Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

Our final day in Glencoe was overcast so we decided to take a wander around Loch Tulla. Not having been to this area before and seeing ‘Joes/Pauls/Davids/etcs’ tree, I thought we’d take a look around. Unfortunatley I got captivated by a great fern which was like a traffic light with colours from browns and reds through yellows to bright greens. So I could have wandered on and looked for something else but it did look very nice and so .. here is the shot. The big issue was wind and, no, I hadn’t had a curry or too many vegetables – the wind was only blowing slightly but there was never enough time between gusts for the movement to stop. I waited for nearly 30 minutes trying to get the right shot and, although the light was never quite right, I’m happy I did my best.

Because the weather was supposed to be changing from the north, we drove over to Kinlochleven to take a walk up the hill past Grey Mare’s Tail falls. The weather was still changeable but we could see a sliver of light in the distance and we walked up to a place where I had taken a picture a couple of years previously that I’d wanted to work on again. As we set up, I could see the band of light approaching and over the next forty minutes we experienced three weather fronts that varied from torrential rain to bright sunshine. The photographs below show a couple of moments within a twenty minute stretch. The challenge here was mainly dealing with dramatically changing light and also changing gradation of light. It wasn’t enough just to work out whether the light had increased or decreased, I was having to work out which grad I needed to change to. At some points it was impossible to take pictures as it was heavily raining locally and half a mile away was in intense sunshine.. I won’t say I succeeded in dealing with these dynamic conditions but I did get serviceable pictures (although I might need a drum scanner to service them properly).

Our next to final day in Glencoe was for me a revelation of sorts. We decided to return to the valley behind Ballachulish and take the walk that we had tried with Richard Childs. After taking a couple of photographs next to the river, we headed up the hill and passed into a small glade of birch trees and ferns; the remains of a mine cutting I think. I started to see combinations of colour and texture that were separated by considerable distance, with alignments of elements drifting in and out of focus. I’ve talked with people before about composition sometimes being like a three dimensional game of tetris or like one of those christmas cracker games where all the peices must be exactly aligned for things to snap together properly. In this case I had seen two separate elements, a branch with fantastic autumnal colour and a birch tree surrounded by ferns in a small hollow but also with distinct darkening on one side of it’s trunk which enhanced it’s visual depth. I wanted to capture one or the other somehow and I figured I could try to combine them both despite them being 6 or 7 feet apart. The result has become one of my favourite photographs (despite 3 of the 4 transparencies I took having blurred leaves). The alignment of elements in a picture and the way a composition can lock together was something I felt very strongly during the taking of this picture.

I’ve included a picture of a side view of the composition below..

I try to work out what I’ve learned after I’ve taken each picture (or walked away from a setup) and also after I’ve developed the picture. In this case it was another step to realising that a location can have potential locked up inside it like a complex puzzle. Unlike christmas crackers, you don’t know if you’ve got a prize and you might have more than one!!

OK So here are a couple of quick blog posts about the last two days of my Glencoe trip – how far behind am I getting? Well I want to start writing about Northumberland soon so I’d best do this quickly. I’m finally feeling pretty much over my wierd illness (a couple of falling downs and a missed hoar frost in Northumberland were the last manifestatons I hope).

The day after going to Robbers Falls we went out with Richard Childs on what must be the wettest photography trip I have ever had the pleasere to go on. We walked up the back of Ballachulish but with 20 minutes of arriving I was sheltering my camera under an umbrella and sitting waiting for the rain to lessen. It didn’t. In the end, the water was bouncing off the floor and hitting my camera about 1 foot high. We decided that this was stupid and so I closed up the camera, thinking it was a little stiff, and we tromped our way back to the flat.

We sat and discussed, well.. loads of stuff, whilst I unpacked my camera to dry it out.. so I extend the bellows.. or rather I don’t extend the bellows because it’s completely seized up.. Of course I was completely relaxed and said “Oh I’ll just wait a few hours, I’m sure it will dry out and un-seize”. Or that’s what I should have done.. as it was I started forcing things and then worried when it started making gear grinding scrunchy noises..

Fortunately a few hours later all was well again.. The moral of the story is – if you are going to get your camera wet, slacken off the screws on either side and if it gets wet in the field, wipe down the runners before closing the camera (a little bit of lemon oil wouldn’t go amiss I don’t suppose).

