Category Archives: Nature Photography

Conventional bucolic views of the British countryside only tell half the story, says Tracy Calder. By adopting a new mindset, we can find beauty in even the bleakest corners of the land. She takes a look at the book This Pleasant Land: New Photography of the British Landscape. Plus, shares guidance on an alternative approach to landscape photography.

The British Landscape

In his wonderful book The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America, Bill Bryson describes his experience of the British landscape. ‘For months the sky had remained a depthless grey. Sometimes it rained, but mostly it was just dull, a land without shadows. It was like living inside Tupperware.’

Anyone who lives on this North Atlantic island will be familiar with the ‘depthless grey’ Bryson refers to. While we might dream of dramatic skies and colourful sunsets, most of the time we go about our daily business under a dispiriting blanket of white. As photographers, we deal with this ‘Tupperware’ effect by adding an ND grad, hoping to eke out some drama. But dramatic and bucolic views of the British countryside only tell half the story.

In reality, the British landscape has been heavily shaped by human hands for centuries: quarries pockmark hills, fences criss-cross fields and roads slice through woodland. Arts and culture writer Rosalind Jana agrees. ‘In its wilder hinterlands we might think that it remains untouched, but our fingerprints – real and imagined – are all over it.’

China Clay Pit, Rocky, Ivybridge, England, 2018. © Jethro Marshall

Jana provided the text for This Pleasant Land: New Photography of the British Landscape (published by Hoxton Mini Press). The book contains projects that form a post-millennium portrait of Britain where ‘Tupperware’ skies are not just tolerated but actively sought out. ‘This selection of fine art photography captures the beautiful, the bleak, the uncontainable and the marginal,’ says Jana.

It’s an exploration of overlooked corners, from the humble hedgerow to WWII pillboxes and shapeshifting floods. There’s an overriding sense that the landscape is in a state of flux – people come and go, boundary lines are drawn and redrawn, tides nibble away at the fringes of land. The photographers selected for the book present their own personal ‘reading’ of the landscape.

Each image is an expression of their memories, associations, interests and, at times, preferences. None of these artists are interested in the chocolate box view of the landscape. ‘Instead, they raise questions about how we inhabit it, own it, work it, protect and destroy it,’ says Jana.

Glencoul, Northern Highlands, Scotland, May 2016. © Nicholas JR White

Fingerprints of man

Each photographer has a story to tell – projects range from the autobiographical to the environmental and political. What unites them is a desire to be immersed in the landscape. To hear the cry of gulls as they descend on ploughed fields, to taste salt on the air as you approach the coast, to feel snow underfoot as you walk to a mountain bothy.

These are essential visceral experiences. Few of the views would be considered classically beautiful, but each photographer has found beauty in the scene – a shaft of light illuminating abandoned cars in a slate mine, cement cubes scattered on a beach like toy building blocks, a suburban hedge that looks like a Beefeater hat. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder after all.

One photographer who has found beauty where seemingly none exists is Paul Hart. For ten years he has been capturing the effects of large-scale agribusiness on the Fens in East Anglia. The area has always been popular with writers who, Jana argues, are attracted by the flat fields, ‘domed by an unrelenting sky’.

Walpole St Andrew, Reclaimed, England 2019. © Paul Hart

While it might seem ‘damply atmospheric’ to the likes of Graham Swift, most photographers seem less keen to embrace the tilled fields and monocultural crops here. Hart, however, is an exception. Through a triptych of projects evocatively titled Farmed, Drained and Reclaimed, Hart uses a Hasselblad loaded with black & white film to describe how farming has shaped the region. ‘Many of Hart’s images have a ghostly feel, full of misted horizons and bare trees,’ says Jana. ‘They often feature lines vanishing into the distance: electrical cables, narrow lanes, silver waterways, the hard ridges of tilled fields.’

Jethro Marshall’s work also celebrates manmade participation in the landscape. For him there’s beauty in the abstract brutalism of coastal defences and quarries. ‘His trademark monochrome imagery is sparing but unafraid of drama,’ says Jana. These sculptural structures are set against natural backdrops – a cliff stabiliser mirrors the shape of the rock face behind it, a curve of anti-tank cubes nestles into shingle.

‘Whether used as military defence or to ward against erosion, there is something powerful in this idea of protection,’ notes Jana. While shooting Rocky (Marshall’s quarry project) the photographer was often asked to leave the site – a bid to protect Marshall or something else entirely? ‘Much of this land is not as free to explore as we might hope or assume,’ concludes Jana.

Places, Seven Sisters, England, 2016. © Toby Coulson

Impact of the military

If you’ve ever come across an MOD red flag while out walking – indicating possible life-threatening activities – you may have wondered how military manoeuvres impact the British landscape. Some military sites have the potential to become reservoirs of biodiversity, but others support ‘temporary’ structures that have been left to decay. Photographer Richard Brine used a combination of satellite imagery and local hearsay to pinpoint a number of Britain’s remaining 6,000 pillboxes (there were once around 30,000).

