One of my favourite areas in the Highlands of Scotland is Torridon, a relatively compact area and a landscape photographer’s cornucopia. Even in dreich weather (a wonderfully expressive Scottish term), the area has something to offer.
The weather on the morning of this shoot was (as so often in Scotland) undecided: dark clouds in the sky, but not dense enough to forbid the sun’s rays.
My subject was Beinn Alligin (from the Gaelic for ‘Jewelled Mountain’). The clouds partly suppressed colour from the freshly risen sun, but allowed a broad belt of sunlight to hit the mountain, illuminating the glacially formed corrie and the streaks of snow within it. The fingers of water in the Annat salt marshes in the foreground below picked up some of the reflected colour from the reddish-brown sandstone that is the primary constituent of the mountain.
It was a wonderful sight, the corrie seeming to form the setting for a jewel created by the sun’s radiance. I knew it would not be long before the light shifted, yet compositionally there was something not quite right with my initial shot.
The harmony of the scene was pleasing, but I had unthinkingly prioritized dry feet over a more symmetrical ‘lead-in’ to the subject. Once I’d moved myself and my tripod into the marsh and was standing in the water, I got the picture I wanted; damp feet seemed a modest price.
When I look at this photo, I am taken back to that morning, over 10 years ago, recalling it in almost granular detail — the kind of recall familiar, I suspect, to many photographers when various elements of their shoot cohere in a pleasing and rewarding way.
