About Christopher Harrison

I'm Christopher Harrison, a self-taught landscape and nature photographer based in the South of England. I graduated with a Mathematics degree from Newcastle University in 2012. Now, I work in technology for a global publisher - a career that started with my first job out of university with IBM on their graduate scheme. For most of my life I assumed I wasn't creative, being a logic-driven maths guy. Photography changed my mind about that.

What I'm after is atmosphere rather than spectacle. Fog, frost, snow, storm light, the ten minutes after sunrise when mist is still burning off a field. Most of it happens within an hour of my front door, in the beechwoods of the Chilterns and along the Thames Valley. Shooting close to home is the part I enjoy most, because it turns the ordinary and familiar into something worth standing in front of and capturing. Travel still matters to the portfolio, but the local work is where I've honed the craft.

This means going back, again and again, to the same places. The same woodland can look ordinary for ten mornings and extraordinary on the eleventh. I've learnt to scout compositions in winter for a bloom that arrives in May, and to accept that most early alarms end in flat grey light. Even then, I don't think I've ever regretted getting out for a sunrise.

How I got here

My dad shot film on an Olympus OM-10, and family holidays came with a ritual I loved: a finite number of frames, and no way of knowing what you had until weeks later. That was enough to inspire me to get my own camera, so I kindly asked Santa. I chose an early Sony DSLR as my 'big' Christmas present in my early teens, a camera that came with me on every day out and trip away. An a6000 followed, and then the a7R IV I shoot with now.

I would always carry my camera with me but I hadn't always taken it seriously. It was more of a thing I just loved doing - capturing photographs from my travels. That changed on honeymoon in Vietnam in 2022, when it occurred to me that I had a lot of photographs, some of them were decent, and I might as well put them somewhere. That's when I started the Instagram account, with zero expectations.

What followed was mostly humbling. The more I looked, the more I found work several levels above mine, landscapes from all over the world, shot by people who seemed to know something I didn't. Working out what that was meant getting out more, upgrading gear, and reading forecasts religiously.

It worked, slowly. Thick fog in the beechwoods. Sunbeams landing on bluebells. Crepuscular rays seen from above, from the drone. What actually changed was simpler than technique: being in the right place, and being ready.

Since setting up my social media, I've been blown away. Photographers I admired and respected became followers, and some of them have even became friends in real life. Instagram is often talked down of and spoken of negatively - but for me, it's allowed me to learn, grow and make genuine connections. The 2022 me would be very impressed with where we are today, I reckon.

Competitions, and getting them wrong first

I started entering competitions early, mainly out of curiosity. Looking back, the work wasn't ready, and for a while the results said so. But those early failures turned out to be the most useful thing I did: seeing my own photographs sitting next to the ones that placed showed me exactly where the gap was. Being self-taught, this feedback loop was invaluable.

So I iterated. What changed things was learning to read a forecast. Humidity, wind, temperature, dew point. Working out which conditions produce mist and which merely promise it, then arranging early alarms around a full-time job and a growing family. Knowing a handful of places properly, so that when the conditions do arrive I know exactly where to stand. Being there, being ready. This doesn't always remove the 'location anxiety', but it helps the decision making process!

Results have improved over the past couple of years, but I still have no expectations when I enter. Any placing is a surprise, and opening an email with 'news' in the subject line is still gets the nerves going. Choosing which competitions to enter and which photographs to submit is a part I enjoy as part of my process. As someone largely self-taught who 99% of the time works alone, it's this process that forces me to be properly critical of my own work.

I feel very fortunate to have won several competition categories, most notably the British Photography Awards (Drone & Landscape), the Drone Photo Awards (Nature - 1st Place), the British Wildlife Photography Awards (British Seasons Winner), Glanzlichter (Highlight, Plants & Fungi) and the Travel Photographer of the Year (Rising Talent Winner). You can see all of my awards on my Awards page.

From the air

I've flown a drone for six or seven years, long before any of this work was online. It started as an interest in the technology, and a fascination with aviation. I think this has now become a part of my photography that does set my work apart. The overhead view changes what you can capture in a fundamental way. Seen from eye level a fallen tree in a loch is a fallen tree; seen from directly above it becomes something else entirely - still recognisably a tree, but standing again, against a sky that isn't there.

These days my drone of choice is a DJI Mavic 3 Pro. I also hold a Private Pilot's Licence, which means the occasional chance to photograph from a light aircraft rather than a drone.

A note on where

I don't share precise locations for smaller woodlands, and I don't geotag. Bluebells take years to establish and a single footstep undoes them. I stay on paths, I follow the Nature First principles, and I'd gently encourage anyone photographing these places to do the same.

Well-known locations are different. If a place is already on every map, at home or abroad, my naming it won't change the footfall there, so I'll say where it is. It's a decision I make each time rather than a blanket rule. The chase is most of the pleasure anyway.

The prints

Every print sold here is printed by me, on my own printer, signed by hand and packed at my kitchen table. Nothing is drop-shipped from a warehouse. There's more on paper, signing and editions on the prints page.