Why a Long-Term Project Makes Photography Feel Less Repetitive

Landscape photography can settle into a loop: scout a spot, wait for light, take the frame, go home, and do it again next weekend. That routine produces some beautiful single images, but a hard drive full of unrelated pictures rarely adds up to a body of work you can show someone.

Ian Worth describes that same loop in his own shooting and says the thing it most often lacks is meaning. His photos can look moody or mystical, and then that's where it ends, with nothing linking one frame to the next. His answer is a long-term photography project, which he's tried before with a series called Between the Hills that covered local towns, villages, and abandoned buildings. That series turned out too broad to hold one strong narrative. It still did its job, though, because it surfaced smaller stories inside it that he could commit to for years. If you've been holding off on a project until you have the perfect concept, treating the first attempt as a scouting run takes a lot of the pressure off.

While working on Between the Hills, Worth kept a running list of project ideas on his phone, and he reads through it in the video. Some are simple enough to start this week. One location, 12 months, means returning to the same place every month and recording how the seasons change it. Your doorstep limits you to places within 5 miles of home, which forces you to find interest in what you walk past every day. Another idea asks you to photograph a single subject, such as one tree or one building, across a full year of weather, light, and compositions. These work because the constraint does the planning, leaving you free to look harder at what's in front of you. The rest of the list turns to light, seasonal color, people in the landscape, and minimalism.

The one he picked is number nine: a journey along a familiar route. For Worth, that route is the Golden Road, an ancient track that runs for about 7 miles along the ridge of the Preseli Hills in Pembrokeshire, roughly from Foel Eryr in the west to Foel Drygarn in the east. It's thought to be thousands of years old. One theory holds that it formed part of a longer trade route that brought Irish gold over Wales and on to Wessex in southern England. Beyond the Preselis, the road no longer appears on the map, so he plans to trace where it might once have run through the rest of Pembrokeshire and photograph the people and landscape he finds along the way. He has no idea how long that will take or where it ends up, and he treats that uncertainty as the point.

A project built around a route like this turns research into part of the photography. Old maps, place names, local history, and conversations with people who live along the line start deciding where you point the camera, so you spend less time chasing the same overlooks everyone else visits. It also changes how you edit. A quiet frame of a gate or a farmhouse that would never survive a cull on its own can earn a place when it moves the story forward, which is why Worth says not every image in a project has to be amazing. The approach suits you best if you live somewhere with deep history but few famous views, or if you can only shoot in short windows close to home. Give yourself a clear boundary, whether that's a line on a map, a fixed radius, or a set number of months, and write the brief in a single sentence before you start. A boundary keeps a project from sprawling the way Between the Hills did, and a one-line brief gives you a test for every frame you take.

To mark the start, Worth set up below the ridge one evening with the M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100mm f/4 IS PRO zoomed all the way to 100mm. His plan was to shoot a series of vertical frames and stitch them into a panorama covering the whole range. With about 15 minutes until sunset, the light was patchy, and the dappled sun moving across the hillsides made the wide view look messy. Rather than pack up, he started looking for a smaller detail he could isolate, a cluster of trees on the slope with Foel Eryr behind it, and waited to see whether the light would land in the right place.

Near the end of the video, Worth shows the single frame he settled on after abandoning the panorama: the cluster of trees, a town off to one side, and the ridgeline behind them.