My photography.
I’m a (very amateur) photographer with a love of nature and landscapes. Most of my photography happens on hikes with my family around the Chilterns; all of it happens with my trusty Sony a6000 with 16-50mm and 55-210mm lenses.
The Ridgeway II
Photographs from hiking another stretch of The Ridgeway national trail, also known as "Britain's oldest road". This is the Chinnor to Wendover stretch, passing through some of my favourite places: Pulpit Hill, the Grangelands nature reserve, and Coombe Hill.
Singapore
I travelled to Singapore just after joining the Ahrefs crew. It's a surreal place, an Asian Canary Wharf, all high-tec chrome and glass in the middle of a sweltering tropical peninsula. Someone described the country as "Asia for dummies", which explains why I had such a great time.
Stowe
Stowe is a National Trust property just outside of Buckingham, famous for its grand house and carefully manicured landscape gardens.
We visit from every few months (always forgetting that the walk to the entrance is substantial in its own right), and Reuben took some of his first steps here.
It's a beautiful place for photography, and I love the contrast between rigid Victorian architecture, all cold stone and straight lines, the burnt bronze of trees in autumn, and the soft, indistinct creams of the sheep that graze the surrounding lands.
Ivinghoe Beacon
The beacon at Ivinghoe is the start (or end) of the Ridgeway National Trail, an 86-mile hike through the heart of the Chilterns and out Westward.
I have always lived in the shadow of the Ridgeway, and feel a deep affinity for the place - despite a lack of buildings or monuments, there is a deep sense of history steeped throughout its slopes and grazes. People have visited the beacon for millennia, and I love the fact that it is still a place of reverence today.
I started my walk of The Ridgeway from Ivinghoe beacon at 5am one October morning.
Grangelands Reserve
Grangelands nature reserve forms the final stretch of a circular walk we love at Pulpit Hill in Princes Risborough.
Descending from the woodland and leaving the confines of the Bronze Age hillfort at its peak, you descend through sheep-grazed meadows, coils of wool caught on every bramble, join a short stretch of the Ridgeway National Trail, before entering into the Grangelands.
We're usually exhausted by this point, carrying the children on our backs, but the views of the treeline from the basin are always breathtaking - even on a grey day, as these photos show.
Floodplain III
I took this triptych on a walk near our house. The Winter light was low and intense, casting the textured bark of this tree in sharp relief. I love the depth of contrast that emerged when I processed the photos in monochrome.
Marsworth Reservoir
There's a cluster of reservoirs near where I grew up. I remember spending many hours walking their windswept circumference with my dad. We visited again when our eldest, Reuben, was around a year old.
The weather was bleak but the swans made for beautiful photos (I maintain that swans are essentially cheatcodes for photographers).
I prefer my 16-50mm lens for photography but here the 55-210mm really came into its own. I love the color contrast between water and reed.
