I’ve just noticed how many of my recent post titles have the word ‘light’ in them. Which isn’t surprising, I suppose, as light is what makes this whole ‘seeing’ and ‘photography’ business possible.

Light can transform the simplest thing into something extraordinary. That’s why the way light plays with subjects during the ‘golden hours’ is so appealing. I often find myself shooting into the light, enjoying how this perspective drains a scene of any colour but gold.

I used to hate flash. I never used it. But it’s become an essential part of my toolbox for visualising the lives of nocturnal birds (along with a good head-lamp), or working in dark forest environments. Sometimes you just need a bit more light than is readily available. I spend a lot of my life working in the dark. Sometimes I wish there was a way of capturing the infinite subtle shades of the night in the same way, but those experiences are more intwined with the other senses, the sounds, the smells and the textures than could be reliably reproduced in an image alone. I love the way the world shrinks and wraps around you in the dark, coalescing into the experience of your eyes trying to make sense of shadows, or the lone floating glow of your headlamp in a sea of night. But that’s another blog entirely.