To ride the South Dorset Ridgeway is to disappear back into a deep time.
To a time before there were even people and the land was covered with ice.
To a time when humans were hunter gatherers roaming the land, using scattered flint stones to kill and prepare their food.
To a time when people began to settle, when monuments were raised on high ground to honour the dead.
And then to a time when young men dreamed of the sea.
And finally to my time one summer’s day when I cycled from Weymouth along the ridge and into the past.
Maiden Castle
One of five burial mounds at the top of Gould’s Hill out of the village of Upwey. This is the most prominent with a ridge around it, standing in sight of Maiden Castle. One could imagine the torch lit procession from the hillfort carrying the person to their last resting place.
The Valley of Stones
Large and small stones lie scattered across this remote valley left behind from the Ice Age. Most lie where they were left but some have been moved into circles and few were used to sharpen tools by some of the earliest people to live in this area.
The Grey Mare and Her Colts.
Another burial mound, this one a little distance from the Valley of Stones. It has been stripped of its earth cover perhaps to steal whatever precious items it might have contained. A few of the stones that would have marked the entrance to the grave remain.
Bronkham Hill
The view from Blackdown looking south towards the distant glittering sea. Admiral Hardy, the captain of HMS Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar would have know this view. He grew up in a nearby village and the memorial to him stands behind me. It is a prominent landmark visible to mariners at sea, seeking the land.
I rode this route in the hot summer of 2026. If you would like to follow my cycle ride check it out on Komoot.
“Yep. When I first moved here I used to go out with the camera all the time. Photographed it all now, though. There’s nothing left to photograph here.”
This was the conversation I had a few years ago. I was sitting in a pub at a seaside resort in the south east of England. I’d been taking photographs and I was checking through them on the back of my camera. Noticing what I was doing another customer struck up a conversation with me. This was the end of our conversation before he finished his drink and headed home.
I remember thinking at the time how sad that was. In my mind there is always something worth photographing; something different, something deeper. Since then I have made it a bit of a mission to try and encourage people to re-engage with their photography.
Photographing only in black and white shows the world in a different way – a world of light and shade, patterns and textures. It’s also a reminder that the camera sees things differently to us. The colour of light might be different and the camera captures movement in a very different way to our eyes.
Experimenting with how the camera views the world is a great way to re-inspire ourselves to take photographs. One way I have tried lately is to limit the amount of my photograph which is in focus. Typically we can see from the near to far distance almost all in focus. In certain circumstances our cameras see only a tiny part of the subject in focus – everything else drifts off into a blur. Read on to find out how this happens and how you can use it to create magical and mysterious images.
The techy bit
When we compose a photograph we focus on the subject either manually or on auto focus. But how much of the image will be in focus? This is down to something called the depth of field and is controlled by the aperture setting
Depth of field is the amount of the image in focus in front and behind the subject. This could be almost everything from close up to far in the distance or it could be just a tiny part of the image.
The depth of field is affected by the aperture – one of the three settings that controls the exposure of your image (the other two are the shutter speed and the sensor or film’s sensitivity to light). The aperture is the size of the opening in your lens that lets the light through to your sensor or film. It also affects how much of your image will be in focus. A small aperture which lets in less light means more of the photograph in front of and behind the subject will be in focus; a wider open aperture which lets in more light means less of the space in front and behind your subject will be in focus.
In and out of focus
I thought I would play with the shallow depth of field when I went out photographing recently. I thought it would be fun to open up the aperture so that very little of the pictures I took would be in focus. For this purpose I decided to use prime lenses (lenses with a fixed focal length) as these tend to have wider apertures than zoom lenses and the effect can be more dramatic.
A great subject for this technique are close-ups of flowers. That’s what I chose when I went over to Hill Gardens on the northern edge of Hampstead Heath close to Golders Green in North London. They were once the gardens of a stately home and are now open to the public under the management of the City of London who also manage the Heath.
I have photographed the gardens before and this time I wanted to come in close and open the aperture wide just to see how my camera would view them. It was a windy day so sometimes it was hard to compose my images and capture the delicate flowers in focus as they were blown around in the wind. Having the aperture open wide did mean I could use a fast shutter speed though.
As a result I tended to choose subjects that were more static or sheltered. I then began to play with the idea of what needed to be in focus. The flowers or the railings in front of them? The ferns or their shadows?
