This photographic project took the INEOS Grenadier Black Edition onto Salisbury Plain, placing it within the kind of environment it was designed to navigate. Open grassland, rough tracks and expansive skies provided a setting in which to explore the relationship between the vehicle, the landscape and my own role as a photographer.

The series incorporates self-portraiture, bringing me into scenes I would usually observe from behind the camera. The Grenadier serves several purposes: a means of access, a subject within the photographs and a tool for finding a different viewpoint. In one image, I stand on the vehicle to photograph from above, making that connection between exploration and photography visible within the frame.

Including myself adds a human scale to the landscape and a sense of how the vehicle is being used. It also reflects something of the experience of making photographs outdoors: travelling through a place, stopping to look, and finding a position from which the scene begins to come together.

The images move between broad landscape compositions and closer studies of the Grenadier. In the wider views, tracks draw the eye across the plain, with the vehicle occupying a small part of a much larger setting. Closer photographs concentrate on its distinctive form and the contrast between the black bodywork and the muted colours of the surrounding ground.

Light plays an important part in that contrast. Beneath the changing sky, the dark surfaces shift between reflections, visible detail and silhouette. Photographing the Black Edition meant paying attention to those changes, finding angles that gave its shape definition while retaining the atmosphere of the landscape.

What interested me most was how these elements worked together. The Grenadier enabled access and offered new perspectives; the plain provided space, texture and scale; and self-portraiture brought the act of looking into the photographs themselves. Together, the images record both a vehicle within its surroundings and the process of exploring those surroundings with a camera.