To the Mountains!

I love the wild places but I’m certainly no mountaineer. I’m more of your downhill walker if you get my meaning. I wasn’t designed for ascending hundreds of metres and the low lying mountains and hills of the Peak District tend to give me a good enough workout thank you very much. But being in this wild mountain-scape it’s difficult to fully appreciate the landscape from the glens alone. To spend my time at low level would feel like I was only seeing and telling half the story.

The Plan

A while ago I was talking to my mate and fellow photographer Greg Whitton (aka @mountainman76 - the hint’s in the name!) over a beer or two about an intrepid wild camp on a mountain. Now that I’m in the area we - or rather he - decided that it should be on one of the Torridon Hills, with Beinn Eighe at 1010m being at the top of the list. Yes, you read that right. It’s over a kilometre high and the climb doesn’t start much above sea level.

The plan with a wild camp on a mountain is to witness a view that most people will never see and to see it in solitude. I suppose there are relatively few that climb such things and many fewer again that would camp on top of one. Seeing the sun set and rise from this altitude, red light flooding this seemingly endless mountain terrain with warmth was the plan.

Our ascent was to be from Glen Torridon, via Coire an Laoigh then up to the summit before following the ridge to the north-west for a camp on or around the grassy plateau of Coinneach Mhor.

Unfortunately the weather closed in around us as soon as we reached the minor summit of Stuc Coire Laoigh and stayed with us until we got into the car at the other end. I won’t give you a blow-by-blow encounter of the climb - there wouldn’t be much left to say once I edited out the swearing to be honest - but I’ll share some of the experience and thoughts about it with you.

The Gear

This isn’t a post about gear but when going long distances and camping at altitude you have to give it special consideration. My backpack of choice is F-Stop’s Tilopa BC. I am a huge fan of these packs for two key reasons - comfort and modularity.

By crossing the features of a regular hiking rucksack - such as internal frame, padded hip belt, multiple adjustment and suspension points - with a camera bag you get a camera bag that fits you very well and is comfortable to carry for a long distance. Most bags I’ve used in the past put all of the weight on your shoulders and back which become very painful over even short distances. With the internal frame supporting and distributing the pack’s weight, and then putting the weight on the hip via the belt there’s little discomfort over a long distance.

In terms of modularity, you can scale up or down the amount of camera equipment you carry by virtue of the removable Internal Camera Units (ICUs). These are like the innards of most camera bags with padded dividers to hold equipment. Coming in a variety of sizes, you can install a small one if you need to carry more ‘other’ gear than camera gear, or install a large one to maximise the camera equipment in the bag.

Of course on this occasion the trip demanded less camera equipment to make space for all of the camping gear so I used a Small Micro ICU. In the ICU I had a Fujifilm XT1 with XF10-24 attached, Fujifilm XE1 with XF18-55 attached and the Fujifilm XF55-200 lens.

This was packed inside alongside an F-Stop Elkhorn pouch, a Jetboil stove, food, windproof top, a change of clothes and my sleeping bag liner. The Elkhorn is a small accessory pouch that I use to store ‘bits and bobs’ - remotes, filters and holder, batteries and memory cards, lens clothes and such like.

Attached to one side of the pack was my tent and sleeping mat, and strapped to the other side was my Redged TSC-427K tripod (much lighter than my large Gitzo).

I didn’t weigh my pack but when fully loaded it must have been close to weighing 20kg. All I can say is thank goodness I wasn’t carrying my Canon gear - there’s a serious question mark over my ability to make it to the top if I had (that sounds melodramatic but it’s a serious weight difference when including tripod).

Climbing v Photography

I often find when in the midst of one activity it is difficult to switch your focus to another activity. Normally this means that I find long distance walking and photography incompatible, always thinking about the miles ahead rather than the photography at hand. I find that my process is distracted, hurried and often forced. Normally when I’m focused on my photography I will spend several hours in one location without another anything else entering my head.

Climbing a munro takes this to a whole new level! With a heavy pack, miles ahead of you and hundreds of metres above you the breaks tend to be short and you’re more worried about recovering your breath and your energy than making images. As it was we arrived at camp about an hour later than hoped, so there really wasn’t a lot of time to be methodical in our image making on the hike up.