These concrete forms were built during WWII to defend Britain, but, according to Jana, ‘Many now house sheep (or furtive teenagers looking for somewhere to smoke).’ Brine has a background in architectural photography, and this preoccupation with precision (and the use of a large-format camera) carries over into his pillbox project. These defences may be dressed in moss and ivy, but Brine’s compositions are full of clean lines and negative space.

Melanie Friend is another photographer who explores how war is embedded in the British landscape. For her 2020 book The Plain, she made repeat visits to the chalk grasslands of Salisbury Plain, ‘a preparation ground for war’ since 1897. Here Friend captured the eerie presence of rusty tanks, battered telephones and stark warning signs. Her contribution to This Pleasant Land has a similarly disquieting air. For this project she travelled around the country attending air shows, which Jana describes as, ‘the respectable face of war’.

In this context, we see war as spectacle. ‘I remember feeling very sad on one particular beach – just this sense [that] here we are watching these planes as entertainment,’ recalls Friend. ‘In other countries people are terrified by what’s in the sky: the bomber, the fighter jet, the drones.’ On the ground, alongside the photographer, we stare up at the sky tracking the dark silhouettes of planes as they perform for our entertainment.

Avro Lancaster bomber (part of a Battle of Britain memorial flight), Southport Beach, Merseyside, England, 24 July 2011. © Melanie Friend

Effects of climate change

Floods, wildfires and droughts used to feel like problems that only (directly) affected the Southern hemisphere, but climate change has brought extreme conditions closer to our door. In 2022, for example, the NFCC (National Fire Chiefs Council) estimated that there were more than 500 wildfires in England and Wales – twice as many as the previous year.

Spencer Murphy spent summer 2018 recording wildfires as they transformed the landscape into an apocalyptic vision. In his images, patches of green are rare – the earth is blackened and charred, wounded and scarred. Yet there is a strange beauty in this disturbance of nature: the smoke in the air leads to muted colours, the skeletal vegetation provides focal points. ‘There is a weird beauty in it…Not like the surface of the moon, but maybe another planet,’ says Murphy.

Max Miechowski also documents the consequences of extreme weather – in this case the effects of coastal erosion. Along the coast of Britain there are pockets of land being lost to the sea at an alarming rate. ‘Gardens disappear overnight, as landslides redraw the boundary between ground and water,’ says Jana.

Land’s End, England, 2003. © Robin Friend

Buildings cling to the land as it slips beneath them, cracks widen in roads, landslides create otherworldly scenes. ‘I felt very much on the precipice…[with] this idea of being on a particular piece of land that will not exist in the future,’ admits Miechowski. ‘Once it’s gone, it’s really gone.’ But, once again, there is beauty in this shifting, impermanent environment. Miechowski often slept in his car to catch the sunrise. His pictures have a warmth and softness that acts as both a salve and a warning of what we stand to lose.

This collection of fine art photographs offers an alternative view of the British landscape. A place where people picnic by the side of the road, quaff beers in pillboxes, and plough, drain and slice the land to suit their own (temporary) needs. But that doesn’t mean it’s a bleak landscape. If you adopt the right mindset there is genuine beauty to be found in every puddle, hedge, house and ditch.

Imber Village Open Day, Merrie Albion, Wiltshire, England, 3 August 2013. © Simon Roberts

5 Tips for alternative landscape photography

Experiment with mono

Paul Hart and Jethro Marshall documented our human impact on the landscape in black & white to emphasise form and texture. Their work has a sparing quality about it, which really draws attention to every line and element in the composition.

© Paul Hart

Put some legwork in

For his project Black Dots, Nicholas JR White walked to remote mountain bothies – always feeling the ground beneath his feet. On one occasion he hiked for six hours through the Cairngorms, before camping out for three days to get his picture.

© Nicholas JR White

Look to the skies

Sometimes the land can only be truly understood when it’s set against the sky, and photographer Melanie Friend takes this to extremes. In her pictures of air shows our feet are firmly planted on the ground, but our attention is in the clouds.

© Melanie Friend

Show the people

Most of the photographers in This Pleasant Land focus on the imprint we make on the landscape, but few pictures contain people. Alex Ingram, by contrast, captures portraits of island wardens as they go about their work.

© Alex Ingram

Seek inspiration outside of photography

Harry Cory Wright’s images have the formalism of classical paintings. Wright uses a 10x8in camera and the cost of film is one factor that makes him slow down and appreciate each step of the process.

© Harry Cory Wright

Alternative landscape photography: how to see landscapes in a new light

Rise early

Max Miechowski slept in his car to catch the sunrise, Simon Roberts travelled around in a camper van, Nicholas JR White camped out in the cold. Put the effort in and you will be rewarded.

