Another bright, cold morning with the temperature only 4 degrees at 8.30am. We had a little rain over the weekend, but the ground everywhere is extremely dry and cracking. What happened to April showers? Over the past week, the trees have burst into leaf: even oak trees starting to grow foliage which seems very early. I drove to Aston Rowant NNR, parking at Aston Woods. The mature beech trees’ leafless canopies spread like a vaulted cathedral roof from their tall, grey trunk columns, apart from a
Read more →I your eyes are open, the English springtime can be quite spectacular, especially when the sun shines as it is this year. Our weather is in complete contrast to last year when April was cold and wet and somehow joyless: in fact it resulted in greatly reduced butterflies through the summer, especially in the south and east. After a week of solid sunshine you can almost year the trees bursting into leaf and everywhere you look, wildflowers are blooming. I live just to the west of
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[singlepic id=769 w=400 h=300 ] I am currently working on three books – North Downs Landscapes is complete and we’re doing final proof reading so it can go to the printers for publication in March – very exciting! I’m well on the way with Norfolk images but want to get there to get some good wintry shots, preferably with snow. There are also seals on Blakeney Point that would be good to capture in a photo, but it’s a good 4 hour journey…. And I’ve made
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Doing landscape photography in Norfolk is a subtler business than in, for instance, Yorkshire or the North Downs (all books to be published by Oxbow Books) as most of the county is rather flat and agricultural. The south-wast of the county is mostly ‘marshland’, which is a continuation of the Cambridgeshire fens and well drained for agriculture, or flat forest and heath around Thetford. The south-east is very flat ‘Broads’ country, with a lot of lakes and waterways, many of which have been dug out to
Read more →[singlepic id=688 w=400 h=300 float=middle] It’s amazing how popular the North Norfolk Coast is: I had only been there once, in the middle of winter, many years ago, but everyone I meet seems to have some connection with it. This is definitely the most scenic part of Norfolk, and a lot easier to photograph than the fens and Brecks of the the south-eastern part of the county, especially when the weather is good. I took Lindsey and the dogs this time, and we spent four nights
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South-west Norfolk is flat! The borders with Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire are fens, that is, reclaimed marshland that is mostly below sea level and drained by pumps feeding into rivers and channels. The land is very fertile and easy to till, so it’s great for agriculture, and the fields are vast, like the sky. Everything is done in straight lines, so the rivers mostly run like an arrow between dikes, and the roads don’t bend, they run straight then there is a corner and you are on
Read more →[singlepic id=671 w=400 h=300 float=middle] I am making really good progress on the text for North Downs Landscapes (to be published by Oxbow Books early next 2015) and the theme is developing nicely. I was completing the East Kent section when I found that there were some more images of Kent villages needed. This is because I meant to go back, having spent a day dashing around and exploring, () but didn’t as I wasn’t sure what was needed: until now. So yesterday I decided to
Read more →The sky was very blue and the air clear on Wednesday morning, which was perfect conditions for taking photographs of Norfolk’s wide open skies and flat fens. My packing didn’t take long, and it’s worth noting here that I do not carry your standard hiker’s kit. I was using my medium-sized rucksack that I used to walk from Lands End to John O’Groats, which is still serviceable, though it has a lot of modifications as I was carrying a guitar and camping gear at the time.
Read more →My publisher, Oxbow Books, has signed me up to produce another book for them for publication in 2016. They have asked me to start work on Norfolk, or possibly East Anglia, on the grounds that it’s a lovely part of the World, they have a lot of customers there, and loads of people decamp to Norfolk for their holidays. As I don’t know the area at all well, it will be a real adventure, discovering the beauty and secrets of the east of England, and seeking
Read more →Having signed a publishing contract with Oxbow Books, I now have the pleasant task of actually producing the book content before the autumn deadline. I have started assembling images into a book of 90-odd pages, which I do using the BonusPrint software for producing photo books. This is a very exciting stage, as you see things start to come together into another beautiful publication, and it is also interesting finding out which images I end up selecting. The publisher wants more text than in Chiltern Landscapes
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