Why I Photograph the British Countryside in Black and White
There are easier places to be a landscape photographer in the UK. The Scottish Highlands will give you drama on demand. The Lake District hands you postcard views at every turn. Cornwall — and I say this as a Cornishman — has coastline that does half the work for you. The Chiltern Hills, on the other hand, ask something different of you. They ask you to look properly.
I am a UK black and white landscape photographer based in the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire, and I have been walking and photographing this area for long enough to know that it rewards patience and familiarity more than any grand gesture. The Chilterns are my local stomping ground — where the bulk of my walking and photography happens. Once or twice a year I try to get further afield with my dog Elvis for a camping trip, and the last few years we have managed the South Downs, Exmoor and the Cotswolds. When I get the chance — not as often as I would like — I head back home to Cornwall. But it is the Chiltern Hills I keep returning to, and it is the Chilterns that have taught me most about how to look at a landscape properly.
It is not a landscape that shouts. It is a landscape that, if you keep returning to it, gradually reveals itself in ways that genuinely surprise you. This is why I shoot black and white. And this is why the Chilterns, for all their apparent ordinariness, turn out to be very good for it.
Why Black and White
This isn't about making my photography look more serious or artistic. I shoot black and white because it is genuinely how I see — and I mean that literally. I spent years shooting only black and white film, and somewhere along the way my eye stopped registering colour as the primary information in a scene. Now when I look at a landscape, I am reading it in tone and contrast before anything else. Colour has become almost secondary. When I am out on a walk in the Chiltern Hills with my camera, I am not looking at colour. I am looking at light, tone, shape and texture. Colour is actually a distraction from those things, and removing it — or never having it in the first place, which is essentially what shooting black and white JPEG does — forces both the photographer and the viewer to engage with what is actually there.
Black and white doesn't necessarily make a photograph more interesting — it just stops colour doing the work for you. If a scene has nothing going for it once you remove colour, it has nothing going for it full stop. That is a useful filter. It means that what ends up in my gallery has earned its place on the strength of what is actually there — a strong shape, an interesting relationship between elements, light that is doing something worth recording. Not because it happened to be a nice day.
The Chiltern Hills countryside lends itself to this approach particularly well. The landscape here is made up of rolling chalk hills, ancient beech woodland, open farmland, small market towns, historic villages and working farms. It is a landscape of detail and layering, and black and white photography handles layered detail better than colour does. When everything is reduced to tone, depth and texture, the eye can navigate a complex scene more easily. The woodland becomes a pattern. The field becomes a surface. The path becomes a line.
What I Am Actually Photographing
Landscape photography tends to get lumped into one big category, and for most people that means grand sweeping vistas, snow-capped mountain scenes with lakes in the foreground — idyllic, pristine scenery with no human interference. The reality for most of us is very different. A landscape scene includes roads, telegraph poles, mobile phone masts, buildings. There is no escaping human intervention within the landscape unless you really are out in the wilds, and even then — especially here in the UK — you will rarely come across a scene that hasn't been touched by human hand in some way. That is partly why I have started to think of my work less as landscape photography and more as rural or countryside photography. It feels more honest about what I am actually making.
I am not chasing dramatic golden hour light on mountain summits. I am not travelling to remote locations for once-in-a-lifetime conditions. I am walking routes in Buckinghamshire and the wider Chiltern Hills area that I know reasonably well, with a Sony DSLR, shooting handheld, making black and white JPEG images of what I find. The Chilterns is a lived-in, working landscape — farms still in active use, paths worn down by generations of walkers, villages that have been there long before photography existed. I try to pick out pieces of that. Village architecture. Windmills. Bridges. The kind of rural English countryside that most people drive past without stopping.
This is deliberate. I believe that landscapes photographed with attention and honesty have just as much to offer as spectacular ones. The Chiltern Hills are a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, but that designation does not mean they are obviously dramatic. What they are is genuinely beautiful in an understated way, and that kind of beauty requires a certain kind of looking.
Black and white photography is very well suited to that kind of looking. It slows the process down. It focuses attention. It encourages you to ask what is actually interesting about this scene, rather than relying on colour to carry it.
Returning to the Same Places
One of the things I have learned from photographing the Chiltern Hills repeatedly over time is the value of returning to the same locations across different seasons and different conditions. This is not about waiting for the perfect shot. It is about understanding how a place changes and what those changes reveal.
A footpath that looks unremarkable in summer can become a strong image in winter when the frost picks out the worn ground and the bare trees either side create a natural frame. A farm that blends into the surrounding landscape on an overcast day becomes something else entirely when the light drops low and rakes across the fields. The landscape is not static, and neither is the photography.