The next day Charlotte and I went out to the same Glencoe valley as our twighlight shoot so I could scout some more ideas. This is where I took one of my favourite shots of the holiday and learned a couple of lessons. The first lesson is that for an overcast day, three stops of grad is nearly always too much.. I had placed the highlights in the foreground at the same tone as the highlights in the sky (both at about +1.5) which just looks wrong, wrong, wrong. I should have used a two stop grad and placed the highlights at +0.5.. Anyway.. The other big lesson is how much just a little bit of light can make a difference. I thought I’d learned this one doing my ‘Behind the Clachaig’ shot of the wall up the Pap of Glencoe but in this case the light is just a highlight in the distance. The shot in the previous post shows the first frame where I’ve waited to highlight the gap between the sisters. The shot below shows the moment about 30 seconds later when the highlight has lit up the face of the mountain and the outcrop beyond. Unfortunately the foreground light has dissappeared in the meantime which makes the whole picture really dull. I have the last two frames being developed at the moment so I’ll try to post a final comparison when they come back. What I’m really pleased at is the structure of the composition and the way it moves your eye around. What I hadn’t realised is just how much some subtle changes in light can enhance or cancel this effect.. (forgive the crap scanning on the picture comparison)

That afternoon we went to the lochan again for a little walk and met a nice Gentleman who used to be a rescue helicopter pilot and now took landscape photos. He was recounting how he keeps on going to places that look amazing from 100ft but he are completely bereft of ground level vantage points.. It reminded me of how when you are driving and you see a great view but when you stop you realise that the view is blocked by trees wherever you look. What has happened is that your brain has built a composite view whilst driving along and ignored the trees wizzing past..

What I really wanted to capture whilst I was walking around the lake some fungi and mosses.. The nice gentleman pointed my at a great big Fly Agaric (whch I’m sure you’ve seen in the ‘subject’ gallery) but I was looking for a mini landscape of star moss and finally found some where I had a view of the lake in the background (an exposure chalenge!). My main concern was the magenta-red colour of the pine needles as a colour contrast off the bright, almost lime green. Not a classic combination but hopefully the composition makes up for it. Whilst I was there I also took a quick picture of the Pap over the locan which I include on the right. I set up for this shot with amazingly still water and just as I was about to take it, a woman came up with her dog, said hello and then threw a tennis ball into the water for her dog to fetch! The only nice thing was that the dog obviously had better manners than the woman and he refused to jump into my composition.. I did thank the dog (at which point I think the woman got the message).

Only one more day of Glencoe to write up and then onto Northumberland!!

The last full day of our trip started off generally overcast and we decided to have a look around loch tulla. I was hoping to wander around and dig out a novel composition or subject matter but we had a quick look at Paul’s tree (commonly known as Joe’s tree but Mr Wakefield got their first) and the view was stunning and also their was a fern showing all of the colours of autumn that I could use in the foreground. Well I’m not too precious about practicing my technique on a well honoured subject so I set up and proceeded to have a two hour battle with the wind. It’s amazing how much concentration it takes to try to calculate when the optimum time is to release the shutter; It always seems like the wind is going to stop and so you give it a few moments for the fronds to calm down and then the wind picks up again. Combine this with trying to work out if the light is getting better or not and you have what could end up as an expensive photo. I ended up taking six pictures and was still tempted to stay at the end of two hours (although the marital risk was too high!). The result is more “try harder” rather than “nice try”.

We then drove across to Kinlochleven and walked up towards the old shooting lodge (Where myself, Nigel Halliwell and Adrian Hollister will be staying next week). The weather was very strange, pouring down with rain and then sunny, so that we were constantly putting on and taking off gear. I had in mind a location we had been to two years previously, looking down Loch Leven. After setting up, I started to take a series of shots as the weather fronts swung in from the west, ranging again from sunshine to black, rain laden clouds. Charlotte managed brolli duties and I’ve uploaded a couple of examples.

