My world
from above.

Home, faraway shores and the little campervan in the middle of it all. A personal journey through my Drones album.

Words & photography: John “NIX” Nickolls
29 October 2026 · 14 minute read

I like beginning close to home. Milford is familiar territory, but the autumn photograph changes the scale of that familiarity. You can follow the road through the village, see the gardens and roofs, and then let your eye move into the fields and trees beyond. Things that feel separate at street level suddenly belong to the same landscape.

The colour is what grabs me first. The greens remain strong, while the trees break into orange, rust and yellow. Then the structure starts to emerge: the curve of a road, the edges of fields, the places where the village meets open ground. It is a photograph to look into, rather than simply glance at.

Milford Common sits on the north-eastern side of Cannock Chase, where heath and woodland meet. That close relationship between village, open ground and trees is part of what makes the area so rewarding to photograph. Cannock Chase National Landscape ↗

At Shugborough, the wider view gives the house room to breathe. The Georgian mansion, parkland and trees work together, which is easy to miss when the building fills the frame. There is a pleasing photographic connection too: Shugborough was home to Patrick Lichfield, the fifth Earl and fashion photographer. A place with that history deserves to be looked at carefully. National Trust · Shugborough ↗

Tixall gives me a different sort of order. The lockhouse is a clear point of interest, but the canal and its edges do much of the compositional work. The Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal links this scene into the same local landscape as Milford and Shugborough. In a single picture, a piece of working history becomes a line through the countryside. Canal & River Trust · Tixall and Great Haywood ↗

These are the pictures that remind me why a photographic archive should include ordinary, familiar places. Given a few years, an everyday view becomes a record: of the season, the landscape and the way I chose to see it.

The heather photographs are a good example of how much a view can change when the ground becomes the picture. The tracks form pale marks across the purple-pink vegetation. Patches of green interrupt the colour. The scene begins to read almost like a drawing, with the paths doing the work of pencil lines.

Then there are the trees. From below, a woodland is trunks, branches, shade and the path ahead. From above, the canopy becomes a collection of rounded forms, each with its own colour and texture. A small change in camera angle can turn a recognisable piece of countryside into something close to an abstract photograph.

I enjoy that second look: the moment when you stop asking exactly where a picture was taken and start noticing what holds it together. Repetition, an interruption in the pattern, a line that leads somewhere, an area of stillness beside something busy. Those ingredients are there whether the subject is woodland or a marina.

The Exmouth and Sandy Bay pictures have a very British sense of the seaside: a long stretch of beach, a clear edge of red cliff and a holiday park arranged across the land behind it. The contrast is what interests me. The coast sweeps and curves; the rows of holiday homes repeat in tidy blocks.

Exmouth sits beside the Exe Estuary, with the Jurassic Coast beginning at Orcombe Point to the east of the town. That meeting of coast, estuary and land provides a useful background to the photographs, but the pictures themselves have a simpler attraction: the shape of the shore is strong enough to carry the whole frame. Visit Exmouth ↗

Corfu brings a different palette. In the photographs from the Gouvia area, the blue-green water takes up enough space to become a subject in its own right. Buildings gather around the shoreline, and the wooded ground behind them gives the coast depth. Gouvia’s setting on Corfu places these views in the Ionian Sea. Visit Corfu · Gouvia ↗

These two pictures were recorded on the same day in June 2018. They show how changing the framing can alter the balance of a scene: one is more about the harbour and its buildings, the other more about water, land and colour. Neither needs a dramatic incident. The arrangement is enough.

Then there is Alcúdia Marina, the photograph I have used to open this story. The location is on Mallorca’s northern coast, in Alcúdia Bay. Alcudiamar · Mallorca ↗

Here, the horizon disappears. The boats become repeating white shapes, divided by dark lanes of water. Pontoons give the picture a framework, while the differences between individual boats stop it becoming mechanical. It is a very different response to a coastal scene from the wide views of Corfu, yet it belongs naturally beside them.

I have a soft spot for a marina photograph that makes me look twice. At first it is all order; then you begin imagining the journeys those boats might make. With my Royal Navy background and love of being out and about, a collection of boats was probably never going to pass unnoticed.

The Kyle of Tongue photograph brings several of my favourite things into the same frame: a journey, the campervan, open water and a landscape large enough to make the campsite look tiny.

There is plenty to look at, but the picture does not feel crowded. The sweep of water holds the centre. The curve of the shore gives the eye a path through it. The campsite sits close enough to the foreground to provide scale, while the hills and mountains draw everything outward.