Trying this technique gave me an opportunity to explore the gardens in a different way, to come in close and look for details. It also made me pay more attention to the background and foreground and how they related to each other and I had to think a little harder about the composition and some of the technical aspects of taking the photographs.
Your turn
So now it’s your turn. When you next have trouble thinking what you might like to photograph why not play with how your camera sees the world? Open the aperture up wide and look at it in a different way.
If you would like more ideas on how to fall back in love with photography check out the ideas on my blog here.
Overcoming photographer’s block
Or why not enrol on my new course all about overcoming photographer’s block? An hour and half of videos full of practical ideas on how to re-inspire yourself. Includes practical exercises to get you out and about with your camera.
Best of all, it’s ***free*** until the end of September 2026.
When I go out cycling it is almost always to take photographs. It is how I capture the experience of the ride and observe the world around me. The ride for me is a way of escaping, disappearing for a few hours or a day, exploring new landscapes or revisiting old familiar places and building up the moments as memories. The photographs I take help me to hold those memories
Usually they are taken with my digital camera and so the memories are immediately available. As soon as I get home I review and edit the photographs, reliving the day. Just after Easter 2026, though, I went for a cycle ride and this time the photographs were all taken on an old film camera. Once I got home I would have to send the film off to developed and printed or scanned. Now there would be a gap between the day of the cycle ride and seeing the memories.
My choice of camera was an Olympus Trip 35 with a dodgy frame counter
I tend to go through phases of using one of the film cameras. Sometimes I am very enthusiastic and take a few photographs but then I will put it aside long before the film is used up and the camera gets left in a corner somewhere, the memories wrapped on a spool inside it. Sometimes it can be weeks, months, years even before the film is developed.
There was a film in the Olympus Trip and I was determined to finish it, get it developed and unlock those memories. I had about twenty more photographs to take (although the frame counter on the camera is a little dodgy!).
I was down in Dorset so I headed out for a short bicycle ride around some of my favourite places along the coast to Abbotsbury and back again. It was the last day of my visit and I would be catching the train back to London later that day.
Taking photographs with one of my old film cameras can sometimes seem an act of faith. They all have their own little foibles and I can never be absolutely certain they will come out. The Olympus has the frame counter issue. After the first couple of frames it stops telling me how many pictures I have taken. All I can do is keep winding on until the film goes no further. And I am never completely sure the film is winding on and all I am doing is taking one massive multiple exposure – and this is even though I can feel the film resisting and I can see the rewind lever turning.
However I was determined to finish the film off and so I took it out with me on the cycle ride. I was using Kodak Ektar; it is rated 100 ISO but I was using it at 125 ISO meaning the images would come out a little darker which would hopefully bring out some of the colours of a bright Spring Day.
The photographs I took were mostly of the landscape. The Olympus Trip is very simple on the outside; all I had to do was to leave the focus on the little picture of the mountain and let the camera take care of the exposure with its selenium light meter.
The road from Langton HerringChesil BeachSt Catherine’s ChapelGoods shedRailway workers’ shedChurchyard lantern
My ride took me out along the undulating coast road from the tiny village of Langton Herring out to Abbotsbury with views of Chesil Beach far below me. St Catherine’s Chapel, once a part of a monastery, stands on a hilltop just outside the village. Then home via an old railway track and a tiny church tucked away at the end of a lane.
Once home and with the film finished I set it off to be developed along with several other rolls of film that had been lying around for a few years (!) A week or so later the images came back to me. As I downloaded the scans the memories of that cycle ride came back to me. Unlike other photographic expeditions the moments had been held in secret and now they emerged. The rolling hills, the blue of the sky, the green of the sea, the distant chapel on the hill top, the remnants of the railway and the secluded churchyard at the end of the lane.
If you would like to see the route I took click on the map above to view it on Komoot
There are some places I return to photograph regularly. In some cases it becomes almost a ritual. There’s a tree next to the road on Ridgeway Hill which I pass each time I cycle to Weymouth; everytime I stop to photograph it, recording its changes throughout the seasons.
Then there is this small bluebell wood.
For the last two or three years since I discovered it I have risen early one Sunday in springtime and cycled out of London into the Hertfordshire countryside and then on until I reach this quiet woodland.
It lies on an undulating country lane just out of Hertford, the county town. Every year I am never sure how far along the lane I have to cycle to reach it so every year it surprises me.