I’m writing this (very slowly and with almost abolute stilness) from the emergency ward at Leeds General Infirmary after having a spectacular episode of loss of balance. Emergency wards never feel like their is an emergency happening, we’ve been here two hours so far (I could have taken two pictures by now- although in my condition I doubt they would be in focus) and I’ve had ECGs and blood tests and am waiting to see what happens next. I hope I’m OK for Scotland, it will probably be a good place to relax as any and the grounds have ample material if I can’t go on any walks.

— some time later —

OK so I didn’t get to Scotland and my typing needed a lot of work to make it readable. It turns out I had labyrinthitis, which is damage to my ear gyros (at least thats how I interpret it). What this means is acute nauseau, completely confused balance and falling over, eye scanning screwed; i.e. try to scan from one side of your vision to the other and your eye back tracks involunatrily and repeatedly). It feels like you have the hangover from hell and the worst car sickness you’ve ever had all combined together. The good news is that the doctor said it should only last a couple of weeks but may last a month or so!! Cue intense depression and desire for hibernation. Anyway – three days later and I could tell I was feeling a little better. One week later and I would walk a straight line and had no headaches.

Now I’m back to normal but really missed my trip to Glencoe – unfortunately so did my two travel companions who booked into the hotel I’d chosen only to be presented with a cold hellhole (an old shooting lodge in Kinlochleven that looked nice on the website). An expensive night in the leftover accomodation at the King’s Hotel and a brief trip to Loch Etive and they came back to visit the Peak District. A big apologies to Nigel and Adrian for booking a crap hotel and then not going!! If it’s any consolation I felt pretty bad about it (well.. not just it ).

I’ve not got a trip to Northumberland coming up with Light and Land led by Joe Cornish and David Ward which I’m really looking forward to.

A quick interlude into the log of my last trip to Glencoe as I wanted to discuss an interesting weekend I had in the company of Jem Southam, a well renowned contemporary landscape photographer who lectures in photography at the Exeter school of Art and Design. He inhabits a world that is almost anathematic to self professed ‘classic landscape photographers’.

It probably doesn’t help that the majority of media about landscape photography is predominantly aimed at delivering well composed pictures of the glorious wilderness, leaving little room for any associated narrative to live alongside the photographs.

I have to admit that I had a ‘knee jerk’ reaction of the same sort, especially as one of my initial exposures to contemporary landscape photography was the work of Harry Cory Wright, in particular his book of his tour of the UK. I should add that I do find some of Mr Wrights work interesting (if derivative of Hiroshi Sugimoto – and a hundred other Sugimoto wannabes) but the book lacked any narrative or photographic rigour – at least in my eyes.

Since then I have become somewhat fascinated by the work of Edward Burtynsky because of the coupling of strong photography with a stimulating and complementary narrative. A few other contemporary photographers have since tweaked my interest and when the opportunity to attend a masterclass with Jem Southam arose, I checked his pictures and read a little about him realised that there could be something interesting going on. I didn’t read too much about him as I was hoping to get an idea of his guiding forces directly from the horses mouth. The pictures, especially the Painters Pool/Landscape Stories, with echoes of Eliot Porter, and Rockfalls which has a certain dark beauty and challenging compositional approach (which I sometimes get and sometimes think I miss).

The masterclass was a 10-4 session in a small room at the Lowry museum with about 20 other photographers of which 17 were photography students, 2 were professional photographers and 1 was an amateur hobbyist (I’ll let you guess who that was). In retrospect, it certainly appears that I could have chosen to sit at the front to badger Jem about the whys of his photography (what was surprising is that the students were interested in how he took/printed/framed his work more than I was!).

So what did I learn during these few hours? Well, my summary conclusion is that Jem seems a nice, rational guy that has a deep interest in discovering the subtle plays of nature and man on the landscape over time. He has a strong desire to create compositional grammar for himself rather than to reflexively conform to classical compositional techniques. I should add that I use the word grammar on purpose as the parallel between language structure of grammar and the photographic structure of composition is an apt one. Most photographers use many grammatical or phraseal tools in constructing their pictures. These will be either common compositional elements (rules of thirds, S curves, groups of threes), or elements from other photographers or painters that they may have absorbed (central placement, assymetric balance, etc) and could also be subject related (lone tree/rock syndrome, panoramic hills behind lake, misty long exposure water).

