Britain Landscape & Wildlife Photography Portfolio
Britain may be a relatively small island, but its landscapes are wonderfully varied – from Atlantic coastlines and windswept moors to tranquil lakes, ancient woodlands and dramatic mountain scenery. Having photographed extensively across the country, I've built up a collection of images that explores both Britain's iconic landscapes and the quieter details that make each region distinctive.
Browse the galleries below to explore Britain's landscapes, wildlife and wild places through my photography, or use the quicklinks in the 'Featured Regions' section below to go straight to the area you're interested in.
Featured Regions in Britain
Cornwall
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Cornwall’s wave-gnawed Penwith Peninsula takes the brunt of anything the Atlantic hurls at Britain. It’s what makes it such a compelling photographic destination. As well as feisty seas, this gnarled granite outpost, with its fortress headlands, smugglers’ coves and stoic fishing villages, is also bathed in subtle, ever-changing light. An Atlantic front, bruised and sullen, can bluster through, leaving diamond-bright sunlight sparkling in its wake. This portfolio also contains images from the North Cornwall coast, Bodmin Moor and South Cornwall's fishing villages.
North Devon
North Devon is spoilt for dramatic scenery. One of Britain’s least visited national parks, Exmoor is small (about 170,000 acres) but punches way above its weight with everything from heather moors and ancient woodland to towering sea-cliffs and deserted, pebble-strewn beaches. Further west, the Hartland Peninsula has been chewed into a jagged maw of shark-tooth rocks; ridges of black Carboniferous shale biting into the sea – the contorted strata in the cliff faces bearing testament to colliding continents 300 million years ago. It's a spectacular destination for seascape photography.
Dartmoor
Dartmoor has a split personality – it’s one of the main reasons why I find the 236,000-acre national park so rewarding as a photographer. There’s a rugged side of rolling moorland pockmarked with wind-scoured granite tors. Lonely hawthorns hunker down in swathes of quivering heather. It’s big-sky country, clouds whipping overhead on a brisk westerly, while underfoot the upland bogs squelch and ooze. Then there’s the green, leafy side of Dartmoor – secret, shady valleys where rivers flow through jumbled, moss-covered boulders. Oak, maple and beech arch overhead – not the wind-pruned trees of the open moors, but exuberant woodlands with dense canopies.
Dorset
On the Dorset coast, the sea has gnawed through Portland limestone to create the rock-arch at Durdle Door. Perhaps the most striking coastal feature of all is Chesil Beach, an 18-mile-long stretch of shingle sweeping from West Bay to the Isle of Portland. All of these provide rich pickings for seascape photographers. Occasionally, though, you will want to switch focus inland. The Dorset countryside is equally photogenic. Corfe Castle ruins are a must, but there are also ancient churches, stunning bluebell woods and even an avenue of beech trees to track down.
Sussex
The West Sussex coast and South Downs is a landscape crying out for a zoom lens – or at least a few lenses covering a wide range of focal lengths. On a typical day here, I might start with a wide-angle lens to capture sunrise breathing fire into clouds towering above the downs. By lunchtime, I could be focused on abstract compositions of surf-strafed sea defences, using a 50mm lens to capture textures and patterns. As for sunset, it’s not unusual for me to reach for a telephoto lens to isolate the silhouette of a distant church spire or look for details in Brighton's old West Pier.
London
Viewpoint, I tend to find, is the single most important factor in unleashing your creativity when photographing London. It’s all about getting low to exaggerate perspective or catch a reflection in a pavement puddle; using shiny metal parapets of bridges or the glass-lined chasms of shopping malls to frame, reflect and contrast classic buildings, and looking for stairs, railings or even an exposed slipway at low tide to lead your eye towards the historic wonders of London.
Cotswolds
The Cotswolds have been my home for over 20 years, so I confess to being slightly biased in extoling the virtues of a photography break here. It’s a gentle, subtle landscape where compositions are often inspired by something as simple as a lone church spire or plough lines in a field. There’s no coastline or headline-grabbing waterfall, but you might well find yourself captivated by the reflections in a shallow trout stream or village pond. This is big-sky country, especially where the limestone escarpment of the Cotswold Edge falls away to the north and west. You’ll be reaching for both wide-angle and telephoto lenses to capture the distant folds of sheep-speckled hills, just as a macro lens will come in handy for abstract close-ups of rusty barns, thatched cottages and ancient church doorways.
