Dartmoor - More Than a Great Landscape Photography Location

I’ve been photographing Dartmoor for over a decade, and I love the grand vistas of the open moorland. As a landscape photographer, I am truly fortunate to have a National Park with such a varied landscape on my doorstep.

For much of that decade, I was capturing photographs of Dartmoor without knowing or understanding what I was photographing. I would turn up to a location, photograph it, and then head home. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that approach. When I go on photography trips to other places it’s an approach I often have to adopt.

As time went on though, I felt that I should know more about my local landscape and visit more locations on Dartmoor. If I was going to claim my love for Dartmoor, I needed to know and understand it. I’ll never know everything thing there is to know about Dartmoor, so my learning journey would be a journey that takes a lifetime.

You must start somewhere though. And started I have. To give you an example of how I’ve been expanding my knowledge of Dartmoor I’ve created a short video. In the video below I head to one of my favourite Dartmoor viewpoints, Rippon Tor. As far as Dartmoor tors go, it’s on the small side, but as I found, there is so much to discover. There’s a granite cross, granite mill stones, stone reaves, cairns, and 360-degree views.

I might not want to photograph all those things, but just knowing they are there makes the location more interesting. Suddenly you aren’t just looking at some magnificent views of Dartmoor, but you are standing on a place steeped in history. Even if I don’t photograph everything, looking for these items of Dartmoor history introduces me to compositions that I might not have seen or considered before.

Knowing more about Dartmoor has undoubtably enriched my photography and I hope this short video shows you why.

Rippon Tor - Dartmoor Landscape Photographs