Jem talked about thinking hard about why each of these compositional elements is used and in general he tries to avoid them where possible and if used, makes use of them for an explicit reason (i.e. not just because of a satisfactory visual balance/appeal). Now this could all be a load of rubbish talked to post rationalise some landscape snapshots but having seen Jem discussing his work, I think he means what he says. The result is a picture that does not have instant appeal which, combined with a subject matter that doesn’t necessarily have an immediate beauty and taken in ‘unflattering’ light means that the pictures aren’t going to with landscape photographer of the year (although he does have a penchant for including animals so perhaps he does stand a chance after all!).

More interestingly for me is how his work taken as a series and with an associated narrative can become something more than any single picture. In fact the lack of instant visual appeal accentuates the coherence of the series by diverting the attention away from ‘ooh pretty picture’ to ‘what is this about’. And it is here where I think a lot of contemporary photography fails (for me at least). In trying to promote the narrative element and trying to detract from the picture as aesthetic, contemporary photographers throw the intrinsic beauty out with the overt beauty. Something need not be ugly to avoid being senselessly beautiful.

What I take from this is that it is a valid goal to rein in the throttle on the beauty of a photograph in order to accentuate some other visual goal. I suppose it’s similar to the job a good mixer or mastering expert does where they balance the auditory parts of a recording to provide the appropriate balance. A pop song mixer will spot the ‘hook’ in a song and kill everything else in order to drive it home. Someone approaching the mixing process as an artist will balance the components, sometimes knocking back a part in order to allow something else to come through.

Anyway, after a good few hours discussing work we came to the ‘critique’ session where each of seven people presented some of their work. I followed on from a couple of photographers who were working in the Stuth/Shore mould and was concerned my pictures would be seen as inane. I was more than pleasantly surprised when he singled out one of my pictures as being ‘one of the most astonishing photographs he had ever seen’, even more surprised as it was the one picture where I think I have achieved most of the my compositional goals. That picture is the one associated with this blog post. His reasoning behind it was that the composition worked at different levels and the placement of lighting was very reminiscent of classical painting. I did use the time to discuss some of my ideas beind my photography (in particular about human influence on the landscape) but I think I’ll leave that for another blog post.

So.. Am I going to be converted into a contemporary landscape photographer then? I doubt it. However, I will be thinking more about why I’m taking pictures and will try to organise some of my photographic goals into projects with associated narratives (even if the narrative adapts as I’m taking the pictures). I shall also be thinking a little more about my concious and subconcious use of compositional devices (although how I can think more about a subconcious process I don’t know). I’m hoping that it’s possible to live somewhere in the divide between the two opposite poles of classic and contemporary landscape photography.

Does anybody think about their photography in this way? Does working in series/projects make more sense than working ad-hoc? I’m interested in anybody’s comments – even if they just think I’m thinking too much

OK.. I’m really sorry about not posting for ages.. I haven’t actually been out apart from a quick trip to the lakes in November. I have promised myself that I’ll catch up with the Scotland trip before I got back to Glencoe again in February. I should add a big thanks to Richard Childs for coming out with us during our Scotland holiday. We tried to have a day outside but we got dramatically rained off. I tried to wait it out with my camera set up on a tripod but after about 40 minutes we packed up. As an aside, anybody who is using an Ebony (or I presume most wooden cameras) make sure it isn’t tight when dry if you want to go out in the wet. My Ebony seized up when I got it back after it’s wet weather experience. It didn’t get wet but the moisture in the air obviously expanded the wood. I was worried for a while as it wouldn’t move att all (and it made some dramatic clicking sounds as I forced it) but once it dried off a bit it was fine.. I’ve since loosened it off a bit and carry a screwdriver to slacken it off a little more if I know I’m going out in wet weather. Anyway – thanks Richard, your company made a rainy day memorable..

So, following our wander around the Glencoe valley, and wanting to have a bit of a longer walk to make up for one short day and one lost day, we decided to see how far we could get up robbers falls near Glen Etive. We’d walked this way the previous year but got fought off by ticks, which we hadn’t seen before and were a bit freaked by. This year we were prepared with our Avon ‘Skin So Soft’ Bug Guard which we tested against a couple of ticks and it worked a treat (not like the Deet which the ticks had a bath in, drank a few pints of and proceeded to headbutt us). The previous year we got just below the main lost falls area where the path splits, this year we decided this would be the starting point. Don’t make the mistake we did and take the little right hand path, it ends up precariously following the river (about 100ft up) and the bank is close to collapse. Taking the right hand, well worn path, we continued about a mile and started crossing a few rivers (well done to Charlotte for not freaking out). This took us to just below the ridges where we had our sandwiches and headed back down the other side.

