Every one of these images was taken in or around pouring rain. Over the past eight years I have chosen to photograph more and more in these conditions. I have to admit that it was initially with reluctance; the blue sky, white fluffy cloud days that I hoped to photograph were so few and far between that I just ignored the weather man and headed out anyway. Every time I returned, soaked and chilled with a clutch of new images I was delighted with the drama and atmosphere I had captured. Now, I do listen to forecasts but mostly to confirm that there will be some cloud and possibly more. With the absence of strong directional light, particularly through the foreground I am able to capture an enormous amount of detail throughout the scene. Importantly to me it’s the sort of detail that you can keep coming back to again and again, subtle colour and tone that offers a longevity to the viewer that I feel stronger light often fails to deliver.

Crucially for me, using film helps me to capture the softness in the light that I have yet to see in a digitally captured image. I’m sure that day will come but at a huge (and unjustifiable) financial cost to me and my current work flow. I’m lucky too that I use such a basic camera; I once heard Scottish landscape photographer Ian Cameron refer to his Pentax 6×7 camera as ‘steam driven’ in which case mine must surely be ‘horse drawn’. As such I don’t really have to worry about wet weather or submersion in a river. The wood on my camera does swell a bit when it gets wet but I just have to loosen a few screws and I’m back in action, there’s no risk of anything going fizz or pop signalling a costly trip to the repair centre.

If climatologists are correct in their predictions that global warming is set to make Britain a more stormy country then this Summer will probably be less rare than we think. Coupled with milder, wetter Winters too we may find that England’s weather may be more similar to that in Scotland. Personally (and only on a photographic level) I find that prospect quite exciting, so long as the midge doesn’t turn up with it.

Producers of camera gear will soon jump on the bandwagon and produce a broader range of accessories to help deal with the wet. Many do already but I would like to see clamp on umbrellas for tripods more widely available to help where I don’t have a willing assistant, a waterproof darkcloth that attaches around the front standard of my camera to keep it and me dry. I have a Paramo but don’t useit because I cannot make a decent tube using the friction created between my hair and the fabric which is far too slippery. My Gnassgear cloth with a narrower front end and waterproof outer layer would make the perfect tool for me. Smaller waterproof darkcloths for digital cameras would be perfect, allowing users to view detail on their rear screens too.

In this final image taken at Taynish National Nature Reserve in Argyll, the rain was coming down in sheets. I had seen the potential for a decent image while walking past on the way down to the old mill and loved the fact that the rain had turned the Loch surface from its usual gloss sheen to a wonderful satin finish, reflective and yet opaque. Fortunately going with a friend meant that I had all the help I needed keeping the camera and more importantly the film holders dry while setting up and shooting the image. We were both soaked to the skin but my goodness the tea and buscuits were ten times as good when we got back.

Getting out and photographing in the rain can be so satisfying. Coming back with images despite the weather, fighting the elements to make your pictures work and finding out that they can look amazing on a grey day can be a revelation. Rather than sitting inside feeling frustrated, get out. Even if you don’t take a single shot you will have filled your lungs with fresh air which had to be one of the reasons you chose to take up landscape photography in the first place wasn’t it?

I find it interesting how poor digital cameras are at capturing this sort of thing compared to film and especially Large Format. Old, decaying, flaky buildings have become some of my favourite subject matter in recent years and that is in no small part down to the fine detail that I can render with film. No matter what digital camera I have tried ( it’s not many but there have been a few) I always fail to capture the subtly and detail. The results tend to end up looking hard, brittle, dry and lacking emotion.

As an example this image of frosted kelp made at Ganavan beach a few years ago has so much rich and subtle detail in the print and a natural sharpness that digital would struggle to match. Sharpness incidentally that is not the result of movement of a LF camera, nor LF lenses (LF lenses have a smaller dof at any given aperture that smaller formats and therefore have to be stopped down further to match their digital equivalents). The sharpness that I prefer is natural looking, with biting, three dimensional detail but without the brittle ‘digital’ look. It’s the same warmth and richness to be found in vinyl rather than CD, analogue rather than digital recording, a valve amplifier, real ale, I could go on. In other area of course digital excels; it is a match for film in the wider landscape, particularly in strongly lit situations and of course film cannot compete where instant feedback is now necessary (reportage, action, wildlife etc).
It interests me to know how much my visual style has been moulded by the equipment choices I have chosen in the past. I regularly ponder the conundrum as to whether it would be worth my while switching to digital and to date I continue to come up with a resounding no. I still feel as though I have only just started down my chosen path and have so much to learn, develop and improve that I simply cannot entertain the thought of change at this point.
I’m taking my 45su next week so expect to see my large format version of this in the next few weeks and pray that I might have cloud to make this image work. Once I have returned I will write more fully on the subject and luckily having made digital back ups of many of my past images will do some comparisons from my library. You never know, some expensive digital back manufacturer may start throwing gear at me in an attempt to prove otherwise! Anyway, I’m just heading outside to collect up some of that rocking horse s#*t for my flower beds while I wait for their call ;o)

The area, just West of the village of Benderloch is mostly covered with very boggy grazing land and a shooting estate through which narrow dirt tracks lead to some truly breathtaking views out to Lismore, Mull and Ardgour over the Firth of Lorn. During the Summer months the odd cyclist and motorist travel down the road, perform a u turn at the no entry signs and head back and other than that no-one comes here. I’m fairly confident that the images I have made are pretty unique and will probably stay so. It’s far off the beaten track, requires a fair amount of effort and research to get to and is not plastered all over the image sharing sites encouraging the less adventurous photographer to visit.