Talk to the locals

For his pillbox series, Richard Brine asked locals for their advice and combined this with satellite data to pinpoint the exact location of the defences he wanted to photograph.

Embrace serendipity

Sometimes it’s good to introduce an element of chance. Toby Trueman, for example, captures beautiful long-exposure seascapes. But instead of tracking the tides he just turns up to see what the shore reveals.

Stay curious

As children, we have a desire to see what’s around the corner, but in adulthood this seems to diminish. Ian Potter, however, encourages an appreciation of overlooked patches and a natural curiosity to see what’s around the bend.

Remain grounded

If you’re faced with an expanse of flat and empty land, much like Paul Hart was in the Fens, look for elements that will ground the space – trees, pylons or the ‘line’ of a furrow in a field.

Near Strathpeffer, Ross-shire, Scotland, January 2017. © Iain Sarjeant

Ignore obvious beauty

The colourful Americana of amusement parks, piers and fairgrounds can be alluring, but try to look beyond the surface. Rob Ball, for example, looks for evidence of weathering and decay in seaside attractions.

Keep close to home

After the restrictions of the past few years, many of us are keen to travel long distances for our photography fix. However, photographers like Iain Sarjeant are keen to prove that there are adventures right on our doorstep.

Stay in the margins

Joseph Wright, Paul Hart and Ian Potter are all fine examples of photographers who have found great riches in the hedgerows, ditches and hinterlands of Britain. Explore marginal places for maximum gain.

Shift your perspective for an alternative view of the landscape

Simon Roberts makes work that understands the landscape as an active process. To gain greater control over the narrative he often stands on his camper van roof to shoot.

Don’t fear change

Landscapes undergoing transformation make great subjects. Think Max Miechowski and his coastal erosion project. Spencer Murphy and his wildfire series and Joseph Wright’s images of flooded woodland.

This Pleasant Land: New Photography of the British Landscape, with text by Rosalind Jana, is published by Hoxton Mini Press.

Also available here.

Feeling inspired? View our landscape photography tips and get shooting some spectacular shots!

Similarly, if you are new to landscapes, check out our beginners guide to Landscape Photography.

Improve your landscape photography

Put your landscape photography to the test. Learn more alternative landscape skills on one of our upcoming landscape photography vacations. Including Isle of Skye with Jeremy Walker, Faroe Islands with Serkan Günes and Lofoten Winter Magic with Serkan Günes & Florian Warnecke. See all upcoming landscape photography holidays here.

More reading:

The best landscape photography books for inspiration

The top 20 best landscape photographs

Follow AP on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

A Colorado bear is the talk of the nature photography world after it appeared in 400 selfies on a wildlife camera set up in Boulder.

“Recently, a bear discovered a wildlife camera that we use to monitor wildlife across Boulder open space. Of the 580 photos captured, about 400 were bear selfies,” Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks wrote earlier this week on Twitter.

In followup tweets, the department clarified that the photos had been taken and posted on their Instagram page in late 2022 and that the bear was likely hibernating.

According to the BOSMP website, the department uses nine motion-detector-activated cameras to track a number of different species — like birds, coyotes and, of course, bears — across 46,000 acres.

The cameras use infrared technology so as to not disturb the animals’ nocturnal adventures.

“The motion-detecting cameras provide us a unique opportunity to learn more about how local species use the landscape around us while minimizing our presence in sensitive habitats,” said Will Keeley, senior wildlife ecologist for Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks. “These cameras play an important role in helping BOSMP staff identify important wildlife areas.”

In December, the department posted a series of photos of a pair of howling coyotes.

CNN
 — 

Tyre Nichols was a father, a man who loved his mama and a free-spirited soul who was looking for a new life in Memphis, Tennessee.

That life was tragically cut short earlier this month after a violent arrest by five officers with the Memphis Police.

Now, as attention turns toward potential charges for the officers involved, Nichols’ family wants the world to know the man Nichols was.

The 29-year-old was the baby of his family, the youngest of four children. He was a “good boy” who spent his Sundays doing laundry and getting ready for the week, his mother, Ravaughn Wells, said.

“Does that sound like somebody that the police said did all these bad things?” Wells said. “Nobody’s perfect OK, but he was damn near.”

“I know everybody says that they had a good son, and everybody’s son is good, but my son, he actually was a good boy,” she said.

Above all else, Nichols loved being a father and loved his son, his family said.

“Everything he was trying to do was to better himself as a father for his 4-year-old son,” attorney Benjamin Crump said at the family’s news conference.

Nichols was someone who brought everyone joy. “When he comes through the door, he wants to give you a hug,” Crump said, speaking on behalf of Nichols’ family.

