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Photographing Nature
Welcome to the Photographing Nature section of my blog, where I share inspiration, techniques, and tips to help you connect with nature through your lens. Whether you’re wandering through a forest, sitting by a quiet lake, or observing wildlife in motion, nature photography offers endless opportunities to explore beauty, light, and life in its rawest form.
Whether you're just starting with a smartphone or shooting with professional gear, you'll find ideas designed to improve your photography.
Simple Photography Tips - Icy Day Photo-Art
realised that the way the autumn leaves had landed in the bowl had combined with the structures that the freezing process had produced, to create some great opportunities for art images.
Rather than looking for subjects, it's an opportunity to seek textures as well.
Tiny bubbles frozen in the water add depth and a sense of time held still. Look for clusters, trails, and size changes.
Cracks are like faults in a precious stone, they can reflect light at a different
Michael Blyth
4 min read
Friday Photo Inspiration. Simple Photography Tips “Learning to See Includes Other Peoples Perspectives”
Prayer changes perspective. It shifts you from replaying the offence to seeing a human being again — sometimes broken, sometimes blind, always accountable, but no longer in charge of your inner world. And it can change the other person too: softening what’s hardened, interrupting patterns, opening a door you couldn’t force.
Michael Blyth
2 min read
Simple Photography Tips - Celebrating 2025 In Pictures
Celebrating 2025 in Pictures is a stroll through some of the images I’ve used this year to illustrate the joy of photography. As I share and celebrate the year in photographs, I hope you’ll 'join the walk', the same quiet lesson I’ve been learning: to stop more, look more, and accept the images that waft into your awareness.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Friday Photo Inspiration. Simple Photography Tips “Christmas is for Slowing Down”
In some parts of the world, where it's warm and sunny - go and find a lizard and sit still, breathe slowly, and just watch it - two minutes, five minutes. Look at it, and notice things you'd never noticed before. Look around and notice.
If it's wet and miserable, go and watch a branch drip, notice the light shining through, move a little and watch it from a different angle.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Simple Photography Tips - Learning To Notice
The weather is broken cloud, the sun peeking through, then hiding again.
You’re in the mood for looking, for noticing. Seeking something quirky in this seemingly rather featureless wintery lane, as a diversion from Christmas 'festivities' perhaps.
You might start to notice a few things; the way the recycled road material has formed a pebbly surface, with shapes and shadows. The trees either side of you, and the way their trunks sit in parallel up to the sky.
Michael Blyth
3 min read
Simple Photography Tips - Sunset Photography
Perhaps rather blunt, but sunrise and sunset photography centre around the appearance or disappearance of an immensely bright splodge of light, either appearing over the horizon or sinking below the horizon.
There's nothing unusual about this, happens every day, has been for a few years now, and God-willing, will continue to.
Photographically it's pretty boring, and it needs a number of add-ons to give it interest, certainly if you want to print it for others to enjoy.
Michael Blyth
4 min read
Friday Photo Inspiration. Simple Photography Tips “Avoid The Cliff edge - Cap de Formentor Mallorca.”
It strikes me that many of the highest peaks, the best outlooks, and the ultimate goals all require zig-zags, the willingness to turn from the straight way, even if you can't see the reason. It may not be a cliff as in the picture, but you never know what lies ahead.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Simple Photography Tips - The psychology of Photography - Entering or leaving a picture
In summary; it matters whether the subject is moving into the picture or out of it. In terms of 'story', it changes how the viewer reads the story, feels about the moment and how direction changes this.
Michael Blyth
3 min read
Simple Photography Tips: Advantages of Grey Days
The overall conclusion I'd like you to take with you is that there is very rarely a day devoid of photographic opportunity - you just need to stop and settle, and maybe imagine your'e a modern-day Monet, looking for the light to guide you.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Simple Photography Tips: How to Avoid Lens Flare in Landscape Photography
Out for a few minutes walk before meeting Favourite Middle Daughter for a before work coffee from Roc and Floss at the market. I was able to capture a short video demonstrating how to use existing objects to cut the lens flare that occurs from bright light entering the lens at the wrong angle - this is usually sunlight, but can also be streetlights etc.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Friday Photo Inspiration: Simple Photography Tips & Uplifting Insights from Autumn Pumpkins
Not a simple photography tip as such, but more like life inspiration through Photography and Words—a mix of visual with sometimes meaningful reflections.