Sadly we will only be here in this idyllic part of the world for a further seven weeks as we are relocating back to England. As beautiful and tranquil as the landscape here is it has not been paying its way of late, most professional landscapers I know are feeling the pinch as this recession goes on and on and the traditional income streams of the landscape photographer dry up or become more and more dilute. Living out on the West Coast is expensive, property isn’t particularly cheap but everything else comes with a premium price. Our family trip to see The Avengers on Sunday involved five hours of driving, £40 of fuel and lunch out before we even got into the cinema. Beyond the practical stuff though comes the need to be closer to ageing parents and more important to us, opportunity for us now and for our children in the not too distant future.

Of course I have mixed feelings; the thought that I will no longer step out to absolute silence on a calm Spring evening is tempered by the fact that there will be no midges where we live through the summer months allowing us to enjoy the outside space. That I will not be able to drive the relatively short distance to Skye or Ullapool is balanced by the fact that Snowdonia (perhaps still my first mountain love) will be only an hour and a half away and I will be finally able to visit mountains and valleys that I already have detailed (walking) knowledge of. That living as we do now just a few hundred metres from the sea we will no longer hear the wonderful sound of Snipe at dusk but will far more rarely need to suffer its violent weather which will allow me to garden again knowing that my plants will survive the Winter gales.

So it will soon be farewell the Scotland but ironically I know that that will mean more photographs of it. Living here for the past eight years I have never walked or climbed so little. Running the gallery, managing a website, devising and attempting to market product and tours has all taken its toll on my time and living among the mountains means that I have tended to postpone my photography to get the other work done. In the future, travelling away from the office for longer trips to photograph should hopefully yield better results. I still intend to run tours and to travel alone here in Scotland but now I will also be in striking distance of Snowdonia, The Brecon Beacons, The Peak District, The Lake District and North Devon, all less time by car than Ullapool is now.

Within the next couple of days I shall post a new set of weekend workshops to all of my old haunts in Wales and the Peak District for those interested. In the meantime I hope you enjoy some of my latest images in the gallery section.

This area has to be one of the most beautiful in Scotland with iconic hills and mountains forged of ancient sandstone. A mecca for photographers, geologists and all lovers of the outdoors it’s an area that I feel I have only really just started on and plan to delve deeper in the future. I hope therefore that the images on this slide show are just the Overture for many better images yet to come.

These are all available on a first come first served basis so don’t wait too long.

Note that we cannot post any framed print larger than 15×12 as no courier will insure the parcel and our experience is that any framed print larger than this has a high chance of getting damaged in transit. Mounted prints of any size are fine in the post.

A little background info on the feature image which shows a corner of our gallery in Oban back in 2010. The gallery is now closed due to killer overheads and prints can only be purchased from this site and just a small handful of outlets.

As an easy illustration I shall use this Sgeir Liath image which was made in fast changing (and falling) light on a breezy Summers evening just twenty minutes walk from home. Wishing to capture the passing shower I had no more than five minutes to set up, focus, meter, grad and shoot just the one sheet of film. Any doubts about exposure and I would have missed the opportunity.

Sgeir Liath

Rather than waste any valuable time trying to ascertain what could be a mid tone in this scene I simply looked for something with an absolute value to me, something in the foreground that I would always assign a value to based on how I choose to expose transparency film (for which this illustration applies). In this case it was obvious, not the darkest patches of sea weed along the very edge of the shore but the whitest patch of lichen on the rock. I always expose white to be one and two third stops brighter than a mid-tone (assuming I wish to record textural detail as well as colour) so having metered the white with a ev reading of 9 and 2/3rds ( 1 second @ f16 2/3rds if you prefer apertures). This meant that the ideal mid-tone for my lichens to appear white was ev8 giving me an exposure time of 4 seconds @ f22. Now to quickly ensure that everything in my foreground could be held in the four stops that Velvia allows by metering highlights and shadows elsewhere ( note foreground only). Yes, everything holds, time taken so far=10 seconds. Now for the sky and whether I can hold it with grads and make this invisible. So I go straight to the darkest part of the cloud with the intention of bringing this back to my chosen midtone ( ev8, 1s @ f11). Here the value of the darkest part of the cloud was ev10 which basically meant that two stops of nd were needed to get back to ev8. In this instance I used two, 0.3 (1 stop) grads as I also had to control the reflecting water between the rocks. These were applied diagonally with one right down to the seaweed and the other higher and only really covering the sky. The resulting image has a very natural feel with the colour in the sky, water and rock perfectly balanced. The whole process of metering and filtering took less than a minute.

