A typical day depends on the nature of the job. A job rarely lasts for a whole day because time is so tight and it is so hard to get access to celebrities. You will have very restricted amount of time with them.

Sometimes I have to spend a bit of time on preparation. If I am using lights to do a shoot in a hotel, I need to turn up a couple of hours beforehand, to get my equipment set up. I need to be ready to shoot when my subject arrives, so I'm not wasting any of their time.

A lot of shoots are in the evenings, particularly when they involve public relations events. For example, when Liz Hurley was over, you had to turn up at the party she was attending to get the shots.

A lot of the time, I would be doing commercial photography during the day and then, in the evening, I'd cover parties and the like.

The majority of invitations I get are through magazines. I do get some for myself - some of the PR companies have me on their invitation list and I also have membership of the various clubs.

The most recent thing I did for WHO magazine was a fashion shoot. Before that there was a ball in the British Ambassador's residence - there are a lot of balls and that kind of thing. Then I was at Paul Brady in Vicar Street; there were a few celebrity guests down there, so I was taking photographs of them.

Usually when I arrive at an event, I make contact with whoever is my contact, that is the person who invited me. It could be the organisers - or the magazine could have got in touch. They give you a list of who's going to be there, but a lot of time you're photographing the same old heads from around Dublin.

When I arrive, they give me an idea who is there, if there are any likely targets and then I just go in and have a chat to people. You have to go in and take your time and see what situations develop. Two people could be at opposite sides of the room, but if you keep an eye on them they could eventually start talking to each other. The shots you want to get is the celebrities together.

My day could start at five in the evening. Generally if I'm working a lot of evenings I try to get a lie-in in the morning, so I'm not going to be wrecked by 11 p.m. when I'm still working. A lie-in would be until about 9 a.m.

I spend a lot of time during the day selecting shots from my work the previous night and getting them processed, captioned and sent off to magazines.

I don't develop them myself, but it's still very time consuming because a lot of the time they may not be exactly right and I have to get them redone.

In conversation with Elaine Larkin