Shooting unfamiliar terrain forces you to adapt fast. When the dramatic mountain backdrops you rely on aren't there, the images you make either show your range or expose your limits.
Coming to you from Steve O'Nions, this honest and unscripted video follows O'Nions into the Berwyn Hills of North Wales, a quiet, largely unphotographed area well outside Snowdonia National Park. He brings a Nikon F75 loaded with Ilford HP5 Plus and a yellow filter, paired with a 28-80mm lens, a deliberately minimal kit that keeps the pack light but puts a hard ceiling on reach. Without big mountain ranges to anchor his compositions, O'Nions quickly realizes he can't fall back on the layered, dramatic landscape shots he's built a style around. The rolling hills are beautiful, but at 80mm they look small, and the foreground grasses become his primary compositional tool for pulling the viewer's eye through the frame.
What makes the video worth watching is watching O'Nions work through the problem in real time. He's candid that the location didn't deliver what he hoped, and he says so plainly rather than pretending every frame was a success. Reaching the high point of the walk gave him 360-degree views and excellent skies to work with, and he makes a strong case for shooting from elevated ground when the surrounding landscape lacks dominant features. With no single element demanding attention, every direction became a viable option, and he followed the light accordingly. That kind of flexibility is easy to miss when you're fixated on a specific subject.
The forest section near the end of the walk is where things get genuinely interesting. O'Nions is the first to admit he fell into the trap of shooting rows of upright plantation trees, a composition he calls boring and clichéd. But he keeps moving and eventually finds what he was after: a single lighter tree in the foreground, surrounded by the soft, subtle tones of Ilford Delta 400 rendering the background trees into a quiet supporting cast. That shot ends up being his favorite of the day, and it's a good lesson in not settling for the first obvious frame a location offers. The half-second handheld exposure in the dark forest is also a small technical detail worth paying attention to, particularly if you shoot film without stabilization.
O'Nions doesn't wrap the walk up with a tidy success story. He's clear that it wasn't his finest day, but he also points out that working without his usual compositional tools forced him to think differently, and the resulting images are unlike anything in his existing portfolio. That tension between expectation and outcome is exactly what makes the video useful. Check out the video above for the full rundown from O'Nions.
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