My original caption places Vanilla among the vehicles at Kyle of Tongue Campsite and records the Mini 4 Pro as the aircraft behind the photograph. That gives the image something a generic scenic picture cannot have: a personal connection to a particular stop. The van is a small part of the view, but it is the part that ties me to it.

That is the appeal of combining campervan travel with photography. The photograph can hold the bigger setting while the van holds the everyday business of being there. A bed, a brew and a view: a perfectly respectable set of priorities.

Scale does the storytelling. The small campsite makes the sweep of the Kyle feel larger. Remove that human detail and the landscape would still be beautiful; keep it, and the photograph also becomes a story about being there.

The May 2026 pictures bring the album into my European Drift. In the Strožanac view, the harbour structures occupy the foreground, the buildings follow the coast, and the hills rise behind them. The photograph explains the setting in a way that a single street-level view would struggle to do.

Strožanac is beside the mouth of the Žrnovnica River in the Podstrana area. Nearby Stobreč occupies a peninsula east of Split, between the Adriatic coast, river and rising land. These are useful relationships to know when looking at the pictures: there is a reason the water, settlement and hills gather so tightly together. Podstrana Tourist Board ↗ Stobreč Tourist Information Office ↗

I like the contrast between all that detail on the shore and the relatively simple surface of the sea. The water gives the picture breathing room. The boats provide scale, and the mountains keep the composition from ending at the last row of houses.

Eight days later, the album places the camera beside Ammersee at Mühlfeld, near Herrsching in Bavaria. Herrsching lies on the eastern shore of Ammersee, south-west of Munich. Herrsching · official local geography ↗

The change of mood is striking. Trees take over from the dense waterfront buildings. The shoreline is softer. Boats sit across the lake as small light marks against the blue. It still has the ingredients of a water photograph, but the balance between them has changed.

Looking at these two frames together is a reminder of what a travel archive can do well. It preserves differences. A coast and a lake may share colours, but they do not have to feel the same. The task is to notice what gives each place its own shape.

The Berrends Farm picture is a lovely change of pace. After broad coastlines and great sweeps of countryside, here is a much smaller world: Vanilla, the awning, a table, people sitting together and bicycles nearby.

It has plenty of photographic structure—the arrangement of the vehicles, the shape of the awning, the boundary between grass and track—but those things are supporting the real subject. This is what a stop looks like when it becomes a place to spend time.

I want pictures like this in the collection because they give the grander views some company. Travel is made up of the hours between the landmarks as much as the landmarks themselves. The pitch, the chairs and the people around the table deserve a place in the record.

At Cropredy, the wider view puts each pitch back into the surrounding countryside. Tracks divide the field, the trees make a boundary and the vehicles form small groups across the grass. It is a temporary community described by its layout.

A drone is particularly good at showing those relationships. A close photograph can tell you what one pitch looks like. A wider one can show where it sits, how the site is arranged and how much countryside surrounds it. Both deserve to be kept.

The Dubbed Out pictures add another kind of energy. Rows of vans and gathering spaces become a large temporary settlement, while the fairground and glowing sky add colour and atmosphere. Beside the quiet campsite pictures, they show the range of experiences a campervan can bring into one photographic collection.

The Humber Bridge photograph has a very clear direction. The deck takes the eye out across the water; the towers and suspension cables give it rhythm. The foreground trees anchor the scene, and the far bank makes the distance readable.

The bridge opened in 1981 and connects Hessle in East Yorkshire with Barton upon Humber in North Lincolnshire. Knowing that adds context, but the image communicates its scale before a caption says a word. Humber Bridge · official history and statistics ↗

It also brings me back to the marina at the start of this story. The subjects could hardly be more different, yet both pictures rely on arrangement. One uses repetition; the other uses direction. The camera position allows those arrangements to become clear.

One of the pleasures of looking through an archive is finding the history inside the files. The October 2016 countryside photograph records a DJI Phantom 4. The turquoise Corfu frame from June 2018 records the original DJI Mavic Pro. My Kyle of Tongue caption identifies the Mini 4 Pro. The photograph titled My Drones preserves another stage, with the Mavic 2 Pro and Mini 3 Pro together.

The album reminds me how many stages this hobby has already been through. Each generation belongs to its own part of the story. My current affection for Nemesis, the Mavic 2 Pro, and Zoom, the Mini 4 Pro, sits alongside the work that came before them.

The more interesting continuity is in the pictures. Water, woodland, roads, travelling, campsites and the shape of familiar places keep returning. The technology changes, but those subjects continue to give me reasons to take the camera out.

A still photograph lets me decide exactly which moment to hold. Film gives the view time to unfold. I like having both in the archive: sometimes a single frame says everything, and sometimes it is worth staying with the scene a little longer.