This is particularly relevant for black and white countryside photography because the tonal relationships between elements in a scene shift dramatically with the light and the season. A scene that produces a flat, uninteresting black and white image in one set of conditions can produce something genuinely striking in another. You only find this out by going back.
For photographers interested in UK landscape photography, the Chilterns offer a very practical advantage here. They are accessible. You do not need to plan an expedition or travel significant distances to photograph them. If you live anywhere in or around Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire or Bedfordshire, you are within reach of some genuinely rewarding countryside photography, and the compact nature of the area means that returning to favourite locations is straightforward.
The Countryside Itself
The Chiltern Hills run roughly from the Thames Valley near Goring in Oxfordshire up through Buckinghamshire and into Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. The area covers around 833 square kilometres and is characterised by its chalk escarpment, its beech hangers — the steep hillside woodland that clings to the escarpment edge and defines much of the Chilterns' character — its river valleys — the Chess, the Misbourne, the Wye — and its network of footpaths and bridleways.
From a photography perspective, the variety within a relatively small area is one of the Chilterns' strengths. You can be on open hilltop farmland with long views in one direction, and within twenty minutes find yourself in a narrow beech woodland with a completely different quality of light and a completely different set of photographic possibilities. Village churches, country estates, working farms, the towpaths of the Grand Union Canal near Tring, chalk downland — all of it within a reasonably short drive or walk of each other.
For black and white landscape photography specifically, the Chilterns offer strong material across all seasons. Winter is perhaps the most rewarding for my approach — bare trees, frost, low light, minimal colour distraction and a clarity to the landscape that summer foliage obscures. But autumn has its own qualities, particularly in the beech woodland, and spring brings a softness to the light that sits well in black and white even without the leaves fully out.
Summer is the most challenging season for black and white countryside photography in my experience. The landscape is full and green and the light is often flat and high. But even then, early mornings and overcast days produce usable conditions, and the discipline of finding strong images in difficult light is ultimately good for your photography.
Equipment and Approach
Good black and white landscape photographs do not require expensive equipment — and I say that from experience rather than as a comforting theory. I shoot with Sony DSLR bodies — an A350 and an A700 — that are well over a decade old. Both cameras are set to shoot JPEG only within my workflow, meaning I do not shoot RAW files and do not do extensive post-processing. The black and white conversion happens in camera, and what I edit in post is minimal — contrast, exposure adjustments, nothing dramatic. I shoot mostly in manual mode, which means setting aperture, shutter speed and ISO myself for every frame — though aperture priority has its place and I wouldn't dismiss it. In many ways my approach mirrors how I shoot on film — considered, deliberate, with no assumption that anything can be fixed later. I still shoot film, though less often than I used to, and that discipline has carried over into how I work digitally. When you cannot rely on volume or post-processing to bail you out, you learn to get it ‘pretty close’ in camera, and that habit improves everything else you do.
The Walk Comes First
There is one thing that probably defines my approach more than anything else: I am a walker who photographs, not a photographer who walks — but that doesn't mean my images are any less deliberate. It shapes everything about how the photography happens.
You are walking at your own pace, paying attention to what is around you, and occasionally something stops you. It might be something you have walked past a dozen times before and never noticed until today. That is the only difference between getting a shot and not getting one — you were paying attention at the right moment.
This approach produces a different kind of photography to the kind that involves tripods, carefully chosen positions and extended waits for the right light. It is less controlled and more responsive. Some days you come back with very little. Other days something catches the light at exactly the right moment and you were there with a camera in your hand. Both outcomes are part of the same process and neither is a failure.
It also means the walk itself stays enjoyable. I have never understood the approach that turns a day in the countryside into a purely technical exercise. The Chiltern Hills are worth being in for their own sake, and a camera should add to that experience rather than reduce it to a series of locations to be ticked off.
The Argument for Ordinary Landscapes
Like I mentioned earlier there is a version of landscape photography that is essentially about travel and spectacle — getting to impressive locations and recording impressive views. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is not the only version, and it is not the one that interests me most.
The photography that I find most compelling, both to make and to look at, pays attention to familiar places and finds something worth looking at within them. The Chiltern Hills countryside is full of that kind of material — farms, paths, villages, woodland, open fields — and black and white photography is the right language for it because it demands that the content of the image justifies itself on tonal and compositional terms alone.
If you are a UK photographer looking for landscape material that does not require a long drive or a dramatic location, the Chilterns are worth serious attention. Bring a decent camera, wear decent boots, and keep coming back to the same places. The landscape will show you things it does not show anyone who only passes through once.
I document my walks and photographs here on Walking With Pics, alongside photography blogs about equipment and approach, and a growing gallery of black and white images from the Chiltern Hills and beyond. There are no grand ambitions behind it — just a photographer, a dog, and a landscape that rewards the effort.