Roundthe Corner

The Landscapes on Your Doorstep You Keep Forgetting About

There's a version of photography that involves booking flights and explaining to airport security why you need three camera bags. I have a lot of respect for photographers who do that work. But some of the best frames I've taken were within twenty minutes of home, on a morning when the light was doing something I hadn't planned for.

It's easy to look past what's close. You start thinking about places you haven't been, the locations that keep appearing on other photographers' social media, the landscapes that look like they couldn't possibly be in England. Suffolk and Norfolk are genuinely extraordinary if you catch them at the right moment. And that is the thing: the moment is everything.

Walberswick, Southwold, Dunwich: Extraordinary in the Right Light

The same location looks completely ordinary at three in the afternoon on a grey Wednesday. Get there at six on a clear June morning and it becomes something else entirely.

Walberswick Harbour is a good example. On an early summer evening, when the light is warm and the tide is in, you can stand at one end and photograph the whole harbour. The boats, the water, the reflections. It looks like it could be coastal France, or somewhere in Scandinavia. It is, in fact, twenty minutes down the A12. On a warm evening with distant rain on the horizon and the sky turning orange and gold, the light out towards the water can look almost African. That is not an exaggeration. Dunwich Woods has that same quality in the right conditions, mist in the trees and the light coming through at an angle. Southwold Pier in low autumn light is something I never get tired of.

The reason morning beats evening, more often than not, is simply that fewer people are around. You get the scene without the crowds. Nobody in the frame who didn't mean to be there. Golden hour exists twice a day, but the one at the start of the day is the quieter one.

I'll look out of the window at half past five or six and read what the day is going to do. If it's got that particular quality, a stillness, the right colour already on the horizon, I'll be in the car inside ten minutes. Sometimes it doesn't deliver. Sometimes it delivers more than you were expecting. You never quite know, and that uncertainty is part of what keeps it interesting.

You Don't Have to Go Every Morning

You don't have to do this every morning. The mornings when you do go and the light is right and you come back with something you couldn't have planned for, those are the ones that remind you why you picked up a camera in the first place.