Norfolk
As you travel along the north Norfolk coast, the tides will also be foremost in your mind. Are you looking for low tide when estuaries shrink to snaking ribbons of water, or a rising tide when waves are sluicing through the wooden posts of beach groynes? Planning each day of photography to synchronise with these diurnal rhythms is one of the joys (and challenges) of photography here. Also shown in this gallery are Cromer Pier (an excellent nightime subject), Thurne Mill in the Broads and fishing boats – high and dry – in Southwold on the Suffolk coast.
Peak District
Dark Peak – the higher, wilder part of the Peak District National Park – is defined by Millstone Grit, which has been scoured and chiselled by frost, wind and rain to create a dramatic landscape of gritstone edges, rolling plateaux and narrow ravines, or cloughs. Crowning the summits, mushroom-shaped tors like the Salt Cellar are lapped by a purple tide of heather. The White Peak in the central and southern part of the national park is a gentler plateau of limestone, riddled with caves and gouged by valleys cloaked in hay meadows and dense woodlands of ash, oak and beech. The two contrasting landscapes – Dark Peak and White Peak – offer endless inspiration for photography.
Yorkshire
From minimalist moorland to crowded coast, the North York Moors National Park offers photographers an exciting range of possibilities: lone trees lost on the moors, waterfalls tumbling through leafy gorges, carpets of heather, cobblestone streets, rusty shipwrecks and raucous seabird citadels. When taking photographs in the YorkshireDales, I often find that my compositions are heavily influenced by horizontal and vertical lines: waterfalls pouring in barcode stripes over parallel bands of limestone; a viaduct leapfrogging a valley; lone trees rearing from the exposed strata of upland scars.
Lake District
The Lake District is one of the most photographed landscapes in Britain, yet it feels fresh and inspiring every time I return. It must be something to do with the way the light slips across the fells, pooling in valleys, dancing on lakes. Mist, cloud, reflections, rainbows... there’s a conspiracy of elements in this land of rocky crags and sparkling water. It’s intensely familiar to me, but I never know what to expect. In the space of a single day, you can frame mirror-still reflections on Rydal Water, then be high on a ridgeline looking down on drystone walls snaking through the Mickleden Valley. You can’t help but notice how the Lake District has been sculpted by glaciation, then etched by thousands of years of human activity. Along with the ever-changing light, it’s what makes landscape photography in the Lakes so rewarding
Northumberland
Northumberland’s coast has a stark, compelling beauty. Light shifts constantly across wide skies and open sands, and ancient structures appear less like landmarks and more like elements of the land, sprouting from dunes and headlands. Photographing here is about noticing subtle changes; the way wet sand mirrors the wind-raked clouds, or how a few seconds of low evening light burnishes a castle’s towers. The photographic highlights of Northumberland are spaced like markers along its coast. Alnwick Castle, although a few miles inland, offers rich rewards, its architecture dense with detail and steeped in history. From there, the coast sweeps northwards to Dunstanburgh Castle, a skeletal ruin standing above Embleton Bay where waves course through smooth boulders of glistening dolerite.
Brecon Beacons
I love connecting with the geology of a region when I’m out taking photographs. In places like Bannau Brycheiniog (Brecon Beacons)it helps me understand a region’s rich variety of landscapes and its connection to the past. The Old Red Sandstone visible in the north of the national park was laid down in a desert over 400 million years ago, while the harder Brownstones forming the distinctive northern scarp and plateau-like summits of Bannau Brycheiniog were deposited later in the Devonian period. Unlike these pinkish sandstones that underlie the mountains, the southern flanks of Bannau Brycheiniog consist of younger limestones, mudstones and grits, deposited in a tropical sea 100 million years later. Add a dash of water from the uplands and it’s the perfect recipe for caves, sinkholes and gorges to form. Without that geological foundation, park’s ‘Waterfall Country’ wouldn’t exist.
Gower Peninsula
A mere 16 miles from tip to toe, the Gower is small but perfectly formed – a bay-notched appendix dangling from South Wales that’s packed with photographic potential. It’s tempting to make a beeline for Rhossili at the western end of the peninsula. Walking out on to the headland above this spectacular 3-mile-long scimitar of sand, it’s hard to imagine you were driving through the suburbs of Swansea 30 minutes earlier. Other highlights include Three Cliffs Bay with its dragon-back promontory jutting into a jade-green sea, Whiteford Point Lighthouse and Neolithic Arthur’s Stone.
