Five Reasons I Love Running Photo Tours
Putting together the perfect tour is never easy, but the results are always worth the effort
I started running workshops with Light & Land in 2025, although becoming a photographic tutor was something I had wanted to do for much longer. During my years as editor of Digital Photographer Magazine, a significant part of my job involved photo education. Every month, I would explain camera techniques, dissect images, suggest creative approaches and, hopefully, help readers get a little more from their photography. There was just one obvious limitation: those photographers were usually many miles away.
What I rarely had was the opportunity to stand beside somebody while they tried a technique for themselves, answer the inevitable questions that only appear once a camera is actually in your hands, or see their reaction when everything suddenly clicks. Running a photo tour changes that completely. Whether exploring a familiar UK city like Durham or leading a photography holiday abroad, teaching face-to-face has reminded me just how rewarding photography can be when it becomes a shared experience.
There’s Nothing Better Than A Eureka Moment
Photography contains a surprising number of concepts that seem unnecessarily complicated until the precise moment they suddenly make perfect sense. Hyperfocal distance, exposure compensation or the relationship between shutter speed and subject movement can sound rather abstract when explained on a page. Put somebody in front of a real subject, however, and the theory quickly becomes tangible.
That moment when a guest tries something, looks at the back of their camera and realises they have created exactly the effect they wanted is one of my favourite parts of being a photographic tutor. You can often see the thought process happening in real time. Better still is watching them repeat the technique independently later in the day. That is when you know something has genuinely sunk in rather than simply produced one lucky frame.
Seeing Familiar Places Differently
One of the most satisfying things about leading a photo tour is watching somebody discover photographic potential somewhere they thought they already knew. We all become visually immune to familiar places. Streets we have walked hundreds of times become routes from A to B rather than collections of colour, texture, light and shape.
Read more: A photographer’s Guide to Barcelona
Put a camera in your hands and suddenly the same place changes. A building you have barely noticed might become a study in symmetry, while an ordinary alleyway can spring to life when low sunlight reveals its textures. I particularly enjoy exploring cities for this reason. Travel photography does not always require travelling thousands of miles; sometimes the most important journey is simply learning to look at somewhere familiar from a completely different angle.
For me, this actually happened most notably on a Light&Land workshop. I attended fellow leader Bill Ward’s Impressions of Newcastle workshop a few years back, and I’ve never seen my hometown in quite the same way again.
Sharing The Enthusiasm
Photographers are capable of discussing cameras for an impressively long time. Possibly too long, according to the non-photographers in our lives. Put a group of enthusiastic image-makers together for several days, however, and that shared obsession becomes one of the great pleasures of a photography holiday.
Every guest arrives with different experiences, interests and ambitions, but everyone has photography in common. Conversations move effortlessly between favourite locations, equipment, techniques and images we wish we had taken. That enthusiasm is infectious. I might technically be there as the tutor, but I benefit enormously from the energy of the group. A good workshop is not a classroom with one person broadcasting information; it is a collection of photographers exchanging ideas while exploring somewhere interesting together.
Everyone Sees Something Different
Give six photographers the same location and you will rarely get six identical photographs. This is something that continues to fascinate me. One person will notice an architectural detail, another will concentrate on people, while somebody else might find an abstract composition in a reflection that everyone else has walked straight past.
I meet a lot of photographers through my work, yet I am still regularly surprised by somebody approaching a subject in a way I have never considered. That makes workshops an important part of my own photo education too. Seeing how another photographer interprets a scene encourages me to question my habits, experiment with different compositions and occasionally wonder why I completely failed to notice the excellent photograph somebody has just found three metres behind me.
Discovering Places Through Photography
Of course, another considerable perk is the travelling. I am fortunate that photography takes me to some remarkable places, both while scouting potential locations and when running the tours themselves. A recce is never simply about identifying attractive viewpoints. I am looking at how the light moves through a location, where the crowds gather and, most importantly, what makes the place visually distinctive.
When I return with a group, I often experience that destination afresh through their reactions. Watching somebody encounter a favourite viewpoint, street or landscape for the first time reminds me why I photographed it in the first place. Whether working in Britain or exploring another country, travel photography is ultimately about atmosphere. The challenge is not merely to record what somewhere looks like, but to communicate what being there actually feels like.
That, more than anything, is why I enjoy running tours. Photography may begin with an individual looking through a viewfinder, but it becomes far more interesting when ideas and experiences are shared. I invariably return from a workshop with new inspiration of my own, which seems like a pretty good arrangement for everyone involved.
Come on one of my tours and workshops with Light & Land and learn to see places in a whole new way.