The best of 2023
My look back at 2023 is a selection of images that are either personal favourites or images that help tell the story of the year.
And what a year it has been, 2023 has flown by! Looking back through my images from the year to put together this selection, has made me realise just how much I’ve crammed in and just how fortunate I am to be doing what I do… it’s only possible thanks to all of you, so thanks for all of your support in 2023 and I hope to see you again in 2024!
January Vestrahorn in the snow, Iceland
The highlight of my January was without a doubt my trip to Iceland. It was my fifth visit in five years and was to be my tenth workshop there but unlike all the other workshops which were run for another company, this would be my first under my own steam. I was as nervous as I was excited about the prospect and my anxiety wasn’t helped on arriving the day before the workshop to heavy rain and freezing winds. As is to be expected of the Icelandic winter weather, the day of the workshop brought a complete change with calm weather and a beautiful covering of snow. It was the first of many such meteorological changes that left the itinerary in tatters but brought a bit of excitement to proceedings and a lot of drama to the photography. I am blessed with the best workshop clients though and the six day tour was a success, the highlight being fresh snow at Vestrahorn.
February Houghton on the Hill church in the mist, Norfolk
One of the interesting projects that I worked on in 2023 was the images for Ellie Griffiths’ book about Norfolk, a pictorial guide to the county based around the locations for her popular series of Dr Ruth Galloway mystery novels. The deadline was tight so most of the photos used were from my library of Norfolk images but I did have a short window to get some shots of new places. One of these was a rather spooky night spent photographing a derelict church in a remote Norfolk woodland another was this little church at Houghton on the Hill on a crisp and frosty February morning.
Rural churches like this are often hidden amongst the trees so a drone can be very useful for photographing them, the extra elevation revealing the landscape beyond, a view not visible from the ground. Ok, in this case it revealed a landscape that was still hidden by the fog but the sun rising through it added the atmosphere that I was looking for!
March Spring at Melford Hall
I love spring. Everything is coming to life and everywhere is coloured in shades of fresh greens. March is a little early for all that but there are signs that spring is on the way in the shape of flowers like daffodils and this spring I had the opportunity to photograph those early signs at Melford Hall for the National Trust. I’ve been working with the National Trust for almost ten years and this was one of several locations they commissioned me to photograph this year. I was in fact also photographing Northey Island in March - an interesting project involving both wildlife and landscape photography, capturing the ongoing work being done to increase the saltmarsh both as a habitat and flood defence and showing the increase in birdlife since all overhead cables had been removed and run underground. I also had several contenders for my March image from a trip to Anglesey and Snowdonia but I chose this one as this was my first time at Melford Hall and I find those first trips especially exciting. The enjoyment of exploring a new place and the challenge of finding the best angles from which to capture it.
April first light at Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk
April is one of my favourite months for photography. It’s at time of year when wildflowers are starting to bloom in the countryside, the tides are at their highest at the coast, the unpredictable weather could bring warmer days and calm misty mornings or passing showers and dramatic skies and the days aren’t so long yet that you have to get up in the middle of the night to catch the sunrise!
It’s also a time of year when I am busy running workshops while also trying to cram in my own photography at the same time. This April was particularly special as I was awarded an FRPS (Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society) for a panel of images on the subject of the Essex coast, you can read about that here.
My chosen image doesn’t really encapsulate any of the things that I particularly love about April or feature in my FRPS panel but it is my favourite from the month. It was taken on one of my workshops at Wells on the North Norfolk coast. We had been photographing the sunrise along the beach but once the sun was up and far too bright we changed the angle to look between the beach huts capturing the light hitting the sides and the view beyond out to sea. Afterwards it struck me that the huts looked like a group of old friends silently enjoying the view together.
May A fox in the buttercups
One of my aims of 2023 was to spend a bit of time improving my wildlife photography skills and to make the most of my limited free time I decided to visit a couple of specialist wildlife hides, the idea being that this should improve my chances of actually seeing some wildlife to practice on.
In May I visited a hide down in Essex, tucked away in the woods in one of the busiest parts of the county, surrounded by the urban sprawl of Southend on Sea. The hides themselves were makeshift affairs with nothing in the way of creature comforts but the location was perfect and we spent an amazing two or three hours there. My wife sat in a neighbouring hide watching the foxes while I somehow managed to rattle off around 6000 shots! Being a relative newcomer to the world of wildlife photography I havent yet mastered the art of anticipating the moment and taking photos in short bursts and in the excitement of the moment my finger tended to stay pressed on the shutter button rather too long which, with a camera capable of 30 frames per second, means you end up with thousands of shots many of which are almost identical… all part of the learning curve!
June The night sky at Southwold, Suffolk
Much of my time in the early summer was spent in front of a computer screen working on the layout of my new book, Explore & Discover Essex. I did manage to find time for some photography as well though including a final recce trip up to the Yorkshire coast before launching a new workshop there in September and an interesting commission photographing several beautiful East Anglian gardens for a garden designer.
June probably isn’t the best time of year for astro photography, nights are very short and the brief spell of darkness that there is occurs in the early hours. Chances can be few and far between for this sort of photography though, whenever I seem to have the time for any night photography (or the energy to stay out half the night) and the moon is in the best phase for dark skies, the sky is likely to be hidden behind dense low cloud so you have to grab the opportunities when you can. So this was taken just before 1am on a clear and surprisingly cool night at Southwold on the Suffolk coast.
July Seas lavender on the marsh at Thornham, Norfolk
It might seem a strange choice but July is another favourite time of year (I do have quite a lot of those it seems). In my defence although days start too early, the sun is high and bright and (occasionally) hot and everywhere is swamped by people enjoying themselves, if you do get up for sunrise, mornings can be fresh and misty and places deserted, in the East Anglian countryside fields are full of swaying crops and wildflowers still bloom in the margins which look wonderful backlit by the setting sun.
