As mentioned in my Surrey and Portsmouth post, work has been one of the reasons I’ve travelled more over the last three years since getting my camera.
One of my work trips was a little different from the rest. In autumn 2024, the meeting wasn’t in the UK but in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Of course, I wasn’t going to let that opportunity pass, so I booked a few extra days before and after the meeting.
I was amazed by the natural beauty of the country. I spent half of the trip exploring Ljubljana and the other half visiting places outside the city, including the famous Lake Bled and Postojna Cave.
A couple of weeks before the trip, I had joined a photography group back home to help me improve my photography. It was still very early in my journey, and the group had only covered the basic technical aspects of photography. Even so, the natural beauty of Slovenia, and especially Lake Bled, made me realise that perhaps I had some good instincts.
I had almost no knowledge of composition at the time, yet the photos I captured during this trip were the first ones I genuinely liked. Of course, when I look at them now, I can see smaller or bigger composition mistakes, but they were the first photographs that made me feel I might actually be getting somewhere.
This trip, together with my second visit to Scotland—the first trip I took into nature after becoming more familiar with composition and giving more thought to each shot—made me realise something else. When the environment is beautiful and the conditions are good, almost anyone can take a good photograph of it.
It was also during this trip that I realised how much I love landscape photography. It may not be particularly difficult from a technical point of view, but finding new landscapes means travelling, and travelling isn’t always easy to come by. Perhaps that is also part of the appeal: there is always another place to discover, another landscape to photograph, and another opportunity to get it a little bit better.
