Loch Torridon

On how I rediscovered the value of closed loop photography

In January 2022 I visited Torridon with Dave Tolcher, Guy Aubertin and Joe Cornish – a trip that we all wrote up for On Landscape. The trip was memorable for me for the learning rather than the images – in particular seeing Joe’s prints made me reassess how I was approaching digital processing and working without a physical artefact was something I resolved to rectify.

In terms of photographic output the second and third days produced my favourite images. On the Tuesday we visited some ancient forestry that we had scouted and I made the alternative image. Seeing some of Joe’s prints and talking about processing gave me many of the insights I needed to process this kind of image much better with Capture One.

The main image – and my favourite of the trip – was actually from the following scouting morning. It was a location I knew well – the pass above the house we were staying in – so the real purpose was to find a dawn composition for the next morning. I did that and utterly messed up the dawn shoot – but that is a different story. I had taken my technical camera up onto the pass and as a rainstorm came in across the loch the potential for this main image appeared. I set up quickly with a little tilt and made the exposure just before the rainstorm hit.

My conclusion was that at this time of year shooting into the light really needs something special to be happening across the loch and the rainstorm provided that magic. More fundamentally I realised that I had a long way to go to improve my digital raw image processing – a journey which I can clearly date from that trip.