Wild Ones Forest School

Wildsnaps365 - follow us NOW on instagram @wildsnaps365

THE PROJECT

A group of people are each assigned a day of the week with the challenge to take a picture of nature as they find it. The idea is to make them look at the natural world around them and in doing so inspire others to do the same. These people are not professional photographers and often only had their phone to hand but the result is a diverse calendar of snapshots, or Wildsnaps capturing the British landscape and wildlife.

WATCH IT HERE

HOW IT STARTED

In 2014 was flicking through my Instagram feed and came across a picture a friend had posted. It was taken while he was out on his early morning walk with his dog.

The snap was of a perfect spider web hanging in an Autumnal hedgerow. Heavy with dew it was glistening in the sunlight and was absolutely beautiful. A quick and sudden snapshot of the wild at that moment, a Wildsnap, I felt transported to the very spot. It made me think about my friends walk and what he would have seen and I wondered if I would have noticed the web too? It made me feel good to think about being outside, the natural world and all the millions of natural and wild things there are to see. I wondered how much people take these things for granted and how many things they walk past along with all the special beautiful things that they do see.

I decided I'd like to look at a Wildsnap everyday and was interested to see what other people would see. I asked a group of friends if they'd like to be part of capturing a snapshot from the wild on one day during their week and to continue this for a month. Each person was assigned a day and on this day, the same day for the month they would take their Wildsnap and send it to me. The result was really wonderful to see and incredible that some days although no one knew what the others were taking and we were all spread across the country people were spotting and recording the same things. We did our test month in November 2014 and even more inspired by the results I wondered how it would be to capture a whole year and the changing seasons and so Wildsnaps365 began. Together we covered 2015 and we are excited for future collaborations!

When you encourage people to look they see things they might not necessarily have noticed otherwise and they spot things that even if you looked you might not have chosen to capture.

Wildsnaps365 is not a commercial venture, the sole purpose of this project is to encourage people to take notice of the natural world, about the feelings you get when you look at the pictures and hopefully in a small way inspiring people to connect more with nature.