Once I have discovered the carpet of blue I prop the bicycle up on the road side and for half an hour lose myself in the woodland. I pause, notice, listen, smell and finally photograph the bluebell glade.
Here are some of the photographs I took this year. There’s the traditional view across the wood but this year I paid attention to some of the other details such as the young leaves on the trees. I also played around, deliberately moving the camera and zooming in and out to create blurred effects.
Eventually, though, I have to get back on the bicycle and ride on. But there are the photographs and the memories. And there is always next year.
I have so many photobooks though (more an obssession than a passion perhaps) so here’s another one. This is going to be more of a deep dive into the book as I felt more drawn to this photographer. There was something about their work, their process and style, and their choice of subject matter which resonated very deeply with me.
As before, the book was discovered browsing through a second hand bookshop or charity shop (I am afraid I can’t remember which one in this case). I note that this book is also currently still available from the publisher, Silverhill Press
“From the photo-diaries of Mick Williamson”
Mick Williamson 2023
From the Photo-diaries of Mick Williamson
The project has been ongoing since the 1970s and has accumulated over two million photographs!
Mick Williamson is a professional photographer and educator. He first picked up a camera in the mid 1960s and started working in photography in the early 70s. As well as a photographer he has taught in various colleges and has served on numerous committees and boards. He has given to the art and craft of photography over his career.
The photo-diaries have been an ongoing project for him since the 1970s, around the birth of his son. He is an habitual and almost daily photographer (I understand that if he forgets to take his camera with him he will go back to get it – I know he feels!).
For this particular project he has taken over two million photographs! And it is worth bearing in mind he is using a film camera rather than digital.
I am fascinated by his work not just because of his breathtaking ethereal images but because some of his ways of working resonate with me. I have tried to a photograph a day as part of a mindful process to observe the world around me, although I am not always successful.
I have also been conscious of just how many photographs I have taken over the years. I have had a digitial camera for well over a decade now and I have no idea how many photographs I have created, most of which live on various hard drives and never see the light of day – just the quantity of photographs can seem overwhelming. Perhaps this could be a subject for another post.
Williamson has used the same camera for the whole project. His way of working with it has become instinctive.
As mentioned, Williamson photographs on a film camera. His choice was an Olympus Pen, a small half frame camera: that is it would take two photographs for each frame of a 35mm film. 36 exposures would become 72. He has used the same camera for many years and knows how it will work and what it will see. As a result his photography is intuitive. Very often he will take his photographs without even looking through the viewfinder. He tends to work in a very instinctive way responding to what he sees. He does not impose himself on his subject.
The driving force of the project was the birth of his son in the mid 1970s. I have never been a father but I could imagine how watching the moments of your child’s life could make you more conscious of each second and perhaps want to capture them. As mentioned in the introduction to the book his compulsion was “borne of a desire to seize the ever-vanishing seconds.”
His choice of subjects are from the everyday, a fleeting moment, through carefully composed landscapes.
Many of his images are of the domestic – cups of tea and pints of beer; chairs, tables and other everyday objects that have caught his eye. Perhaps it is the way the light falls upon them or simply giving prominence to something that is often overlooked.
Some of the photographs are more like family “snaps” of his children and friends on holiday and at play, although they are more than that. The ethereal quality of the lighting renders them as something more than a simple family photograph.
As with many ostensibly personal photographs some of the images can seem a little surreal to a third party. For example there is one image of hands holding a cup of tea, and in the background a hose snakes across a gravel surface and through a wooden fence. What is going on? A family photograph out of context?
Some of his images look like the quiet scenes from a movie.
Many of the photographs are displayed in a sequence as they were taken on the film with the sprockets and numbers visible. It is always fascinating to watch how a photographer comes to their chosen image. Somewhere in my collection of second hand books I have a copy of the book of contact prints from photographers working for the Magnum photograph agency – they show how some of the most classic images of all time were arrived at. In this case, though, Williamson is showing a series of moments for example curtains blowing through an open window in a hotel room, or a child walking around concentric circles drawn in the sand. It is almost as if they are scenes from a movie, perhaps a moment of calm between the action.
A lot of the photograph are taken at unusual angles and focus in on details, perhaps a hand holding a cup of tea. Many of the people in the images tend to be viewed from behind or from a distance or against the light, or perhaps just a part of them is visible.
