Walking the moors before first light.
On the personal half of the practice. Why I leave the house at 5am, what I look for, and the cheap pair of boots I will not give up.
The personal half of the practice happens before the working half wakes up. Most weeks, I leave the house between four-thirty and five, drive twenty minutes north, and walk for an hour with a single camera and the wrong pair of boots.
1. Why the moors.
I grew up at the bottom edge of the West Pennine Moors, looking up at Winter Hill from a back garden in Horwich. The moors were the part of the landscape I learned first, and they remain the part I know best. The work is not about the famous places — it is about the lane behind the next farm.
2. The boots, the camera, the kit.
A single camera, a single lens — usually a 35mm — and no tripod. The boots are a ten-year-old pair of Karrimor mids that have been re-soled twice and will be re-soled once more. The kit is what fits inside an old shoulder bag the size of a paperback.
Walked, not driven. Nothing is set up, nothing is moved, nothing is lit. The frame is the frame I found.Method · landscape
3. What the walks have given the practice.
A wedding is loud and choreographed; a moor at first light is neither. The walks have made the working photographer slower and more patient. They have also given me a body of work that has nothing to do with anyone’s deadline.
There are 38 prints in the Landscape & Flora archive at the moment. Every print began as a walk that was meant to clear my head before a wedding day. None of them ever did, but each of them turned into something else.
Deepisha
Photographer · Bolton
I cover weddings, sports and family days across Bolton and Greater Manchester. The journal is a personal one — written between shoots, edited on the train. If you would like to read it as it goes out, the subscribe form is at the bottom of the index.
Editing slow — thirty frames from three thousand.
The week after the wedding. How I cut a wedding gallery from three thousand frames down to the thirty that go on the wall.
A Mehndi morning in BL3.
A morning at the Patel family's, between cousins arriving and the first sit-down for henna. Four hours, three rooms, one camera.
Mehndi — a guide for the family.
What happens on a Mehndi morning, who needs to be where, and how a photographer can sit alongside the family without getting in the henna.