Free guide
Strong photographs start on your doorstep.
How to Create Unique Landscape Photos on Your Doorstep is a free guide to finding, learning and working the locations within reach of home.
For years I drove hours to famous locations and came home with postcards. The images that changed my work were made within thirty minutes of my house, in woods most photographers drive straight past.
This guide is the case for staying close: three lessons on local knowledge, finding overlooked places near home, and the kind of practice that only nearby locations make possible.
It comes from more than fifteen years of working the same quiet corner of Hertfordshire.
What this guide is
Three lessons and an exercise.
The guide works through the three things that keep photographers from their local area: undervaluing local knowledge, believing there is nothing worth photographing nearby, and not practising often enough for either to build.
It ends with a walking-route exercise to start the habit, and a bonus lesson on why I work from compositional concepts rather than rules.
Lesson one
Why local knowledge wins.
The reason why knowing a place beats travelling to one: timing, weather and the viewpoints no guidebook carries, and why all three build faster close to home.
Lesson two
Finding places near home.
How I research new ground: ancient woodland, OS maps, conservation groups and local history, and what to look for on a first visit.
Lesson three
Practice that compounds.
The walking-route exercise, the discipline of three good photographs a visit, and what a decade of large format film taught me about pressing the shutter less.
There are great photography locations near your home. I can guarantee it.
Who is it for
For anyone whose area feels empty.
Photographers convinced there is nothing worth photographing near home, and photographers tired of long drives for short light.
If you have ever talked yourself out of going because the drive was not worth the gamble, this guide was written from exactly that place.
WHAT THIS GUIDE IS NOT
Not a list of locations.
There are no postcodes in here and no map pins. The guide teaches you to find your own places, because the finding is where the local knowledge comes from, and a spot handed to you is a spot everyone else has too.
Everyone else is going to those places.
WHAT THIS GUIDE IS NOT
Not a list of locations.
There are no postcodes in here and no map pins. The guide teaches you to find your own places, because the finding is where the local knowledge comes from, and a spot handed to you is a spot everyone else has too.
Everyone else is going to those places.
Get the guide
Unique photos on your doorstep.
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