Apart from the photographs of people and everyday objectsthere are also landscapes, typically of woods, lakes and mountains often under dark skies. These are the more formal images possibly where he has composed the image through the viewfinder. A longer moment recorded, they feel different to the instinctively photographed moments.
Above all there is childhood and a sense of fleeting moments.
Above all there is childhood. Running, playing often in sunlight. Throughout the images Williamson makes a great use of light. It flares and glows, casts shadows and ripples on water and through glass. As a result the photographs have an ethereal sense. There is a positive feeling of the moment captured but the glare of the light emphasises its transience and we are returned to the driving force for this project – to capture fleeting moments
Unlike many of the other second hand books I have collected this one is still in print (just!). You can purchase copies of it from the publisher, Silverhill Press.
This is the second of a series of posts on some of the second hand photobooks I have purchased. I hope that you have found it interesting and it encourages you to seek out photographers’ printed work in your local second hand and charity bookshops.
If you discover any interesting ones let me know in the comments below.
The Spring is one of my favourite times of year. Such promise!
At the Spring Equinox when the night begins to retreat and the days grow longer I went out for a cycle ride through the Fens north of Cambridge, one of my favourite places to visit. I like the open expanse of the sky and the land. Everything feels so open.
At this turn of the year all around me the dark earth had been turned to await new growth and in some cases green shoots were already beginning to show through. Here and there the recent heavy rain that had marked February lingered in deep puddles. On the horizon the trees were still in their winter garb but their edges were beginning to soften in the light.
Here are a few of the photographs I took on the day.
If you would like to follow the route I took you can do so on Komoot
My last post was all about searching out snowdrops in an in old churchyard. This time I was looking for other signs of Spring. I found them within the smelling distance of a landfill site! To be fair, a part of it is also a nature reserve.
Here are a few of the details as the new leaves slowly bud and unfurl. In one case, a few of last year’s sloeberries still hang on, looking backwards as the year moves forward.
The other Sunday I needed to get out of London. It had rained non-stop for days, and not a clean rain but dirty, covering everything in a greasy grey dullness: the streets, the buildings, the people. Anything bright or joyful had washed away. Even life seemed to have been lost – no bird song, no leaves in the trees, grass turned to mud.
Sunday was the only day when there seemed to be a break in the drab clouds, so I got on the bicycle and cycled north out of town. I had a gentle tailwind to propel me along. The wind is to cycling as light is to photography. Great light can create a beautiful photograph and the wind on your back can create a wonderful cycle ride.
As I slipped through the northern suburbs of London, I always have the feeling that I am shedding off layers of the city. It can take time. There are false starts as tantalising fragments of countryside are encircled by housing, busy roads, or industrial estates. Eventually, though, London and its acolytes were behind me.
My destination was a churchyard without a church. There had been one once, but it was long gone, moved up the road closer to the living congregation, leaving the older members of the parish to their last resting place.
Between their memorials snowdrops were scattered across the ground, sometimes in ones or twos but often in great swathes, hugging the ground, testing the air, and pushing through the memories of autumn, the fallen leaves. Around them was the promise of later spring as the first shoots of wild daffodils were beginning to show. This was what I had been seeking out. After the old dark drear winter, a promise that things would turn.
I set about photographing, getting down close to capture the flowers in their surroundings. If any passers by had seen a man in full cycling kit sprawled across the ground this was what he was doing! As I photographed, the clouds gradually broke and the sun, still a little watery, appeared. Overhead in the tops of the trees I could hear the sounds of bird song. The delicate white flowers seemed to glow.
If you would like to view the route I took out of London check out Komoot
I like looking at the work of other photographers almost as much as I like taking photographs. It’s a great way to get inspiration, perhaps try something a little different.
There are lots of different ways to seek out photographers’ work. There’s social media, of course, but sometimes it’s hard to find good work amongst all the clutter in your feed and you can’t really appreciate the image looking at a tiny version of it on your phone.
In any case I am a big fan of printed work, its physicality against the ephemeral nature of a digital image briefly seen on Instagram or similar. This is especially the case if the original was a print, created from a negative in a dark room.
If, like me, you’re lucky enough to live in a place with galleries and museums, you might be able to see prints of photographs in exhibitions. If not, there is an alternative which is not as expensive as you might think.
