Incredibly remiss of me but I have not posted a blog for quite a while and yet intended to do so once I returned home from the SNPF. What a brilliant weekend of images and chat. As a wildlife photographer I rarely seem to get the opportunity to have extended chats with other photographers. It can be a bit lonely at times so weekends like this are great to meet up with old friends and meet new ones. The range of presentations and images were truly breathtaking. Most of the time I thought I was out of my depth with my own presentation! I still think I probably was!

The one main message that came home was that my approach for the last few years of concentrated project based photography is certainly the way to go. Every presentation was built on this methodology and the quality of images showed this well. Gone are my days of chasing all round Britain getting thousands of Ok images but never really nailing top quality ones. Project based photography can be frustrating at times and you don’t get an amazing range of species. Perhaps my old approach is also a bit dead in the sense of stock photography where the bottom has fallen out of the market. Drive up to Scotland to get a few mountain hare images, and never as good as the ones of the photographers who live up there, and the financial rewards will rarely even pay for the petrol.

Staying closer to home can be difficult, I still hanker after photographing all the amazing range of wildlife in the UK but I think I will definitely concentrate most of my photography on projects close to where I live. I can’t compete with the millions of images of stunning quality offered by the large number of workshops anymore, so it’s silly to try to. My way forward now is to work on things that they don’t offer, I find it far more refreshing and fulfilling. The SNPF showed me that this is the way forward.

Thanks to Pete Cairns, mine host extraordinaire, Chris Gomersall, Jamie Hall, Colin Prior, Richard Shucksmith, Neil Aldridge, Theo Bosboom, Alex Hyde, Alex mustard and Laurie Campbell, a stunning array of the best wildlife photographers today.  And to Mark Hamblin, good to catch up and for the following images.