Places like Bamburgh Castle and coastal landmarks like it get photographed thousands of times a year, usually from the same spot with the same treatment. If you keep shooting the obvious angle, your work blends into that pile whether you mean it to or not.
Coming to you from Andrew Banner, this thoughtful video follows Banner as he visits Bamburgh Castle and the surrounding dunes with a clear goal: avoid the standard shot. He lives near another well-known lighthouse and admits he rarely shares images from it because they look like everyone else’s. At Bamburgh, he makes a deliberate choice to search for what others ignore. Instead of planting the tripod for the postcard view, he turns his attention to a small shed in the dunes, a pair of benches, and subtle shapes in the grass. The castle is still there, but it becomes context rather than the headline. You watch him work through distractions in the scene, shifting position to hide parking lots and buildings, using a longer lens to compress the frame and simplify what stays inside it.
Banner shoots in a high-contrast black and white profile in-camera to previsualize the result, while still capturing a raw file for full control later. He walks through several edits of the same frame, processed in DxO PhotoLab and Silver Efex, showing how one base image can lead to very different outcomes. One version leans into deep blacks and crisp detail. Another softens the feel. A third shifts the balance again. None of them rely on heavy color to carry the frame. Watching the variations drives home a simple point: the capture is only the start. Your decisions after the shutter matter just as much as where you stand.
What stands out is how physical his approach is. Banner drops low into the dunes, kneeling to find lines in the grass that lead toward the subject. He experiments with a slower shutter speed to introduce motion blur in the windblown grass, changing the mood without changing the location. The scene is cold, windy, uncomfortable. He keeps working. There’s a practical edge here too. He talks about tripod stability in strong wind and the annoyance of missing foam leg covers in freezing temperatures. None of it is glamorous, but it reflects the reality of working carefully instead of casually clicking and moving on.
The deeper message centers on observation and intent. Banner challenges the habit of lifting a phone, shooting once, and calling it done. He pushes you to ask harder questions. Where does the eye enter the frame? Is there a leading line, even a subtle one? Would shifting one step left remove a distraction? Is the story clearer from a lower angle? He also questions the social media reflex to praise loud color and easy compositions while dismissing quieter, moodier frames. If you want your images to hold attention, you need to show that you paid attention while making them. That means considering narrative, emotion, and structure before pressing the shutter, not after.
You won’t see him stumble upon a radically new view of Bamburgh Castle. What you will see is a process that pushes beyond the predictable, along with side-by-side edits that reveal how much room you actually have inside a single raw file. There’s more nuance in the full set of edits and more context around how he refines the final look. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Banner.