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Out and About - Winter 2009
After all the expeditions of this summer, winter finally arrived and things have now slowed down considerably. It has gotten much colder and recently, there has been heavy fog. But of course the biggest reason for the slowdown has been the much shorter days.
However, there is also a positive side to shorter days - dawn comes later in the morning. In the summer, dawn was between 3am and 4am - at the moment, dawn breaks after 8am.
A couple of weeks ago I went back to Gullane Bents for a dawn shoot. It was a cold but beautiful morning with just enough cloud detail in the sky to be illuminated nicely by the first rays of sunlight.
Most recently I went back to another old location - Loudoun Hill. Arriving there an hour before dawn, it was bitterly cold and very dark, worsened by a dense and freezing fog.
Climbing the hill in the company of two fellow photographers, we reached the summit and had plenty of time to set up our equipment before the first light of the day. Standing there, high above the clouds, it was the first time I have ever experienced my camera bag and tripod legs freezing.
Winter is also a good opportunity for trying a variety of different types of photography - when landscapes are not an option, I generally try and do something else, such as urban or interior photography. This year, that moment has not yet come - but its arrival is imminent.
Something else that will keep me occupied is processing (or re-processing) images taken previously. I try to be ruthless and throw away those images which I know are no good, but I tend to hang on to some which I think might be workable, either now or in the future.
Coming back to an image much later also means that I am able to see it with new eyes and new objectivity - this often allows me to work on a file in a way that I might not have done at the time of capture. Sometimes that is a good thing and the results can be good.
Over the last four weeks, the winter has really set in, with temperatures at home as low as -11 degrees and the entire country affected by the arctic temperatures and heavy snow. While incredibly pretty, the weather is also incredibly treacherous, with driving conditions being exceptionally poor. All the same, a trip at the weekend to Loch Awe offered stunning views and landscapes, despite the sub-zero temperatures. Oddly enough, the roads in the north-west of Scotland seemed to be much better than those in the central belt, even though the snow was very deep. Travelling up to the Lake of Mentieth last week, it was astonishing to watch people walking across the lake, totally covered by thick ice.
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