Inspired #01

Waiting for the light - working with landscape and detail.

Hello and welcome to Inspired, a new weekly email for my paid subscribers. In this series I want to explore topics which I hope might spark some inspiration for your own photography. I will talk about my thought process for creating images, both in the field and in post processing. The posts will be linked in some way to the monthly challenges, hopefully giving you all lots of food for thought.

In this first post I want to talk about keeping an open mind when things don’t go to plan. I look at light on the landscape as well as exploring small scenes and I also discuss some of my post processing techniques.

These topics were inspired by my first photo shoot of 2025.

Light on the water - eventually! A 5 second exposure at F16, ISO 64. Taken using a 6 stop ND filter and a 0.6 hard grad.

The conditions on the second day of January were forecast to be frosty with plenty of high level cloud which I thought would make for an interesting sunrise. With this in mind I headed out to an area of coast where there are also some freshwater ponds just beyond the sea wall. I was hoping that the frost on the foliage would give me some atmospheric wintery images with the potential for some sunrise colours.

However on arrival it was obvious that the frost hadn’t really materialised in the way I had envisaged. It was freezing cold, but it was windy, conditions that are not conducive to haw frost. Immediately I could see that the image I had in my mind wasn’t going to be possible. The conditions just weren’t there, and to cap it all a bank of cloud was swirling around out to sea covering the horizon obscuring all possibility of any sunrise colour.

I was very tempted to give up and go home. But instead I had a wander around to see what else I could find.