The experience reinforces my personal view that the two activities are difficult companions. Of course if I was fitter - and Greg was very patient! - we’d have got up quicker and recovered sooner, and perhaps I’d worry about the miles less and the photography more.

Reactive Photography

The above doesn’t go to say that there weren’t photographic opportunities. Rather they were fewer and different than what we anticipated. There were certain moments - arriving at the first minor summit looking over to Liathach and the sun dancing on the sea to the Hebrides, brief glimpses of the landscape as the fog thinned and the sun burst through, descending below the fog on the last day - where I was compelled to make a photograph.

These were the moments where your heart skips a beat, the tired legs and miles to go are forgotten, and the pack is thrown down in urgent excitement. Quickly pulling the camera from the bag, everything is on autopilot, instinctively framing and exposing the shot. It’s times like these that all of the experience behind the camera really helps. Reacting to fast changing light is more akin to sports photography than to landscape photography, so often (wrongly IMO) stereotyped as a rather relaxing affair.

Of course these images could be stronger in terms of composition, sharpness, and so forth. I suppose you could spend a few hours sat on the ridge, in a cloud, camera mounted on the tripod and just wait for the moment. It may never come, or it may happen behind you. So fickle is the mountain weather that you never know. Perhaps you’d have a stronger technical image but to me it wouldn’t tell a true story.

Though far from being my best, for me at least the images from that climb up and along Beinn Eighe reflect the experience of being there, brief moments of minor magic and hold a sense of feeling. Others may think differently being divorced from the emotion of the experience itself and so they remain for me alone.

Expectations

Best laid plans and all that! Nobody climbs a munro hoping to sit in a cloud for 18 hours. Such is the way of things however. After such a tough hike having our plans for a wild camp so completely foiled by the mountain was very disappointing. The mountain doesn’t give up her secrets freely.

And so in microcosm we see the ongoing battle that we as photographers face with failed expectation. Hard work and even careful planning guarantee nothing, and we are at the whim of the landscape. All we can do is keep our chin up and keep putting ourselves out there. Today might not be our day but that day is coming and each failure feels like another step towards success.

Our expectations are so often overly demanding - or just plain false - and they can lead us astray. With the strenuous climb my photo mojo (phojo as I call it :)) was as low as my energy levels. When the conditions turned out to be much less than spectacular I most definitely teetered on the brink of throwing in the photographic towel. A stunning sunset from the summit would have reenergised me and got the phojo flowing like a torrent. As it was I was tired and down hearted that my efforts were not rewarded.

However there are always images to make, you just have to see them and feel them. Those moments of light through the cloud, that was the real story of the experience and perhaps the mountain itself. A clear sky and glorious red light may well have been altogether too benign considering I was standing a kilometre into the atmosphere. Often we try to turn the dramatic and ever changing landscape around us into a placid and beautiful scene, rather than focusing on the more real, visceral, and perhaps honest interpretation of these dangerous and foreboding places.

Don’t let your expectations get you down; change your expectations and open your eyes afresh to what’s around you.

Moisture Management

One of the biggest  challenges I faced on this trip was regarding ‘moisture management’. It was damp for most of the trip, and the walk out was made in torrential rain. My pack’s rain cover blew away on top of Bleaklow a few months ago and I still hadn’t replaced it. Though quite weather resistant my pack became saturated over time and from then it seemed like everything just started to get wet.

The biggest problem this caused was with my camera equipment which fogged up and refused to clear up until we descended and had some brief moments of better weather. Not much good being on top of a munro when you can’t take any images because of condensation in your lenses. Of course given all we could see was fog perhaps this would have added to the effect!

Though the XT1 is weather sealed the lenses aren't. Not that weather sealing would prevent fogging, but it would help and from memory it hasn't beset my sealed Canon lenses before. It's knocked my trust in the gear a little for the time being.

Of course this isn’t a fault of the camera as such. Rather it’s for me to take responsibility and find solutions to keep the internals of the bag drier. As I speak a replacement rain cover has just arrived, and I’ve purchased several neoprene pouches to reduce the lenses’ exposure to the damp air. I’ll also be keeping a spare dry bag with me to put the ICU in during the worst conditions.