Do you know anyone for whom this is true, perhaps you? Let me know, I'd be interested.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Simple Photography Tips: Seeing Light and Finding Photo Opportunities on a Woodland Walk - for phone camera or camera
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.
Michael Blyth
2 min read
Friday Photo Inspiration: Périgord Black Truffle (Tuber melanosporum) – Simple Photography Tips & Creative Insights - Value emerges from darkness
Facts aside, to me they tell a story of things that have remained hidden as they grow, their value and importance increasing in those dark places. To be found only by those in the know, with the skill to uncover such things.
The similarity with human kind: where many folk feel in darkness, but it is this that produces strength of character. "Learn not to fear the dark places.
It’s often where the best things come from,
Like truffles under soil."
Michael Blyth
2 min read
This is a 'must-do activity' this weekend. Spread the word, go to the local park, out into the country woods;go and catch falling leaves.
Please go and try it, take yourself, with family if you have one, and just play the game - it is surely one of the most mentally restorative things you can do. Especially if you pause and admire the leaf you catch.
You're even allowed to smile, laugh, yell, squeal or whatever - this is complete release.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Friday photo inspiration. Simple Photography Tips: Sharing Inspiration Through Photography and Words inspirational Scottish seascape photo
In terms of Simple Photography Tips there's an interesting exercise you might benefit from; try in your imagination re-positioning the yacht, and seeing how the balance changes and how the significance of the various parts of the image change.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
Simple Photography Tips - photography in different weather
1. Fog hides distractions.
Third picture, misty day is like you've slung a big sheet from a couple of helicopters; background gone, eye focuses on the tree.
2. Try black and white
I've turned both images to monochrome, you can see that the colour complicates the image too much.
3. Use roads as leading lines
Oh, and the road running from either sides, makes visual use of the interesting thirds, and takes the eye straight towards the subject.
Michael Blyth
2 min read
Friday photo inspiration. Simple Photography Tips - Finding Inspiration Through Photography and Words "Sunset Blessings".
We had arrived at Far del Cap Salines moments after the sun had set, thinking we'd missed the show, but then the sky caught fire - it got better than this, but my i-phone died through lack of battery. --aaaghh.
Michael Blyth
1 min read
If Your Photos Feel “Off”, This Is Probably Why - balance in photography - Simple Photography Tips
With the person in the water, the eye lands first on the area of the fishermans huts and the rib, then immediately responds to the contrast of the figure in the water - so it's a bit like a visual see-saw - with image four providing a double see-saw with one fulcrum being, like the other two, the mid-point between the fishing huts and the bather, There is another line sort of running vertically between the woman and the rib.
Michael Blyth
5 min read
Early Autumn. Now is the time for photographing Fungi, (but only if you've got mushroom) on your phone camera – Simple Fungus Photography Tips - video
It's been there sufficient time to have accumulated a deep layer of leaves and decomposing matter, yummy stuff to the mycorrhizal masters of the underworld, and at this time of year they get all excited and put out a flourishing of fruiting bodies, which we see as display of wonderful fungi.
They make the most wonderful subjects for learning nature photography, they don't move, they are wonderfully architectural, and depending on the light, are easy to photograph, even wit
Michael Blyth
3 min read
Simple Photography Tips - Finding Inspiration Through Photography and Words - "Some days it feels like it can't get worse".
I came across this little 'mess on the tarmac' while shooting on Mallorca. It immediately took me to the verse, in the book of Matthew I think, where it says that not even a sparrow falls without being noticed by God.
Michael Blyth
2 min read
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