What I really love about this time of year though is that the sea lavender in in bloom on the salt marsh. For a couple of weeks these tiny lilac flowers add a splash of purple to the cobalt blue, sage green and sandy yellow summer colour palette of the marshes that makes July a special time.
August Spoonbills, Snettisham, Norfolk
Sometimes you go out with a clear idea of what you are going to shoot and the sort of photos you are hoping to capture. August’s photo was one of those occasions, well sort of. It came from an early morning trip to the RSPB reserve on the Wash at Snettisham. A very high tide coinciding with dawn meant there was a good chance of seeing what has become known as the Snettisham wader spectacle, when the thousands of waders that feed on the vast mudflats here are sent flying up into the air in huge swirling masses when the mudflats are totally submerged by a very high tide.
It was the prospect of photographing this spectacle in the early morning light that had me setting my alarm for 3am but as I made the drive up to the north of Norfolk and a full moon revealed a landscape blanketed in pockets of glorious mist, I was seriously tempted to change my plans for some landscape photography instead. I decided to stick to my plan but the spectacle, while fascinating to watch wasn’t particularly photogenic on this occasion and as I kicked myself at having made what was apparently the wrong decision, I decide to have a look in the hides overlooking the nearby lagoons before heading home. Which is when I spotted this group of spoonbills in the clearing mist, perfectly backlit by the first light. So while I did have a clear idea of what I was going to shoot on that morning, I came away very happy with something completely different. Nature photography is like that sometimes.
September Mist in the Dedham Vale
September brought a spell of beautiful misty mornings and with a bit of free time on my hands I was hoping to make the most of the conditions and tick off some of the misty photographs I had planned in my head. One such photo was the view of Dedham church in a mist filled valley shot from East Bergholt just over a mile away, a view I have photographed many times before but one that I‘m convinced I can do better with.
I arrived well before dawn to find that I couldn’t see the field in front of me let alone the view a mile away so I headed down to the river at nearby Flatford to see what conditions were like there. I was determined not to be sidetracked though so an hour later I was back in my spot. The valley was still thick with fog so I set up my camera with the 100-500mm lens, perfect for picking out a composition in the distance and waited. And waited. Dog walkers passed. And returned. The sun came up and the fog started to thin. Excitement grew. The fog thickened again. More dog walkers passed. Two hours later the view started to materialise and the church appeared out of the mist, I adjusted my composition and got my shot. A few minutes later the mist was little more than a haze.
October Higger Tor, The Peak District
October’s image was one of the easiest choices. Not because there was a standout favourite but more because my hectic schedule meant that out of the 250 or so photos that I have earmarked for processing from trips to Northumberland, Wales, Suffolk and the Peak District, I have only managed to finish nine of them! My choice from that nine, which also included a couple from a very atmospheric foggy morning at Southwold Pier in Suffolk, was this equally foggy shot from Higger Tor, taken during my Autumn in the Peak District workshop.
The morning started in the gloomy darkness of a rainy dawn with a rather damp and dispirited trudge up to the top of Higger Tor. I don’t think any of us expected to even take our cameras out of our camera bags but anyone with a bit of landscape photography experience will know that anything can happen… you have to be there to find out. In the event, the rain did clear to reveal pockets of fog in all the dips and folds of the landscape and we all left with unexpectedly atmospheric images from a lost cause.
November Laurel trees I the Fanal Forest, Madeira
November was a much harder proposition as it included trips to both Madeira and Iceland but a mist and fog them has clearly developed in my favourite images of 2023. I have long been aware that the difference between mist and fog is one of visibility (visibility less than 1km is fog, more than 1km is mist) but recently learnt that the difference between fog and cloud is one of altitude. If it is less than 50ft from the earth’s surface then it is fog, above that it is low cloud. What does all this have to do with November’s photo? Well this image was taken at the magical Fanal Forest, a laurel forest high on a plateau in the north west of Madeira, also known as the foggy forest or cloud forest for obvious reasons. I’d always assumed that at around 1200m above sea level it was low cloud but as that cloud is close to the earth’s surface then it must be fog… or is it both?!
Anyway conditions when we visited the forest on my workshop in November were perfect. During the ascent, everything was clear and I was beginning to fear that we would be disappointed but just a few hundred metres from the forest we were enveloped by a thick fog. The fog brought a sense of mystery to the ancient trees, their twisted shapes standing out clearly against the simple background, the reduced visibility creating a layer of separation between near and distant trees. Our minds, apparently tuned to find human shapes found plenty here and we spent a happy afternoon composing images to highlight these but one of my favourites was this one which highlights the moss and ferns finding a space to live amongst the gnarled branches.
December Aurora Borealis over Budirkirkja, Iceland
The year ended as it began with a trip to Iceland, six days in the South followed by 5 days on the Snaefellsnes peninsular in the west. Well strictly speaking that was followed by a 3 day workshop on the Dorset coast and I still have some 1 day workshops on the Suffolk and Essex coasts ahead but my favourite image was from the Iceland trip.
This shot was particularly special because having struggled with heavy cloud for several nights the trip ended with a bang and a spectacular display of the northern lights on the very last night. We were staying in the Hotel Budir, a fabulous hotel right on the coast and literally a stones throw from this little black church so when my phone pinged with an aurora alert in the middle of the night we were there in minutes! Iceland never disappoints, the landscape can genuinely be described as epic and the dramatic weather can create equally stunning conditions but the aurora is always the icing on the cake.