I’ll write more on the issue of moisture management in another post. In the meantime please don’t get complacent like me. If you're heading for the mountains give this issue some serious thought, particularly with equipment that isn’t weather sealed. 

Wild Camping a Munro

I’ll make this brief. You have to carry a lot of stuff a long way up a big hill. It is hugely challenging and not to be taken on lightly.

But when you’re cooking on your stove, chatting with your pal, drinking a well earned whisky and all around you is wild silence? That is a very magical experience and one I shall remember forever. And I've completed my first (and second!) munros. That's very cool!

I’d just like to say a huge thanks to Greg for putting up with my slow pace and getting me to the top via his experience, good humour and the promise of whisky and chocolate. Top man! Now,  seriously, can you carry my gear next time please?

What if it's a Huge Waste of Time?

It’s fair to say that the Scottish landscape is stunning, breathtaking, intoxicating. Indeed, it’s so beautiful that it’s hard to make progress driving through it - every passing place and lay-by seemingly offering a fresh view of the mountains and lochs. And yet it presents something of a daunting challenge to the photographer. In a sense it’s easy to make images here. Rock up in a lay-by, point camera at mountain, click, drive on. A moment of lucky light awaits around every bend.

Snap, Snap, Snap!

I jest but it’s easy when confronted with such beauty to fall into tourist-style photography. Standing in wonder as the clouds kiss the mountains and light dances on the loch, it’s difficult not to be overawed and resort to snap-snap-snap at anything that moves (or doesn’t). A cloud on a rock face? Snap. A tree by a loch? Snap. Huge mountain range? Snap. Waterfall with a big mountain? Snap.

This first week here in Lochcarron has been one of re-adjustment for me. Returning to Scotland I’ve found myself freshly in awe of the landscape, and my wonder has run away with my camera. As well I’ve been scouting locations both for my own photography and for my workshop later in the month. This is often in less than ideal conditions and perhaps without the care I’d normally take making images.

Don’t get me wrong I’ve got some images I’m very happy with - maybe not portfolio worthy on first consideration - but there are quite a few snapshots in there at this stage from all over the local area. And I’m just about fine with that for the time being. I think it’s quite usual to feel a need to get the more obvious shots out of your system to free your mind up for some more creative exploration.

What this week has brought home to me though is that feeling that I need to transition away from this ‘tourist’ mode and settle down to more considered image making. Without doing so there’s the risk of coming away after 2 months with dozens of ok shots - what a depressing thought! I’d rather have a handful of images I am delighted with and that will take a slower approach, repeated visits and the right time and conditions.

Skip This If Starts Sounding Weird

Often when I’m teaching people they will remark ‘I just didn’t see that shot’. I try to explain that you can see the landscape as being on different planes. There is the obvious plane of beauty that usually catches our attention and we’re compelled to photograph. Quite often when shooting an image of beauty we’re prone to think that the beauty is enough and we're missing all those other things in the landscape that detract from the image; our focus is only on the big beautiful landscape.

The other plane is one where the landscape becomes abstract. It becomes a collection of shapes and textures rather than mountains, rivers and trees. It’s kind of hard to describe, but the closest familiar experience may be those magic eye images if you remember them? The little pictures made up from different coloured dots and you sort of had to defocus your eyes to see the picture? This to me feels similar, a sort of sense of seeing through the landscape rather than looking at it.

On this plane things become clearer, simpler and less chaotic. Images within the landscape reveal themselves more readily. To get there demands moving out of ‘tourist mode’.

Onwards and Upwards!

They say that admission is the first half of the cure, so being aware of this helps me to move forward. In truth I know that trusting myself to see and make images together with a desire to seek out something more will stop me from sitting in any comfort zone.

Alongside this I’m trying to frame my thinking in terms of projects to avoid creating a random array of unconnected images. With so much to ‘go at’ here you can almost develop a sense of paralysis guessing and second guessing where the best place to be at any time will be. Some constraints and some structure will help to filter the possibilities in this big landscape to make it more manageable.

On further reflection this sense of fear is probably similar to the creative angst many of us feel, just brought into stark relief with the relatively short window of intense photography available. It’s usual to wonder what you’re doing with your work and where it’s leading you. The difference here is that I don’t have the benefit of objective reflection over a longer period of time.

