These photographs were made, within a couple of miles walk from my home, between the summers of 2022 and 2025.

Notes on Process

In all the years I’ve lived here, I’ve been documenting this landscape with my phone camera. However, I grew tired of the kind of photographs this was giving me. It’s such an awkward, clumsy and ultimately unsatisfying process. For a start there’s the whole palaver of waking up the phone. If I’m wearing gloves, it can’t read my fingerprint. If I have my hood up, it has difficulty in scanning my face. The next problem comes with trying to make out what is actually on the screen, beneath the glare. Don’t even get me started on the haptics of smearing a temporarily un-gloved finger across the tiny controls on the screen, whilst trying to compose a shot, and all the while the wind is blowing a hoolie and the rain is lashing down. After wrangling all these obstacles I might get a super-saturated, idealised version of what I was actually looking at. Sure enough, everything will appear correctly exposed and focused. However, upon closer inspection, and especially when it comes to making prints, so much of this algorithmically corrected information will just descend into an anodyne sludge.

This is what finally convinced me to start taking my photography of this landscape more seriously. A little research showed me how modern mirrorless digital cameras can be adapted to use a whole range of, cheaply-sourced, old, manual lenses. With this shift I was finally responsible for authoring my own images, free of the generic influence and direction of the smartphone.

For all but two or three of these photographs I used either a Sony A7II camera or a Fujifilm GFX50S camera, along with a wide variety of adapted vintage manual lenses. The RAW files were edited using RawTherapee open-source software.