it’s a work-in-progress but content is starting to mount up. It can be accessed by clicking here. Here’s a sample video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec8E2UIPmV8
