It’s hard to overstate the difference that it makes to your skill as a photographer when you apply the discipline of taking at least one photo every single day. It can be difficult to find that photo on days when the weather is bad, or you’re tired, or you simply don’t feel like picking up a camera, but the house rule of Blipfoto is that the photo for each day’s post should have been taken on that day, and I’ve always stuck to that – there are ways of cheating it, of course, but why would you bother? Maybe other people wouldn’t know, but you would yourself.

When I look at my work across the years of this daily self-imposed practice, the two things I see most clearly are firstly the straightforward improvement in my level of competence (I don’t know how many hours I’ve spent peering through the viewfinder of a camera over the past few years, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it came somewhere close to the magical 1000), and secondly, my increasing fascination with the natural world, and desire to capture its beauty and variety. What began as a vague interest in taking photos of the birds and insects that visit my garden has grown to a passion that can take me far from home: owls in the Cotswolds, puffins on Skomer, gannets off the coast of Yorkshire, and Odonata… well, these days there’s nowhere in the country I wouldn’t go to photograph a handsome dragonfly or damselfly – but that’s a whole separate story.

Here are a few of my more recent images. I hope you like looking at them as much as I enjoyed taking them.

Hovering over a thumbnail will show its title; clicking on it will start a slide show of the images in that gallery, which can be paused or stopped at any time. Clicking on ‘i‘ at the bottom of the slide show pane will add an information panel to each image.

Birds

Butterflies and moths

Animals

Odonata

Other Invertebrates