Accessible stays with VisitEngland
This November I had the absolute pleasure of working with VisitEngland, Jennie Berry (aka WheelieGoodLife), and Gem Turner to demonstrate accessible stays and activities in the North York Moors. As a disabled photographer it was a privilege to be able to follow Jennie and Gem for two days documenting all the fun things they got up to!
I joined them at their accommodation on the first day at the beautiful Wellspring Cottages. I was absolutely amazed at all the adjustments they’d made to their cottages to make them more accessible, not to mention the place was huge! A lovely big kitchen with plenty of room to get a wheelchair all the way around, plenty of comfy places to sit, accessible wet room in one of the ground floor bedrooms, and of course the log burner for those chilly nights.
I wanted to make sure to show off all the space and how cozy it was when I was taking the images, the goal was warm and inviting and I think I pulled that off! Not that it was hard with such a beautiful space to work with.
We then stopped for lunch at the Graze on the Green cafe in the picturesque village of Pickering. The food was lush, quite frankly I’m still dreaming about that panini, they even had a wall full of local produce for sale! I can’t tell you how much restraint it took to take these pictures first without diving straight in.
We even got to stop over the moors which I was thrilled about, just look at this sunset, what a magical place to photograph! I wanted to get that evening glow behind Jennie and Gem, and love the little bit of rim light around Jennie’s hat.
The next day we headed to Dalby Forest and wow, what a place! The whole area is stunning, evergreens for days, a lovely cafe, and an accessible trail that Jennie got to try out with their Trampers and a hand bike from Dalby Forest Cycle Hire with Gem alongside. These images were so fun to take, the lighting conditions were a challenge I’ll be honest. Bright direct sun is difficult to manage at the best of times, but especially later in the year when the sun is lower the high dynamic range between the highlights and shadows can cause some problems. So to compensate, I made sure to expose somewhere in the middle so I could save as much detail as possible, and then did a lot of tweaking in the edit to bring them back into harmony.
Unfortunately I couldn’t follow Jennie around the whole trail on the bike, as you can probably tell from this shot, she was going pretty fast! Our pal from the Cycle Hire was on an electric bike to keep up, so my wobbly legs never stood a chance. The focus tracking on my Nikon D750 made getting this shot a breeze, and despite the blur around her, Jennie’s face is still tack sharp!
That afternoon we headed to Whitby Abbey, and as the sun began going down the light up here was so beautiful, I couldn’t help but take a few snaps for myself, just look at those sunbeams and the Abbey in the afternoon light! We even got to have a little look around the museum, which despite being incredibly dark, we still got some lovely shots out of.
The harbour was where we finished for the day, as the light died and we entered blue hour, it was a challenge warming these shots up to keep up with the warm, inviting, and exciting vibe we were going for. I even got to see the moon rise over the Abbey which was pretty special and suitably spooky for the week after hallowe’en!
This was such a fun brief to work to, and I cannot wait to do more of this in 2023. I’ve made it my personal mission to make this industry as accessible as possible, and campaigns like this get me one step closer to that goal!