Pembrokeshire
As the only national park in Britain designated primarily for its coastal landscape, a photography break in Pembrokeshire can take you from the seaside town of Tenby to the clifftops of Skomer Island – from bucket-and-spade to puffin parade. Along the way, you’ll witness an extraordinary variety of seascapes, such as the sandy swathe of Freshwater West, the impressive sea arch known as the Green Bridge of Wales and quirky St Govan’s Chapel, wedged tightly into the cliffs. I can’t think of another stretch of coastline in Britain that condenses so much photographic potential into such a small area.
Snowdonia
Slate quarrying is deeply etched into the heritage landscape of Snowdonia – or Eryri in Welsh, spoiling photographers with a wealth of abstract studies. And when you’re not walking in the footsteps of miners or scaling 3,560ft Snowdon (Yr Wyddfa), the highest mountain in Wales, there are patches of ancient woodland to explore, as well as the breathtaking coastline of nearby Anglesey. Classic shots include the lone tree at Llyn Padarn.
Trossachs
Rucked up into no fewer than 21 Munros (the highest being Ben More at 3,852ft), Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park protects a swathe of mountains, lochs and forests. Shaped by ever-changing light and weather, it’s a place of mood and contrast, offering photographers plenty of inspiration. Early morning brings a hush over the lochs, where the light breaks slowly through the mist and the islands emerge like ghostly shapes. A little later, the wooded glens come to life – shafts of light piercing the canopy and casting dancing patterns on mossy forest floors and effervescent streams. A dawn shoot on the loch shore might give way to waterfall-hunting in the afternoon, and by sunset, you could be on a summit like Ben A’an, watching pink-blushed clouds roll over the hills. The roads and trails here lend themselves perfectly to a photographer’s rhythm: pull over, explore, pause, shoot, move on.
Glencoe
You would be hard pressed to find a more beautiful or varied area of upland scenery in Britain that can be so easily explored in just two or three days than Glencoe. I love the fact that, with an early start, I could be squelching across Rannoch Moor in the morning, pottering along the winding lane through Glen Etive by lunchtime and setting up my tripod at Buachaille Etive Mòr in time for sunset. And just as the A82 allows you to round up several viewpoints in a single day, it also provides straightforward access for half- or full-day hikes. Nearby highlights worth photographing include the Ciorpach shipwreck near Fort William and Ben Nevis.
Isle of Skye
For all its famous and well-photographed landmarks – like the Quiraing, the Fairy Pools and Old Man of Storr – it’s Skye’s dynamic weather and constantly shifting light that makes every visit feel like the first. The best photographs come not from chasing the iconic, but from noticing the subtle. Skye is a place where everything is in motion: water, wind, colour, cloud. Take your time to tune into its moods and rhythms. There are also plenty of less-visited spots to explore with your camera. Take Brother’s Point, for example. If you wander down the track to this wave-wreathed headland, jutting from the Trotternish Peninsula like a bony finger, you might be lucky enough to spot an otter squirming through rockpools and cavorting in the surf. Talisker Bay, meanwhile, is all about abstracts and patterns – its two-tone sands an intriguing blend of black and white grains. Even at Elgol, on a pilgrimage to the iconic sunset spot, it’s the details of the shoreline that will catch your eye as much as the Black Cuillins marching along the horizon.
Photography Weekends Britain
Discover Britain's best landscapes and wildlife through the lens of award-winning photographer Will Gray.
My book Photography Weekends Britain explores 25 of the country's most rewarding locations for photography, with practical advice on where to go, what to photograph and how to make the most of the light.
British Wildlife
Successful wildlife photography depends on understanding behaviour: when otters are most active, where red kites gather to roost, how puffins circle into the wind before landing. This knowledge lets you anticipate shots rather than chase them. Respect is vital. Never harass wildlife. Stick to paths or hides where provided, and remember that the welfare of the animal always comes before the photograph. A telephoto lens is your best friend. A 300mm is a good starting point, but many photographers use 400–600mm to get closer without disturbing animals. As with landscapes, light is everything. Early morning and late afternoon are not only the times when many species are at their most active, but the light during these times can add drama, colour or softer, more sympathetic treatment of fur and feathers. Seasonality, meanwhile, shapes opportunities. Spring heralds the return of seabirds to their clifftop colonies. Summer sees dolphins feeding closer inshore; autumn is peak time for observing deer and squirrels in golden woodland settings, while winter is the season to head to the coasts of Britain in search of pupping grey seals.
