Scotland - Day One (2013)

Blackrock Cottage below Buachaille Etive was the first photograph taken on the trip to Scotland in 2013 (see my previous introductory post). In fact, it was taken on the evening before the first full day as we passed on route to the accommodation at Ballachulish, and like many landscape photographers before and after us, we set up on the tripod pitted ground for our own version of a classic view.


There is a lot of luck involved in travel and landscape photography. Effective landscape photography takes time, patience, and a lot of research to get the best light, composition, and ultimately be best photographic outcome. In contrast, travel photography is far more reactive to the conditions. It is possible to be in the right place at the right time but more often than not it is a matter of making the most of the conditions as they present themselves - as the Blackrock Cottage photograph demonstrates:

In order to counter the potential impacts of being too reactive we decided to target one location for the first part of the trip with repeated visits at the golden hours of the morning and evening whilst doing the touring photography in between. Day one was spent making that decision and Castle Stalker on Loch Laich and Loch Linnhe was selected, although I am not convinced we had this clarity of thinking at the time. I can certainly remember the debate about whether it it was a good idea to sit and wait for a chance of light until 8 or 9pm, especially as the cloud cover looked unpromising in the early part of the evening. Ultimately we did wait and luck played its part:

We had actually stopped at Castle Stalker earlier in the day when the tide was low. It was an opportunity to look around and take some preparatory shots:

On reflection, I am disappointed that I didn’t capture more of the sense of place during the Castle Stalker visits. I can see from these early pictures that there was something more photographically interesting about the venue that didn’t need to be centred solely around the castle. I guess that is the difference between my photography then and I how I might approach a subject now....although, as I said in my introduction to this retrospective series, there were early signs of a change in direction including these images of rusting metal:

Finally for day one, these were some of the mid afternoon touring photographs of Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe, although seven years later I had to search for this location having forgotten the castle’s name. Whilst searching I came across some fantastic photography from this venue including wonderful mirror reflections in the Loch....perhaps if I ever returned to Loch Awe that would be the type of luck I would hope for!