My photography has its origins in the south west of Ireland, in beautiful Kerry

Inspiration is not something you look for, it finds you. The extraordinary landscape and the ever-changing moods of the southwest of Ireland immediately captivated me.

My name is Hajo Pirenz, born in 1967 in the lower Rhine area and now living in Hamburg and in the southwest of Ireland, near the small fishing village of Portmagee.

After studying aerospace engineering in Aachen, I began my professional career in management consultancy. Today, I work as a partner and shareholder in an international consulting firm and am responsible for technological and digital transformation projects in global companies.

As a kind of compensation, I started to intensify my photography in the last couple of years, especially in a time of involuntary restrictions.

My interest is primarily in landscape photography in black and white, supplemented by colour photography where the colour helps to tell the story.

Black and white reduce to the essential. I have chosen the same principle for the technique I work with. So I shoot with a Leica M11 Monochrom, a Leica M11-P, a Leica S3 medium format camera, and a Leica Q2 Monochrom with a tripod and Leica lenses - probably the best on the market.

Do you take better pictures with this technology? Probably not! But it encourages and demands focus, concentration and discipline.

And if you like my pictures, then that's exactly what worked.

If you are coming to Ireland, we look forward to seeing you at our beautiful dan's gallery in Kerry, in the small town of Caherciveen where you can see a selection of my pictures and the stunning oil paintings by Ute Roeseler.