2025 - My Landscape Photography Year in Review

Welcome to my final blog of 2025! I’m going to take a couple of weeks away from writing this once I have published this entry and I thought it would be good to take a look back at what’s gone in my photography world this year and to have a look ahead to the new year and what it has in store. The images I share in this blog are some of my favourites from this year, I hope you like them!

These blogs take a lot of writing, usually on a Sunday evening whilst I am consuming some non-photgraphy related YouTube and thinking about the week ahead. I reckon it takes me anything up tp two hours to write one of these and do all of the back end “nerdy” stuff, so I am hoping have a couple of weeks away from it will leave me feeling reinvigorated come the new year.

It’s been quite a year in many ways, I’ve moved jobs a couple of times and feel busier than ever. Photography remains the constant theme in my spare time and the thing that I love to spend the most of my time doing, yet I don’t feel like I have had a lot of time to do as much of it as I would like. Try as I might, work is very busy and takes a lot of my energy and this is something I really want to address in the new year.

I’ve had some great times shooting this year, but I think that one of my favourites was when I went out for a spontaneous evening’s shooting in poor conditions, with a blog post about it being foremost in my mind. What an evening it was. As I pulled up at the location, the heavens opened and I was expecting a complete washout.

What ended up happening was one of the most incredible 15 minutes of light I have ever had as a photographer. It goes to show that in order to get the shots and to see the light, you have got to be there, and being there is another thing I plan to work on in the new year.

I am not one for making resolutions, but what I do like to do is to try and work on some things that I need to improve and I always try and learn at least one new skill (previous years have seen me learning to make cocktails, card magic (don’t ask me to do any of that because I have forgotten all but one trick) and golf (this one actually went quite well, and I was an 8 handicap at one point , but photography won out and I could only afford one money pit!). I don’t quite know what this skill is going to be this year, but I do know it is going to be something photographic; you can expect blogs about it when I have made a decisions and committed to it.

So what else has happened for me? I got some new photo kit: A 16-35mm lens, a 2x teleconverter and a 105mm macro lens. I love two of these and those are the lenses. I am not a huge fan of the teleconverter, and if you have read my review of it, you’ll know that I got it instead of the 150-600mm Sigma telephoto. I don’t regret the teleconverter, I enjoy using it for what it’s meant for, I just don’t love what it produces. The lesson here is that even though I don’t love it, I can still use it to develop a skill sets and see compositions I might have otherwise missed.

At some point, I will sell it and upgrade to a decent telephoto but that’s going to mean I need to sell some prints and to do that, I need to get my print shop back open.

Speaking of the print shop, if you’ve been here a while or are a regular on the site, you will have seen that this has been closed for a while. This is down to nothing other than a lack of time to get the images I want to sell edited for print and then listed on the site. It’s on my to do list for the new year, I just need to organise my time a little better to allow me to get it done. At the moment, my printer is gathering dust and I want to get it fired up again!

I’ve got some upgrades planned for the studio as well. This is going to involve adding some more work-surface, some better light to work by and some better space organisation. I want to ‘up’ my product and still life photography output and having a more workable space is going to be really important in allowing me to do this efficiently and to the standard it needs to be. It’s something I have been neglecting and if I want to move out of my home studio and into a dedicated space, I need to make sure that I am shooting and putting personal projects out there.

Social media has been a but hit and miss, I haven’t been consistent for much of the year, but for the last three months I have managed to post (almost) every day, and this is something I want to try and keep up in the new year.

If you’re not already following then please head to my Instagram feed and drop me a follow, it really helps me out, especially since I have had to start from scratch after my previous account was lost with getting on for 10k followers!

Another thing that I want to do this year is to explore more of The Lake District. I have lived here for almost 3 years but I don’t feel like I have even scratched the surface. It really is a landscape photographer’s playground, but I have fallen into a bit of a trap.

That trap is realising I have got comfortable with a small number of locations, and these are my go-to’s because I know them. I like them and they are close to home. All of this is lovely, but reflecting on this makes me see that what I am wasting time in these locations if I keep going back constantly.

I have a list of places already planned out that I would like to visit and I want to tick these off over the course of the year.

Overall, 2025 has been a decent year for me in terms of my development as a photographer; I have learned a lot, haven’t shot enough and still have a lot to learn about landscape photography, which I am finding a lot more challenging than I did when I was doing street and cityscapes when I still lived in London.

So what else?

This has been quite the year both photographically and on a more personal level.

I am already looking forward to seeing what 2026 has in store for me, but I also know that a lot of this is down to me keeping my motivation up, getting out there to shoot and sharing my images and my learning with you.

All that remains now is to say thank you to all of you for reading this entry and for reading my blog throughout the last 12 months. It means a lot to see so many of you reading what I have to say, and I hope that you find it useful, interesting and maybe even a little bit entertaining at times.

Before I go, I would like to wish you a very happy & peaceful Christmas and a happy, safe and prosperous new year.

Stay safe,

Chris

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