At this point we started seeing quite a few dead tree stumps that had been overgrown with moss, heather and bracken. The picture below shows a shot I fluffed (compensating in the wrong direction for reciprocity) which tried to show some of the dramatic textures of the wood. I’ve been trying hard to include context in my detail shots but sometimes it’s difficult to transition from fore to aft elegantly. I do like the weathered wood textures though.

Just before the final slope on the way down we encountered what must have once been a copse of Scot’s pine. The roots we dramatically overgrown and in the distance the rain and clouds that had just come over were breaking to reveal scanning beams of sunlight. It’s at these points where the myth of the composed photographer just goes completely to pot. Personally I find myself torn between continuing looking for better subjects or commiting to a location and then torn between finalising composition or setting up for the photo and then torn about how comprehensive I am about focus/exposure.. If I take too long the light may go. If I commit too early the light might stay around and I could have found a much better composition. Ultimately you have an unresolveable problem; A mathemetical equation with too few variables. I have been trying to make sure each photograph I take is better than the ones I already have, but this is blatant nonsense as in any batch of photographs, some will work well and others will fail. I haven’t worked out the best answer to this but I think as I build more of a portfolio of pictures I like, I will feel less bad about the missed opportunities and hence can spend more time looking for the better compositions. At the end of the day, I would prefer to have a good composition with poor light than a poor composition with great light. I know the better light picture will be more popular but I won’t have learned anything about composotion by taking it.. At some point the great light will persist and I may get to marry it with a great composition (once I’ve learned how to take on that is).

Anyway – this time I ran between a couple of different trees and found a composition that included a ‘live’ scots pine and also captured some of the variation in light in the distance. I think I could have done with being a bit lower down as the picture looks a little split in two by the brow of the slope. If I could have dropped until the tree stump broke through the diagonal slop, the picture may have become more united.

As it is, I like the picture and it was worth the pint of water I wrung out of each sock when I got back (new boots have since been bought for my next Glencoe trip). I’d love to know your feedback on this picture and how you manage to resolve the unsolveable ‘when to commit’ question..

The day after our Lochan walk was mostly pretty dreary so we had a ‘rest’ and only ventured out of the afternoon. We went back to the Glencoe valley to have a nose around the next inaccessible bit (I don’t know how else to describe it). This time the area was right next to the pass at the head of the valley and again was accessed by crossing the crash barrier. The area was amazingly lush, probably due to it being inaccessible to deer and sheep. I planned to get two types of pictures (as well as scouting out for ideas). The first was a general shot up the valley but including the lush foreground and the glacier scouring on the hill before the lost valley. I also wanted to capture some twilight shots after seeing some of the amazing quality of light that Paul Schilliger gets (although he is in the Alps – it might help). Anyway – both shots I captured were a little dreary, I think I was concentrating too much on subject and not on composition. I shall be trying to get some more twilight shots in the future as the diffuse, shadowless affect can be other worldly..

Continuing on my daily review of our Scottish holiday, we’re on a talk around the lochan in the hospital grounds below the Pap of Glencoe. Also, apologies for the slow posting at the moment, I’m working long hours during my full time job (internet software development) and also creating a site for a holiday company and a landscape photographer. I’ve also got a new site and have just finished captioning the pictures for it. Hopefully now I’ve finished the site updated I’ll get a few more posts up. Fortunately I’ve not been out with my camera since Scotland so I’m not working up a back log…

Anyway, back to the lochan. The walk is a very gentle one with well maintained paths and little in the way of inclines; I have a feeling it’s been specially designed as a physiotherapy walk for heart patients (they have little heart icons on the wooden signposts for the gentler walks). This doesn’t mean the walk is uninteresting though as it takes you around a wonderful little lochan, through some forest areas (mostly fir but some deciduous) and it has great views of the pap.

