Portfolio: Joel Devlin

Images look more mysterious when you shoot them at night," muses the British photographer Joel Devlin – not least, one might add, when using a 40-minute exposure to create eerie landscapes, as he did for "Light Waves & Dark Currents", a series that won him an award from the Association of Photographers in 2010 in the Environment category.

"I wanted to emphasise natural environments by 'painting' them with artificial light," he explains. To do so, he placed a high-powered LED lamp within a waterproof container and let nature do the rest, allowing currents, tides and winds to drag the bobbing capsule down various bodies of water.

The length of the exposure means that trails of light appear to trace a path along the landscapes, from a winding river in Hayle, Cornwall to a shoreline extrusion of rock near Durdle Door in Weymouth, and making a shot of the normally unlovely Dungeness nuclear power station in Kent as alluring as Hatchet Pond in the New Forest.

"Shooting in the dark offers a painterly aesthetic," he adds, "but by adding the lights I feel I'm infusing something very modern into something ancient, and the mood suddenly feels futuristic."

For more: joeldevlin.com