Matt Botwood Photography

Exploring the best locations in the Brecon Beacons, highlighting its beauty throughout the seasons.

Images from other locations in Wales including the Gower, The Glamorgan Heritage Coast and Cardiff.

Images taken in forests and woodland in the Brecon Beacons and elsewhere in the UK.

Signs of life on an alien planet? Aerial photography of a vast wild landscape? Rivers, lakes, forests and volcanic craters? Looking down from high on to another world these landscapes are not at first what they seem. I am constantly looking for more abstract worlds to photograph and different ways of representing the beauty of nature in the environment where I live. In the same way that we may look down on to the surface of another planet and marvel at the vast scale of the geographical features, the same sense of wonder can also be directed at natural patterns on a much smaller scale.

All of these images have been captured on the limestone, sandstone and gritstone outcrops around my home village of Ystradfellte, and are testament to the variety of patterns created by lichens living on these rocks. Lichens are ubiquitous in the clean air of the Brecon Beacons but seldom do we stop to explore their beauty in close detail. While I have taken some artistic licence in softening the sharp details of these macro shots in places and muting the sometimes fluorescent colours, they are basically all natural patterns created by the colonisation and growth of competing species of lichen on different rock substrates.

An exploration of the shapes, colours and textures of the limestone pavement area around Ystradfellte. Limestone pavement has always fascinated me, but I find it hard to capture the textures effectively in a single image so each of these pictures is a composite multiple exposure of at least 5 images. Currently just exploratory, this series may be developed further.

The Middle East has had a turbulent history and has recently undergone some fairly dramatic political and military changes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I visited a number of countries in the region, drawn by a fascination of their history and architectural remains. While it was relativey normal for people to visit certain parts of Egypt back then, some of the other locations I travelled to were obscure enough that they raised a few eyebrows with friends and family back home. 

The current political and military climate in many of these places means that they are now impossible to visit, and in some cases have been severly damaged or destroyed. The current perception of the region in the West is unlikely to encourage tourists (and in many cases travel to these places is prohibited by governments), but back then these were truely fantastic places to visit, steeped in history and full of welcoming, friendly people.

The images here are a small selection from my travels, focussing on key tourist destinations that have been affected by past and current conflicts and political unrest.