Buy second hand photo books. Sometimes you can find an eclectic mix of books of photographs in second hand and charity bookshops. It offers a very much less expensive way of buying photobooks.
I am an inveterate browser of second hand and charity bookshops. There is nothing I like more than spending half an hour so looking along the shelves and finding new discoveries.
So here a few of the books I have purchased over the last few years. Each of them were discovered by chance. In some cases I had heard of the photographer but sometimes they were new to me. The key things that drew me to a book were did I like the photographs and did the subject matter resonate. Oh, and was it cheap? None of the books listed here were more than a tenner!
“Luminance”
Linda Connor 1994
Linda Connor is a landscape photographer, active since the 1970s. She has also appeared in another book I have; “Darkroom”, interviews with photographers about their processing and printing techniques, published in 1977.
The photographs in “Luminance” were taken with a 10×8” view camera described by Rebecca Solnit in her introduction, as a “temple of light”. As the title of the book would suggest the photographs are all on the subject of light – daylight, the sun, candlelight – and how it falls on objects, illuminating them, defining them and sometimes hiding them. It is fitting, therefore, that the prints reproduced in the book were themselves created with sunlight, using printing out paper exposed directly to the sun.
This is one of several books I bought in my favourite charity bookshop – the Oxfam shop on Upper Street, Islington. There is a tiny section upstairs devoted to photographic books which I always head to when I have the chance.
I chose this book simply because I loved the beauty of the photographs – the play of light and shade. In her photographs the light falls across deserts, through windows and deep into caverns. I linger over each page and I marvel at the process used to create these images.
“New Topographics”
Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, 1981
This is the catalogue for an exhibition at the Arnolfini Art Gallery in Bristol in 1981.
New Topographics was a new way of looking at the landscape. The photographers took a long cool look at their surroundings and created images with neutral tones, in contrast to the work of earlier landscape photographers such as Ansel Adams. The photographers were particularly interested in the human interaction with the landscape and how development was radically altering it. The photographs show empty space save for a trailer park or a half-finished housing development.
The original exhibition had taken place in the mid-1970s at George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. New Topographics was the name given to the exhibition, but it became the name of a photographic movement which still has resonances to this day – some of my landscape photographs tip their hat to this particular style.
This purchase has double memories for me. I remember when I bought it in a charity shop in Bristol in the summer of 2025. I was there with family and friends to see a photograph of mine (the Shoeburyness Boom), party of a travelling exhibition organised by the Landscape Group of the Royal Photographic Society. Afterwards we went for a walk around the city and that was when I found the book.
And I remember when I bought it for the first time. It was when I saw that exhibition at the Arnolfini all those years ago. My brother was at the University of Bristol and I was visiting him. This was when I first became interested in photography and I think this might have been one of the first photographic exhibitions I ever went to. Somewhere along the line my earlier copy of the catalogue disappeared so I was so pleased to find it in the Oxfam bookshop in Bristol.
Andre Kertesz
This is a short collection of the works of the Hungarian photographer, Andre Kertesz, and an essay on his life and career as a photographer. It was published by the Arts Council on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition of his work in 1979.
He was born in 1894 in Budapest and, from an early age, he became interested in photography. For a long time he did not actually have a camera but his time visualising images, composing them in his mind. This method helped him become one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, creating striking images.
My favourite photographs are those taken from overhead of people walking in the street. It is almost as if they are actors on their first mark. The most striking one for me was taken in Japan and shows a line of people walking in the rain with their umbrellas up. Their reflections run ahead of them along the wet road merging with an arrow painted on the street. It is a perfect combination of the objects and lighting, creating a dramatic and dynamic image.
This is the first of a series of posts on some of the second hand photobooks I have purchased. I hope that you have found it interesting and it encourages you to seek out photographers’ printed work in your local second hand and charity bookshops.
If you discover any interesting ones let me know in the comments below.
Winter can be a dark time of year. The days are short and the sky can be overcast and grey. Colour drains from the land. Everything seems to have turned monotone.
Yet there is still colour. There will be days of blue skies and bright sunshine. There can be glorious sunrises and sunsets (and with the shorter days you don’t have to get up too early to catch the rising sun!) And there can be colour in the details too – the berries, the lichen, the last of the leaves hanging on, even a cluster of snails!
Here are a few of the images I made over Christmas 2025 celebrating the colours of winter.