Oh and just in case the above sounds downbeat, it’s not meant to be - I’m having an absolute blast! I just think it’s good to reflect on these things and consider where I'm going and challenge myself to improve. Better than wasting the time doing the same old eh? Here’s some images to lighten the mood (a little :) ).

Greetings from Lochcarron

You may have noticed things have been a wee bit quiet on here and on my social media feeds recently. Well, that’s because I’ve been planning and packing for a 2 month trip to Lochcarron in the North-West Highlands. I arrived on Saturday, and after a couple of days I’m absolutely loving it. Beautiful village and very friendly people, great location, accommodation is perfect and the landscape here is just incredible. As they say, happy days! My plan over the next few months is pretty flexible but the focus is on my own photography, writing and teaching. Once I settle in a bit I’ll have lots of new articles and images to share with you. There's also a couple of places available on my Torridon workshop at the end of May if you would like to join me (trust me, it is amazing up here!). You can find details here.

As a heads-up at the start of June I’ll be popping down - if a 1000 mile round trip can be considered ’popping down’! - to Nottinghamshire where I’m very honoured to be talking at the Patchings Art Festival in association with Outdoor Photography Magazine. There’s a great line-up of speakers and it’s certain to be a fun and interesting weekend. You can find details of the festival here.

I’ll also be exhibiting my images during the festival, and completed the printing and framing for delivery just before I came north. I’ve got an upcoming series of blog posts about my experience of preparing for an exhibition which I hope will be of interest to those looking to show their own work.

I'll probably keep the social media activity dialled down a bit so that I can concentrate on the task at hand. For now let me leave you with a few images from my scouting trips during my first few days here.

Mar sin leibh an dràsda (cheerio for now)!

Karaoke: More Thoughts on Honesty

We had friends around for dinner on Saturday night. After a wine or two the suggestion of Karaoke came up. Confession: by 'came up' I actually mean 'I suggested it'. We have a game for our Playstation called Singstar which is a bit like an intelligent karaoke. Not only does it play the music and show the words and the video, but it also shows bars on the screen to tell you how high or low you need to sing. If you hit the right notes then you get points for your efforts, and there's a traffic light system telling you if you're singing really well (green), or you're pretty awful (red).

In our household at least there are two approaches to Singstar. You can keep your composure, talk, even whisper, carefully oscillating your voice to hit the notes. This approach tends to work quite well.

The second approach is to jump around like a rock star (or idiot as my wife says), eyes closed, fist in the air, singing the words that come into your head in the way that you remember the song. This approach tends to feature the "you're a bit rubbish, please step away from the microphone" red light quite often.

But what they hey, I go for the second approach every time!

Y'see, the first approach may get you a better score but it's a pretty boring way of singing a song. You just sit on the sofa, quietly vocalising the words, the score pops up and you move onto the next one. Rinse and repeat.

Approach 2 is a physical workout, it makes people laugh (me most of all), and occasionally (very occasionally I might add) I knock one out the park and I get a good score too! Nobody remembers the songs sung really well quietly from the sofa. They do remember the time that the eejit jumped around on the sofa whilst murdering "I Want to Break Free" with a pair of football socks tied around his head (true story).

This made me think about how we approach our photography. Again there are at least two approaches:

1. The first chases technical perfection in the making of the image. It has to hit all the right notes. It follows the rules. Fitting in is more important than personal expression. It's popular on social media. It gets loads of likes and comments and Explores. The score pops up. Success. It's time to move on to the next hit.
2. You photograph what you want to photograph, how you want to photograph. You have an idea in your head and you have an urge to go with it. You can't be sure how it will turn out, but it's what you want to do. You don't care what notes you're hitting, but they sound right to your own ear. The image (performance) means more to you than the popularism (score).

Approach 2 is the honest approach, just being yourself. You blast out the tune how you want to and everything else is what it is. When the mic/camera's in your hand and you close your eyes to the world it's just you and the song/photograph. You don't care about anything else. It probably won't sound like the original, but it won't be a poor imitation either.

Ultimately the score at the end of the song doesn't mean anything. Imagine if your eulogy read, "over his lifetime he was featured on Flickr's Explore over 1000 times, he collected over one hundred thousand Facebook faves and comments and was retweeted a million times". Ugh.

