Woodland photography blog
A weekly essay from a working British woodland photographer, with field notes, editing thoughts and slower observations in between.
Start here
A few pieces that show what this blog is about, from first steps in the woods to the way I think about the work.
Guide
Guide
Essay
BROWSE
I have written off four woods over the years and come back to every one of them. This is what the pattern perhaps says about how quick we are to dismiss a place, and what it takes to let one open: time, patience, and a willingness to build a relationship with it.
I have been watching for autumn since September, and the woods near me are mostly green but starting to turn. This is the yearly mix of anticipation and anxiety that comes with waiting for a peak that never lasts, and the one foggy morning it is all for.
The woods change quickly in autumn. Here is how I photograph them: which conditions to go out in, when a wood peaks, the filters I pack, and why slowing down beats chasing the light.
A hazel in catkin, in the empty weeks of late winter, and the quiet second craft that put me in front of it: knowing the wood, its trees and its calendar, well enough to be there in time.
Woodland photography is landscape photography turned inward. Here is what it is, how it differs from landscape photography, and answers to the questions people ask me most about working in the woods.
The bluebells at Ashridge floored me, and the pictures came home with almost none of it. Here is the thing I had actually got wrong, years before I could see it.
An evening in a wood still new to me, a frame found just after the light had gone, and three versions of a picture that is not finished. On why a missed composition is waiting, not lost.
For fifteen years I have argued against staying in when the weather turns. Then I caught myself doing the opposite, waiting for the perfect conditions on the few mornings I could get out, and calling it patience.
It was late August at Ashridge, one of those afternoons the forecast calls sunny spells with a gentle breeze. A pleasant day. Not, by any of the usual reckoning, a day for photographing woodland. What stopped me was a fern that had turned gold while the ferns around...
Written in July 2026. An infrared camera has been sitting in my car for two weeks. I put it there one morning in early July, for an image I had wanted to make for months, in a local wood that nobody much visits except dog walkers. I picked the camera up without any...
A starting point for woodland photography: how to read a cluttered wood, find one clear subject, and why returning to a single local patch teaches you more than chasing new places.
Take it further
The same few woods, seen as many ways as I have found. Each gallery is a year of returning, not a day of arriving.