On the morning of 5 November 2022 I was out at Burnham Beeches with a client, on one of my workshops, working an area of wood pasture. The window of light at dawn did not last long. Between us we managed to work on one image before it closed, and then it was gone, and nothing else would come.
We were in front of an ancient tree, its trunk covered in moss, and I could not make anything of it. Not that tree, and not the several others I turned to after it. What I had been reaching for from those trees was the relationships between them, how they interact with each other, and the light was very flat, and I could not make it work. The frames stayed stubborn. So we stopped trying to force the whole scene into shape and started looking closer instead, for the details rather than the view.
That is when I saw the fungi.
It was growing out of the base of the very trunk I had just been failing to photograph, at the foot of the same tree. An odd-looking thing, its caps spiky and the colour of burnt orange and rust, and it stood clear of everything around it, against all the greens of the wood.
I saw it first. I showed it to my client, and we worked it together, framing something that pleased him. He chose to go slightly wider than the image I had envisaged, bringing more of the trunk into play. I went in tighter, a shallow depth of field that drew the attention onto the dew on the grasses beside it.
It was a lovely find. I was satisfied, and I was quietly excited to make the image.
But I try not to get carried away while I am still working. The job in front of me is to make the image, not to delight in the find and then be distracted and miss the opportunity it has only just opened.
Dwelling on a moment that has already passed is another habit I try to keep in check. So the pleasure was real, and I held it on a short rein, and I stayed with the work.
What it did, mostly, was remind me to be more mindful, and to notice the things that are less obvious. Photographing a wood is about more than the relationships between its trees and how they interact, or the portrait of a single veteran or ancient one among them. It is worth remembering to look at both ends of the scale, because every wide scene is rich in tiny, intimate details. It is very easy to fall into a kind of tunnel vision, where you only see images that are just like the last one you made, or pictures similar to something you made in the past, or saw someone else share, and judged to be a success. For every obvious image, there are many interesting but less obvious frames.
That find opened up inspiration for other, tighter frames later in the shoot. The morning did not run in a straight line toward the small, though. There was some beautiful light in one of the areas we had planned to explore, so while it lasted we found some wider, more obvious frames, and then we focused back in on the smaller, more intimate scenes, which worked better that day, as I could find depth in them by other means. That is usually how it goes for me. I like to put my bag down in one area and work around it for an hour, sometimes longer. You tend to start with the obvious frames, and then progress onto the less obvious ones.
Later that same morning I was working a slice of the wood in the other direction, a sapling in full colour in the foreground.
Then I turned from it, looked a little closer, and found some mossy roots clinging to the side of a muddy bank.
I had not walked by it earlier and dismissed it; I simply found it when I turned. That was the moment I saw the shapes the roots made and the soft light lying on the autumn leaves behind them. It was a much tighter frame than most of what I had been photographing up to that point. Without the fungi earlier, I am fairly sure I would have framed that bank much wider, taken the plain record of it and moved on.
I have made a great many pictures since that morning, and when I look at it again now, what it holds is simple enough to say and hard to keep doing. It comes down to slowing down. To being present. To spending more time looking with your own eyes, and to leaving the camera off the tripod until the last possible moment. It is about the thought that goes into making an image.
That morning I made a whole range of pictures with my client: the intimate scenes, with the fungi and the roots among them, a couple of portraits of ancient, veteran beech trees, a wider woodland image, and the slice of wood with the sapling. But it is very easy to settle into a routine in which you are only ever making images of the woodland, rather than images of the details in the woods. And a detail is not always a small thing at your feet. It might be something specific, a cluster of fungi at the base of a trunk, or it might be a pattern, a shape, or even a relationship between different parts of the wood.
This is not a new way of looking for me, and it did not begin on that November morning. In the autumn of 2019, at Broxbourne Woods, I made a frame that is not of anything in particular.
It is only the pattern that the bright leaves make against the blue of the trunks in the reflected light before dawn. There is no single subject in it, nothing you could point at and name. Just the arrangement and the colour.
The reminder from Burnham did carry on, though, into the outings that came after it. The following month, at Hoddesdonpark Wood, I made a frame that is about far more than the tree standing in the background of it.
To me it carries the feeling of being watched by something through the leaves that are blurred out in the foreground. Neither of those is the obvious picture of its place.
Some of this is about how well you know a place. When you are getting to know a wood it often feels a bit like survival: you are simply trying to find images at all, so you lean toward the obvious ones. In a familiar place it is far easier to start looking a lot closer and to spend the time finding the less obvious frames. The two are related, I think, and it is why this sits so close to what I have written about exploring new woods, and opening ones I had written off. An obvious image that is well seen and well made gives you the confidence to go looking for something less obvious, either on the same visit or on a later visit to the same part of the wood.
The real skill is being able to go into a wood cold and drop straight onto the less obvious images. I can do that myself, but it takes a lot of presence, vision and patience.
Because the pull toward the obvious does not go away. The obvious image is usually the easy way out. You take it, and in taking it you slide into merely recording the woods, rather than making something that means anything, to you or to anyone else, a gap I came at from another angle in Why the Place Felt Better Than the Picture. I still catch myself reaching for it. It is a continual reminder to myself not to simply opt for the most obvious image, because a good deal of the time it is not the best one.
The fungi did not teach me that, exactly. It reminded me of it, which is the more honest word. I knew it already, and I know it still. On some flat morning to come, with the light gone and nothing arriving from the trees in front of me, I will need reminding to go looking for the less obvious frame again.
If that pull toward the obvious frame is one you recognise in yourself, my free Mindful Photography Prompts might be of use. They are a set of prompts for planning and reflection: a few quiet questions to sit with before a shoot, and a few for after.
