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).

Now that my gallery has been closed for nearly a year the majority of my imagery is sold through other galleries and retailers across Scotland. I have an agent to cover this side of the business but unfortunately following a terrible accident in which both his legs were crushed below the knee he has been out of action for over a year.  I find it difficult to sell my own work as I have too personal an attachment to it to be able to treat it purely as product.  My wife has been capably managing sales for the past eighteen months while I concentrate on making images and all the work-flow that gets them onto the internet and ready for print, writing and running workshops.

Repeatedly over the past five years my previous agent, my wife and I’m sure my current agent when he heads back out into the fray are asked by prospective outlets to provide ‘local’ imagery and in a specific mood-that being typically a blue sky day with fluffy clouds or the golden glow of a sunset. Both are conditions that believe it or not we do find here in Scotland on a regular basis but neither of them appeal particularly to me as an artist. At first we would agree to their demands, keen to get the work in and see some potential growth but very quickly we realised that there was actually little to gain from this. Taking photographs is costly no matter how you capture the image because of the many other overheads such as fuel, accommodation, batteries, repairs etc. Calculate these costs into a set of unique images for a specific outlet and the break even point is not met until well into the second year of trading with them. Multiply that by X number of resellers that want you to create something specific and you’re simply digging yourself a large hole to get stuck in. For me however these points are less important than the fact that I would find myself making images that gave me little personal pleasure, either in the capturing or the viewing at a later date. I am naturally drawn to darker, more stormy scenes. That is my chosen mood of expression and that is therefore what we have to sell. Fortunately and happily it is holding its own amongst a sea of traditional photographic fare.

So why are my images so serious and dark? Perhaps I am not the person to answer that question, maybe a session or two with a shrink may provide a more revealing answer. My answer is; because that is what pushes all the right buttons for me. I do take photographs in other conditions but they just don’t fill me with the excitement that a rich, dark, stormy and atmospheric transparency fresh from the processor does. When I’m on the hill or beside the sea in a brisk wind, the first heavy droplets of rain falling around me as I fight to focus the camera under a twisting dark-cloth, the sun on the horizon bursting through the heavy cloud making critical decisions around the precise exposure challenging; that is when I feel most alive. The struggle has become an important part of my work-flow and when an image is finally sitting on my computer screen all of the battle is there to be seen and experienced in glorious detail. It’s the same feeling I get when I finally haul up onto a summit of a mountain and a stunning panorama is revealed at my feet, the total satisfaction achieved having prevailed under sustained difficult conditions.

On a different level do the images say something of my experiences of life in recent years? Would a critic in the future look at my current work with hindsight and say that these images are a reflection of the times and my own experiences in them? After all, personal health scares, the sudden and serious illness of your child and an economic downturn that nearly swept away everything you had worked for (and all in a two year period) is bound to affect your outlook on life. A client of mine purchased a selection of images a couple of years ago, all from the warmer side of the colour spectrum. These were all taken about five or six years ago, relatively near the start of my large format journey. He said that they presented a sense of ‘hope’ that he found appealing and asked if I could perhaps take more photographs like that as he felt they would probably be more commercially successful. He’s probably right, maybe now more than ever people do need to feel a sense of hope and would perhaps decorate and furnish their houses accordingly. But was he suggesting that my images are the opposite and perhaps full of despair? Again I don’t have that answer but I do know that in taking my current photographs I am actually trying to capture on film something that excites me and makes me happy and hope that this joy in so called bad weather is evident in the finished work.

Imagine how thrilled I will be when I capture my first lightning strike on film!!

Cold Dawn, Inverpolly

The mountains of Assynt and Inverpolly have inspired me for many years. Studying books by the likes of Colin Prior and Colin Baxter ten years ago these hills (not the largest in Scotland by far) stood out as the most unique landscape to be found here in Britain. Isolated peaks, often surrounded by miles of wet moorland each one had its own unique profile, their Norse names ( Suilven, Canisp, Quinag) sparking my imagination and sense of adventure.

Living on the Leicestershire/Northamptonshire border travelling so far north meant that I didn’t get the opportunity to drive so far North in Scotland until I moved here in 2004. Even then it took a further eight months before I took my first drive up to Ullapool to take my first look at these fantastic hills. Prior to all my trips I will do as much research as possible using maps, the internet and coffee to help maximise my chances of success when I’m actually on the ground. Having a natural interest in maps and having spent many years hillwalking I am able to easily translate the detail on a map into three dimensional images in my head to give a good idea of sight lines (these days confirmed by using google earth). I quickly realised that the interlocking spurs created by the shoulders of the hills to the north of Coigach had the potential to make for a great image if the conditions allowed.

I planned my visit in February and my mountain shoot to coincide with an 8am sunrise that would throw light through the valleys and hopefully separate out the distant hills from each other but there could be no guarantee of the weather conditions I needed. Having pre-booked bed and breakfast accommodation in Ullapool I quickly realised my mistake when doing a dry run of the hill climb the day before to get an idea of timings. While on the map Culnacraig looks only a few miles from town the drive was in excess of an hour. Working back from 7.45 am when I needed to arrive on location I had a one and a half hour climb and an hours drive. Starting out at 5am the roads were thick with ice and the lanes full of deer that extended my journey time by 15 minutes so was already struggling to keep to my schedule. To add to my problems I realised as I got out of my car that I had left my headtorch back at home so had to head out across the tussocky and boggy ground in the dark. Thankfully under clear skies evidence of daybreak already provided an ambient glow to help me pick my route up the hill.

Eighty minutes later I arrived on my top with only minutes to spare and hurriedly set up on an extremely steep East facing slope as the first light turned the foliage in my foreground a rich red. In order to focus the camera, filter the scene, load the quickload holder, stop down and set the lens and lift the cardboard sleeve to shoot I had to remove my glove. The biting easterly wind meant that I had to wait for an extra five minutes with my thumb on the cable release for the breeze to subside enough to make the one second exposure needed, enough time for my hand to seize up in the extreme cold. Not entirely happy with my first attempt I relocated across to the other side of the top to find the cliff edge and this wonderful view. In a more sheltered spot I was able to set the camera higher from the ground to create a better foreground to background balance. By 8.30 the sun had risen enough to light the entire foreground and with no cloud left in the sky I knew my work was done. Time to descend back to my car and act upon that urge for a very large mug of coffee.