This week I had the pleasure of giving a talk on landscape photography to Windsor Photographic Society. As well as being very friendly and welcoming, they have an on-site bar - highly recommended!

One of the things I spoke about was the simple pleasure of wandering around, being highly aware of your place in your surroundings, and looking closely rather than just letting the world pass you by as we all seem to do these days. The pressure to get on and do the next thing, short attention spans, and the evil of incessant smartphone notifications (turn them all off!) means that wandering around aimlessly is becoming a lost skill.

Waking before dawn this morning to mist and frost, I realised that it was a while since I had managed to escape over to my local spot of Whitmoor Common and do just that - aimlessly wander for a couple of hours with my camera. I put my Leica CL in the bag, along with the 18-56 and 55-135 lenses and my 90mm Summicron-M as well, and headed off. I was there before sunrise (it's only 2 miles away), parked up, and headed into the woods. A couple of minutes later, the traffic was an invisible background hum and I was standing surrounded by tall pines receding into the fog.

There's a certain pleasure hearing the muted sounds of rush hour in full swing, yet being unable to see any of it and instead feeling like you're in the middle of nowhere. People in their cars, busy going to the next important thing, forced to get from A to B to get paid to afford the car they need to get from A to B. It's all a bit strange sometimes, and that's the world I usually inhabit. But occasionally it's possible to escape, just for a bit, to selfish peace and quiet.

I have learned over the years that it's important to resist the urge to "get" a picture. But it remains really hard for me to do. I've figured out that, in order to get to the point where I am absorbing things rather than forcing a picture, I need to "get one in the bag" or "get a banker shot" first.

Once I've done that, my mind seems to relax and I get a lot more creative.

And so it was this morning. Mist, trees, atmosphere. Get a shot of trees in the mist looking atmospheric. That was my "banker shot" which I feel I needed in order to make the trip worthwhile (I don't like returning empty handed - maybe I shouldn't be bothered but I can't help it). Hunting around for a decent composition with the slightly different tree in amongst the tall pines was really enjoyable actually - a nice challenge to piece things together from various separate elements.It was a good example of having an image in mind, and setting about finding that image in all the chaos. But this approach closes the mind to other opportunities that abound.

Personally I need to get it out of the way before I can open up and look without a preconceived notion of what I want to record. I guess one day I'll get this little demon off my shoulder and be able to enter full random mode straight away. With some misty pines in the bag, I felt my mind shift away from target mode to a different and more relaxed place. I started some completely purposeless wandering. I followed a lesson from David Ward - to walk about and, when something catches your eye, ask yourself why it caught your eye. Don't ignore it - go and take a closer look. Then start figuring out if it might look good in two dimensions, and how to go about composing something simple enough to capture it.

The frost-lined fallen leaves and twisty grasses in the image at the top of this article, and the smattering of colour left on the silver birches below, drew my eye. Different images, different shapes. They aren't the most special photographs ever taken, but that doesn't matter. What matters to me was the state of mind I came into. Receptive, open, observant.

Being outside, feeling the cold, hearing the crunch of ice under my boots, and absorbing the landscape around me. Lovely.