Slow the shutter, steady the mind, and see your world anew.
The Quiet Call of the Walk & Photography for Mental Health
I find the best walks begin in stillness. Before the light has quite arrived, before the robins start their patient rehearsals, I’m already lacing my old boots. The roads that leads out of Tadley, skirting Baughurst Copse and the edge of the Nature Reserve, carries a particular hush at this hour — that rare, unguarded quiet which makes you feel you might hear the land breathing, my Mindful Photography Exercises and Photography for Mental Health.
My Canon R5 sits in my pack beside my old Bronica ETRSi, a decision not yet made between the immediacy of pixels and the patience of film. Some mornings the mood belongs to digital — fast dawn light, deer startled in the mist. Other days, it’s film that calls — a slower rhythm, each frame deliberate, like writing a letter to the world.
Either way, the walk is not about the photograph. It’s about the noticing: the flicker of a birds among birch branches, the scent of leaf mould rising after rain, the sense — hard to explain but always there — that something both ancient and kind is watching over me.
It is in that spirit these exercises were born.
Mindful Photography Exercises
1. Mindful Walking Photography – The Pause and Listen
📍 Location suggestion: Woodland path, Baughurst Nature Reserve
📷 Recommended gear: Canon R5 + 24–70mm lens
The woodland path through Baughurst Nature Reserve has a habit of quieting me. The light here falls softly, a pale wash through thin trees; even the birds seem to sing in half-tones.
Before taking the first photograph, I stand and listen — really listen. The whirr of a blackbird’s wing. The faint tremor of water reeds. My own breath.
When at last I raise the camera, it feels less like making an image and more like translating a silence. The photograph that follows is a by-product of waiting; a way of saying, I was here, and the world was kind enough to show itself.
Mindful cue: Take three deep breaths before you lift the camera. Wait until the landscape seems to exhale — then press the shutter.
2. The Texture Walk
📍 Option 1: Baughurst Copse
📍 Option 2: Silchester Road
📷 Recommended gear: Canon R5 + Sigma 105mm Macro
Both Baughurst Copse and the old Silchester Road offer extraordinary opportunities to explore texture—though they’re miles apart, so choose one per outing.
In the hedgerows, nature’s details are a symphony: lichen resembling dried sea-foam, hawthorn thorns polished smooth by the wind, and moss in shades of forest honey.
With the Sigma 105mm Macro, every shoot becomes intimate. Frost beads on curled oak leaves glisten, and spiderwebs span blackberries like delicate silver threads.
Take your time. Let your fingers find focus and your breath settle. At this scale, the world slows down—every millimetre holds a universe.
Mindful cue: Switch to monochrome and see how texture becomes music for the eyes. Let your fingertips imagine what the lens sees.
3. The Language of Light
📍 Ridge path, Watership Down
📷 Recommended gear: Canon R5 + 24–70mm landscape lens
The ridge above Watership Down teaches the grammar of light. Here, illumination doesn’t just fall — it wanders, it lingers, it forgets itself.
I walk the path with the 24–70mm lens, stopping every few steps as the sun breaks through ragged cloud. The hills breathe in gold and out shadow. Each shift feels like a benediction.
The key is not to chase it. Let the light lead. Photograph how it touches, not what it touches — the gleam of a puddle, the silhouette of grass against a paling sky.
Mindful cue: Slightly underexpose. Keep the mystery intact. Let darkness say as much as the light.
4. One Frame, Ten Minutes
📍 Gateway near Baughurst Copse
📷 Recommended gear: Bronica ETRSi (medium format film)
With film, I am forced to wait. I find a wooden gate looking over a fallow field and stay. Ten minutes. Maybe longer.
The light shifts from silver to grey. A crow stumbles across the sky. The wind stirs the grass and then holds its breath. The world moves, slowly, as if for me alone.
When the Bronica finally clicks, I feel a small ache — not because it’s over, but because that waiting had become a kind of prayer.
Mindful cue: Choose one frame. Watch it change until it changes you.
5. The Wildlife Watch
📍 Field edges near Baughurst Nature Reserve
📷 Recommended gear: Canon R5 + Sigma 150–600mm lens
The Sigma 150–600mm is my patient companion. With it, I learn humility.
On the field edge near the Nature Reserve, frost stiffens the grass. A hare rises out of it like breath made flesh. I don’t move. I barely breathe.
The moment passes; the hare vanishes. And still, I wait. Waiting becomes its own kind of image. Even without a photograph, I carry the scene inside me — unframed, unspoiled.
Mindful cue: Photograph less. Watch more. The field doesn’t owe you anything, and that’s what makes it sacred.
6. The Film Frame of Gratitude
📍 Lane toward Baughurst Copse or Silchester Common
📷 Recommended gear: Canon AE-1 or Canon EOS 300 (film)
With film, every click has consequence. I end each roll with what I call a gratitude frame — a final gesture of thanks to the day.
Sometimes it’s a puddle reflecting the last light. Sometimes it’s nothing at all — just a patch of lane and the quiet promise of home.
When the roll returns from development, that last frame is always imperfect. A little blurred, often underexposed. Yet it’s the one I treasure most.
Mindful cue: The last frame isn’t about perfection. It’s about presence. Say thank you through the lens.
7. The Return Walk
📍 Any familiar lane or footpath on your way home
📷 Recommended gear: Bronica or 24–70mm lens
On the way home, I turn and look back. It’s become a ritual — the backward glance, the farewell frame.
The same lane looks different in reverse: the puddles mirror the clouds now overhead; the hedges, moments ago ordinary, blaze with evening’s low gold. I take a photograph, not to remember, but to honour the passage.
The light thins, and I pocket the camera. My hands smell faintly of metal and damp earth. I think of the walk, the waiting, the looking — and how much of life hides in those quiet in-betweens.
Mindful cue: Photograph the return, not the arrival. The road home holds the echo of every step you’ve taken.
The Walk Home
By the time I reach the gate again, dusk has drawn a soft veil across the fields. Smoke lifts from a chimney in the distance, and somewhere a dog barks, faint and homely. I pause to listen — not for a shot this time, but for the closing of the day.
The cameras rest heavy now, but my mind feels lighter. I think about how often the act of looking closely has steadied me — through winter’s bare months, through days when the world feels blurred at the edges.
Mindful photography is a quiet rebellion against the speed of things. It’s a way to belong again — to the hedgerows, the birds, the earth beneath the boots.
Tomorrow, I’ll walk again. Perhaps I’ll take the Bronica this time, perhaps the Canon R5. But the real photograph, I know, will be taken long before I press the shutter — in the slow breathing of the land, and in the slower breathing of the man who’s learned to see it.