Nichols moved to Memphis right before the Covid-19 pandemic and got stuck there when things shut down, his mother said. “But he was OK with it because he loved his mother,” she added.

His mom said he loved her “to death” – so much so that he inked it permanently.

“He had my name tattooed on his arm, and that made me proud because most kids don’t put their mom’s name, but he did,” Wells said with a laugh.

“My son was a beautiful soul and he touched everyone,” she said.

Nichols became friends with an unlikely group of people because they kept showing up to the same Starbucks around the same time in the morning, his friend Nate Spates Jr. said.

A couple times a week, these five or six friends would sit together, put their phones away so they could be present and enjoy each other’s company, said Spates, who met Nichols about a year ago at a Starbucks in Germantown, Tennessee.

The group didn’t talk much about their personal lives, and they never touched politics. But sports, particularly football, and Nichols’ favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers, were regular topics.

Nichols was a “free spirited person, a gentleman who marched to the beat of his own drum,” Spates told CNN. “He liked what he liked. If you liked what he liked – fine. If you didn’t – fine.”

Spates said he saw himself in Nichols and recognized a young man who was trying to find his own way and learning to believe in himself.

He saw Nichols grow and start to believe he could do whatever “he set out to do in this world,” Spates said.

Spates’ favorite memory of Ty, as he called Nichols, was last year on Spates’ birthday, when Nichols met Spates’ wife and 3-year-old at their usual Starbucks. He watched Nichols play with his toddler and talk to his wife with kindness.

“When we left, my wife said, ‘I just really like his soul. He’s got such a good spirit,’” Spates said.

“To speak about someone’s soul is very deep,” he said. “I’ll never forget when she said that. I’ll always remember that about him.”

Spates joins the rest of Nichols’ family and wider Memphis community in being frustrated at the lack of information that has come out about the traffic stop that resulted in Nichols’ death. He said he’s had to do a lot of compartmentalizing to be able to even speak about his friend.

“I just hope that this truly does open up honest dialogue, and not dialogue until the next one happens, but a dialogue for change,” he said.

Nichols’ daily life was ordinary at times, as he worked and spent time with family, but he also made time for his passions, his mom, Wells, said.

After his Starbucks sessions, he would come home and take a nap before heading to work, said Wells, with whom he was living. Nichols worked the second shift at FedEx, where he had been employed for about nine months, she said.

He came home during his break to eat with his mom, who would have dinner cooked.

Nichols loved his mom’s homemade chicken, made with sesame seeds, just the way he liked it, Wells said.

When he wasn’t working, Nichols headed to Shelby Farms Park to skateboard, something he had been doing since he was 6 years old. He would wake up on Saturdays to go skate or sometimes, he’d go to the park to enjoy the sunset and snap photos of it, his mom said.

“My son every night wanted to go and look at the sunset, that was his passion.”

Photography was a form of self-expression that writing could never capture for Nichols, who wrote that it helped him look “at the world in a more creative way,” on his photography website.

While he snapped everything from action shots of sports to bodies of water, landscape photography was his favorite, he wrote.

“I hope to one day let people see what i see and to hopefully admire my work based on the quality and ideals of my work,” he wrote. He signed the post: “Your friend, – Tyre D. Nichols.”

Skating was another way Nichols showed the world his personality. A video montage of Nichols on YouTube shows his face up close with the sun shining behind him before he coasts up and down a ramp on his skateboard. He grinds the rail and does tricks on his board in the video, which was shown at a news conference by his family’s attorney Crump.

Sunsets, skateboarding and his positive nature were all things that Nichols was known for, longtime friend Angelina Paxton told The Commercial Appeal, a local paper.

Skating was a big part of his life in Sacramento, California, where he lived before he moved to Memphis, Paxton said.

“He was his own person and didn’t care if he didn’t fit into what a traditional Black man was supposed to be in California. He had such a free spirit and skating gave him his wings,” Paxton said.

Paxton and Nichols met when they were 11 years old and attending a youth group, she told the Appeal.

“Tyre was someone who knew everyone, and everyone had a positive image of him because that’s who he was,” Paxton said. “Every church knew him; every youth group knew him.”

When Paxton found out about Nichols’ death, she crumbled, she told CNN affiliate WMC.

“My knees gave out,” she told WMC. “I just fell because I could not believe that someone with such light was taken out in such a dark way.”

Paxton attended Nichols’ memorial service earlier this month in Memphis. She said she represented the people in California who knew him and wanted to support his family.

“There would be a couple thousand people in this room,” Paxton told WMC, if the memorial had been in Sacramento. “He was such an innocent person. He was such a light. This could have been any of us.”

For his family, seeing the turnout and feeling the outpouring of support meant a lot.

Nichols’ stepfather Rodney Wells told WMC: “My son is a community person, so this (memorial) was good to see.”