Simple Photography Tips: Seeing Light and Finding Photo Opportunities on a Woodland Walk - for phone camera or camera

Five simple photography tips from a woodland walk

• Capture nature's architecture before the final leaves fall

• Sunny mornings with low light provide a challenging but worthwhile photographic environment

• look out for small forms of life that respond to the bare canopy; lichen, moss

• Become aware of your background, take a pause and check, observe the light, beware of visual distractions

• A good background can be as important as the subject. Look for light behind the detail — not just on it.

  
  

There's something hugely healing about walking through woodland, slowly, maybe with a camera in your grimy mitt. Your slower than normal pace allows you to notice the way light falls across a path, or is excluded by a tree blocking the light to form a shadow.

Join me on a woodland walk as I demonstrate how light reveals - and how you can use it to create stronger, more intentional photographs.

At the start of the walk on which I recorded the attached video to provide woodland photography tips, the loss of leaves from the tree canopy had allowed light back in that had been excluded since the Spring.

Image One - Slow down and the woodland offers details like this; tiny sporophyte forms catching the light.

The result was that the moss was producing sporophytes, the system by which they reproduce, and lichen similarly were pushing up ascomycetes.

Image Two - Side light shaping the tiny architecture of lichen on a mossy trunk.

Both were caught and back-lit by the morning light that could now reach them.

Many people just walk on by, not realising the wonder and tiny magnificence of such forms.

Learn to scan as you walk, then like a hawk noticing prey, focus sharply on anything that catches your eye, move in closer, then a little closer still. The world adds so much more the nearer you get.

These images work so well because the light isn't flat, the drama is produced by angled light. It's hard to work with sometimes, but keep practising!

You may need to crouch down, get to the level of your subject.

If you're a wheelchair user, many paths may be inaccessible, but some will be, and you're at a perfect height for this sort of subject. And you can increase your options by turning your phone camera upside down, if you're using one.

As ever, become aware of your background, take a pause and check, observe the light, beware of visual distractions - the things that more hasty people miss.

The longer you look, the more you see, just look at these two images and let your eyes and brain explore the textures and the colours - it really is quite exciting.

From the very start of doing these blog articles, the artist Monet has been my silent 'mentor. He waited ages for a scene to 'reveal' itself, and days and images like this benefit from the same approach.

Photography to my mind is only a part of the process, and one of my enduring Simple Photography Tips is 'that you may look until you see'. It's about learning to see what has been there all along, and maybe it suits a photo, but often it's more important to allow it to sooth you; mind, body and soul.