I wouldn't want to suggest technical perfection isn't important, or that making work other people care about isn't important, because they are. But with an honest approach they are just part of the process, and a byproduct of that process, rather than being its purpose. The most important thing is to make the photographs that you want to make regardless of what fellow camera club members, Flickr commenters or tweeters tell you.

You may not yet know what photographs it is that you want - need - to make. But the wonder of photography is that if you keep trying to sing with your own voice rather than over worrying about what others think, your true voice will reveal itself over time. It truly is about the journey and it's an ongoing process of self discovery. Better to enjoy that by jumping around rather than quietly imitating whilst sitting on the sofa I think. Go and grab that mic. And the football socks!

Thoughts on Shutter Speed from Glen Sligachan

One of the things I've been developing over the last 6 or more months is a more creative approach to the use of shutter speed. Rather than a 'short' or 'long' binary switch, I like to consider shutter speed as an analog dial allowing us to dial up or down the degree of detail in the water to taste and to suit a particular shot. I particularly love the streaking that gives the water a sense of personality when using a mid-length shutter speed of 1 second plus or minus 2/3 second.

Though it suits some shots, I think full detail in the water often provides a confusing and distracting element in a frame. Conversely a very long shutter speed pushing the water exposure towards white for the 'silky water effect' removes any sense of character in the water, it just becomes white blobs in the frame. In between the two though there's the possibility of retaining some of that detail, that real sense of flow and undulation.

I often wonder why, when presented with raging torrents and stormy seas, we want to tame them into placid milky foam. In these elemental environments it is precisely the raw power and personality of the water that I want to capture. If it's a raging torrent, let it be so!

I thought I'd share an image from Glen Sligachan to show you what I mean.

Here's the first shot, looking towards Marsco down Glen Sligachan and the raging torrent that is Allt Dearg Mor (the one the footbridge crosses). Not a unique shot, indeed quite popular though most tend to shoot towards Sgurr nan Gillean and the Cuillin Ridge rather than Marsco, which I think is a particularly photogenic mountain. Still, I find it impossible to drive past Sligachan without stopping such is its beauty.

Already aware that I prefer to avoid very long shutter speeds these days, this shot was made at 1.6" at f/16 and ISO100. I had a polariser and a 3-stop neutral density filter on, the combination of which will block out between 4 and 5 stops of light. It's quite a nice shot I think, but when I look at the water it feels too placid. In particular, the white of the plunge pool holds very little detail and as a result interest. It's quite a large expanse of an image to be close to white and unsettles me.

Note that with other more gentle cascades you may find that 1.6" would retain reasonable detail in the plunge pool. Conversely with a large crashing waterfall, even 0.5" may record too much foamy movement in the plunge pool to keep any detail. The point here is that each time you encounter water you need to use some judgement and spend some time getting to know it to choose the perfect shutter speed. Each shot has a perfect shutter speed, but it's not fixed it's something you have to discover.

For the next image I've pulled out the 3-stop ND filter and I'm now using a 1/5th shutter speed. Note that in so doing I've nudged my polariser and there's a lot more glare on the rocks - oops! This is the main reason I often use a polariser around waterfalls.

Looking at the water itself there's a lot more detail in there and so to me sense of motion through the frame. Let's inspect more closely side-by-side.

The overall feel of the water in the shorter exposure is much more like what I would associate with a turbulent pool and a raging river. Observe that the exposure is still long enough that the detail has been 'smeared', so we don't have the full detail but rather the implication of detail.

Unfortunately the shorter exposure was just a tad under exposed, and the glare on the rocks from that nudge on the polariser means I'm not fully happy with this frame as is. Instead I take both exposures into Photoshop as separate layers (in Lightroom, select both, right click, "Edit In", "Open as Layers In Photoshop") and I use a layer mask to 'paint in' the more detailed water. You may also note that I've dialed down the opacity of the layer with the water exposure to 53% to reduce the extent of the detail in the final frame. Actually having a separate exposure like this allows me to dial the detail up and down as suits my taste back in the studio.

There's a few more tweaks I've made elsewhere in the image to result in the final image below. Some may prefer the original, smoother version but I much prefer this more turbulent rendition of Allt Dearg Mor and Glen Sligachan; for me it better suits its wild feeling location.