A solitary figure stumbles away from the camera, trailing a roll of landmine tape tied to a rock and sweeping the sand with a metal detector. Dwarfing him, the bleak Helmand landscape stretches to the horizon as a hot wind blows across the desert.

“We have all this technology,” Sean Power, the photographer, says, “but still it comes down to a bloke with a metal stick finding the way through. A roadside bomb is indiscriminate and uncontrollable. It gets to your mind for a lot of people. You can start to see mines everywhere.”

It is a rare glimpse of the British soldier’s life in Helmand in photographs taken by one of their own. Power, who fought in the province as a Royal Marine in 2007, returned in the autumn for a unique project sponsored by the Royal British Legion; the results are being released to coincide with Remembrance Day.

Another image captures a weary group from the Black Watch, about four hours into what would be a 12-hour wait for an aircraft to take them back to base. They had been in the field for four days, searching Taleban compounds and finding little but bags of fertiliser that the insurgents use to make bombs. A sandstorm rages outside their tent. Power remembers the conversation as he stood over the group. “They were talking about eating and the first meal they’d have when they got back. The debate was about which was best — KFC, Subway or Pizza Hut. They’re all from right up north round Inverness, so it’s a group of dour Jocks, near the end of their tour, taking the p**s , mostly out of the RAF for not picking them up on time.

“It’s a cliché, but war is 95 per cent hanging around and waiting for the exhilaration of the other 5 per cent. Most pictures that run in a newspaper are about action — the soldiers look miserable and frightened. It’s not often you see pictures of soldiers smiling.”

There is much that he misses about life in the Helmand desert and it is those parts of soldiering — the camaraderie, the discomfort, the banter, dealing with the boredom of waiting — that he has sought to capture.

Power was embedded for nearly two months with The Black Watch, 3rd Battalion, The Royal Regiment of Scotland, as they undertook operations against the Taleban and drug smugglers. It was quite a different war from the one he remembered from 2007. There were relatively few gun battles, but the threat of roadside bombs had become relentless. “There was just a massive increase in IEDs [improvised explosive devices]. To be honest, the lads almost look forward to firefights because it is your skills versus theirs and you can control it. It was easier for us in 2007 than it is now.”

But the main theme of Power’s photographs is waiting. “Soldiers have a way to switch off. There’s always a pack of cards, people have iPods, and there’s a lot of banter.”

Soldiers often find their attitudes to the fighting at odds with public perceptions of war, he says. “There is the idea that war is horrendous, that the lads want to come home. But the lads volunteered to go with a gun and eventually shoot somebody, I guess. It is difficult to explain without making soldiers seem like bloodthirsty maniacs.”

Power is now studying photojournalism, but he hopes to return to Afghanistan as a reservist once he has his degree.

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