Torridon
On enjoying my photography again
The 2018 trip with Guy Aubertin, Dave Tolcher, Dave’s son Mark and myself was the start of another stage of my photography. I had just purchased a Cambo Actus technical camera and a GFX 50S to replace my Pentax 645Z as I was simply not getting along with that setup. I needed a technical camera. More importantly I began to carve out time in Scotland again. It had started in 2017 when Guy, Dave and myself got together with Paul Whiting in Glencoe. That was fun but it revealed that certainly for Dave and myself we needed to work a different Scottish location. I remembered my Advanced Large Format Workshop that I attended in Torridon in 2007 and suggested that as a location.
We were booked into a house which totally changed the dynamics and the degree of ‘après photography’ was dialled up 100-fold. It was just fun.
I took the group briefly to Loch Clair in the morning where I had experienced an utterly bonkers dawn back in 2007. I made a grassy image but more importantly I relaxed and later that morning I made the main image at the top. Dave was dropping his son off for an excursion so Guy and I were briefly out together and we stopped further on by the roadside. It was clear blue sky but still frosty. Guy made an image of a snow-capped mountain top with blue sky using a long lens with his Pentax 645Z and I set up in the shade a few feet away with my technical camera and caught the last of the frosted vegetation. It was a simple image that was undoubtedly the image of the week for me and probably my strongest for some time. But that wasn’t really the point. I started to just enjoy being out again.
At the end of the day, Dave was away collecting his son from the excursion, so Guy and I swung around to the location and scene we had all scouted the afternoon before. Dave had let slip that he hoped to see a rainbow. We had taken the mick of course and sent him back pictures of his scouting picture with lots of things added including purple unicorns. Of course, fate said that Guy and I got a rainbow! (the alternative image). We started messaging Dave that the unicorns had arrived and much hilarity ensued. Thereafter rainbows became unicorns.
There was an awful lot that still needed fixing with my photography (my poor execution of the unicorned scene reveals that) and those elements would take several years to get in place. But the fun was back!
Over the next few days we attacked the landscape of Torridon at a pace that I think left Dave’s son reeling a bit. For several days we got adrenaline-inducing storm after storm, some of them snow showers, smashing into the land from the west. But that’s another story.
