This is a wonderful opportunity to join award-winning macro photographer Lee Frost for a day exploring one of his favourite sites in England, the extensive and peaceful 225 acre Whitfield Valley Nature Reserve.
Whitfield Valley is a macro photography wonderland, featuring a wide variety of habitats within its boundaries, including grassland, wetland, ponds, a hay meadow and areas of wildflowers. This mosaic of habitat means the site supports an excellent range of insects, including dragonflies and damselflies, longhorn beetles, weevils, and of course butterflies, including Dingy Skipper. The latter is a classic example of the wonders that can be wrought with a macro lens – often overlooked by observers as ‘just a small brown butterfly’, seen through the eyes and lens of a macro photographer their wings are a gorgeous confection of myriad shades.
And if that’s the transformation macro photography can perform with a brown butterfly, imagine what’s possible with more colourful invertebrates. With Lee’s guidance, you’ll be transported into the world of colour in a dragonfly’s eye, and dwell in the kaleidoscope of a beetle’s wingcase.
You’ll be in the best of hands – Lee, in the latest of a series of award titles, took the winner’s laurels in 2023 as ‘The Best British Macro Photographer’ at the British Photography Awards. His work has been featured by National Geographic, the BBC, and in newspapers worldwide, not to mention in a wide range of photography magazines and journals.
During your time with Lee he’ll be covering everything he knows, from general fieldcraft principles to the particular approaches and techniques best suited to certain insects; how to get the best from your camera, the settings to use, and which equipment enables the best images; image composition; and how to unlock the potential of image stacking.
The workshop will not be species specific. Instead, we will spend the day out in the field looking for a variety of different species. However, visiting the waterbodies early in the day usually produces good results with various damselfly and dragonfly species, and our early start is designed to maximise these opportunities.
This workshop should equip with you with not only wonderful images to take away as a memory of the day, but also techniques and information that will transform your macro photography and allow you to dive with confidence into the colourful world of the insects that are all around us. Above all, the day will be tremendous fun!