So, what other tones do I base my exposures on? Firstly I learned fairly early on that sunlit grass is a mid-tone but I made the stupid mistake of exposing it so in a wider scene. Being 18% grey doesn’t mean it has to be recorded that way, I prefer to record sunlit (lawn) grass a third of a stop brighter than mid to portray the correct mood (for me). Don’t forget that grass comes in a multitude of colours and tonal values. Bleached, yellow or white grass will clearly need to be exposed brighter than a mid tone, usually one to one and a third stops brighter. If there is bleached grass in your foreground there’s a good place to start your metering. Sunlit snow will normally be one and two thirds above mid for obvious reasons, snow in the shade makes a reliable mid tone as would white paint in the shade, check if you have both in the scene and you can choose which to base your whole exposure on.

Through experience I now build all my exposures based on what tone I assign to an important colour that is usually in my foreground.

White with detail 1 and 2/3rds over mid.

Yellow  1 over mid

Pink   1 over mid

Edges of (unlit) moss covered rocks   3rd over mid

Post Box Red/Lawn Green    mid tone, plus or minus a 3rd for expression

Maroon/Chestnut Brown  1 below mid

Black with detail   2 below mid

My recent images made among the burnt pines in Glen Torridon basically had two easy reference points on which to build an exposure, yellow grasses and black charred wood. In that instance however I opted to work from the grasses as they presented me with a more uniform mass of colour. Burnt timber can contain lots of tones as it can take on a silvery sheen and therefore become reflective in which case it could give misleading readings that would be likely to result in an underexposed image.

While I still make the odd mistake with my metering due to lack of concentration or sometimes very complex scenes I would say that 95% of my A sheets are now accurately exposed and I rarely push or pull any processes to compensate for poor exposure.

“Oooh what a lovely photo, you must have a really good camera”

If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard that over the past eight years I would be enjoying a prolonged visit for myself and said equipment to some exotic location.

Imagine standing in front of a Monet or a Rembrandt and saying ‘how lovely, he must have had great brushes’ or better to a top chef ‘ that meal was fantastic, you must have a brilliant oven’. You wouldn’t dream of it but for some reason the camera gets the credit for a photographers work. The scouting for the perfect viewpoint, the choices around lens length, aperture, height from the ground, focal point, assessing tonal contrast, colour temperature and the perfect balance of these. The careful control of depth of field and understanding its effect on exposure time. The skilled use of neutral density filtration to balance light across the image. And then choosing the precise moment to press the shutter and record the scene pre-visualised in our minds eye. Skills developed over many months and years and practised whenever possible, just as a chef would spend thousands of hours in the kitchen developing a fine menu.

Give me the finest ingredients in the best kitchen and I wouldn’t be able to cook like Raymond Blanc. With the best paint brushes in the world I could do little more than doodle and handed my camera most people would produce the same quality of stuff they do now with their built in phone cameras.

Two image below taken within minutes of each other. One with an Ebony 45su Field Camera, 90mm Schneider Super Angulon lens, filters, tripod and Fuji Velvia film, the other with a Ricoh Caplio R4 6mp compact, handheld. The main difference is that one can be printed 8×6″ before the quality drops away while the other can go to 48×60″ and fill a sizeable wall space. My detailed research, reconnaissance, assessment of the prevailing weather conditions etc put me in the right place at the right time with the right skills to make these images work.

So, is landscape photography sexy? To an observer no. For 95% of the British public the though of hanging around in the cold and wet having risen in the middle of the night to get on location and often coming home with nothing would seem like madness but every weekend thousands of fishermen do just that. For most people slogging out into the wild carrying heavy kit with the ever present threat of sleat or snow would never take precedent over the chance of a Sunday spent indoors watching sport on telly but nearly every hill and mountain in Britain will have its visitors, often in their thousands. The vast majority have little or no interest in getting out into the wilder parts of the counrtyside, particularly during inclement weather. Those of us who go anyway know the satisfaction of returning, soaked and muddied yet totally exhilarated from our time out. Those of us who love our outdoor activity live for the next fix, the next lung-full of fresh air, the next time we will be able to free our minds from the chains of the daily grind, shake off the stress and come alive again. I can rarely go more than 48 hours without it and the odd week where admin keeps me bogged down feels like an eternity.

So is photography sexy? Ermm no, not to me but when I’m out with my camera it really is Rock n Roll.

Those of you who like your slide shows to be a tranquil affair should perhaps give this one a miss but I hope you give it a go (Some of you will be unaware that before being a professional photographer I was a professional musician, trained in Timpani and Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music and then going on to play drums in all styles including Jazz and Heavy Rock).