As I was going around the walk, I had two photographic ideas in my head; one was to try to capture the ferns that were growing out of the sides of trees and the other was to capture the star moss that was so prevalent, sometimes in banks as deep as a couple of feet. The fern picture opportunity came first but I had a great deal of trouble creating a composition until I decided to use the tree-ferns as background material. One large fern was in the foreground that I could use and, with the help of a little ‘crutch’, was in just the right position to match the curve of the tree (pretend I didn’t mention the crutch thing)..

The main problems in this photograph were with the wind and also judging how much to let the tree in the background fall out of focus. I wanted to show the tree to have ferns I didn’t want the tree to be in focus so that the fern in the foreground stood out more. In the end I took a couple of shots and I’ve still to develop the one with slighly more depth of field.

A bit further around the walk we met up with a gentleman who had just been on a course with Ian Cameron. He used to be a rescue helicopter pilot and we talked about how his unique vantage point gave showed him different possibilities. He was taking a picture of the Pap which I was later to attempt myself a coupe of days later but he also told us that there was a Fly Agaric mushroom just around the corner that was particularly photogenic. Well we didn’t find the particular mushroom he talked about (he showed us a photograph of it) but we did find the one on the right.

Now this was a photographic challenge as I was determined to capture the mushroom with a good amount of context, in this case the small pier, the trees and the lake. In order to do so, I had to have my camera at ground level (which meant no tripod) and in order to get an appropriately sized mushroom, I had to use the 80mm lens at a distance of about 8 inches. The photograph at the bottom shows the setup. Trying to focus and then insert a quickload without disturbing the whole lot was a nightmare. It’s fortunate that my wife is so patient as I was there for about an hour (and I pinched the book she was reading to prop up the camera). Another issue that I had to remember was that with so much rear tilt, the bottom half of the picture needed compensating for bellows factor differently than the top of the picture. This was simple enough to work out by using a ‘quick disc’ style calculation which showed an extra half a stop was needed for the bottom, hence I added half a stop of extra grad to the top.

The result isn’t something I would think of as ‘my kind of photography’ but I like it never the less.

On the Tuesday of our holiday in Glencoe, all of us (me, Charlotte and my Mum and Dad) decided to walk up the Glencoe valley from Clachaig all the way up past the old road. The day wasn’t particularly good weather for vistas so my Dad and I walked over to the river coe and wandered around, me taking detail shots and my dad experimenting with long exposures of the waterfalls around the area.

I was looking at an area of strange geology near the edge if the river which I think is the edge of a magma intrusion where the existing rocks have been changed by the heat and the pressure into new rock types. The particular area I was looking at was obviously once a sedimentary composition of older volcanic materials and has many different colours which were brought out by Velvia, from greens to purples.

During our walk up the Glencoe valley, we decided to take a walk down to the river at the upper part of the valley. There is no official access to this part of the valley but if you’re happy walking up the road a bit and crossing over the road barrier then you’ll experience an area of Glencoe that is more like it was before all of the tourists arrived. Because it is at the top of the valley, it receives less light and more moisture which means it is lush, incredibly lush. Also, river here is more like the Etive in that it as the same mixture of hard green and pink rocks into which the river cuts twisting gorges.

I hung off the edge of one of these gorges and tried to capture some of the colours and the deep azure of the water. This particular picture used the largest amount of perspective correction I have ever used in order to adjust the perspective of the picture. As I pointed the camera down, the waterfall at the top was stretched vertically as it was on the edge of the picture (this is the effect that stretches peoples faces if they are on the edge of a wide angle picture). Because I wanted the rock protrusion to be the dominant part of the picture, I pointed the camera at the waterfall and then used front fall to bring the view downward. This made the waterfall undistorted and stretched the protrusion. The effect isn’t huge but I think it balanced the picture better.

As we had my Mum and Dad up I wanted to show them Richard Child’s gallery in Oban, being as it has to be one of the top five landscape photography galleries in Europe – a totally uninformed statistic but I have a feeling it has to be true 😉

Anyway .. we went to the gallery to see Richard’s artwork and to say hello. Richard has done an amazing job setting up the gallery and I would highly recommend anyone in the area go see it (and hopefully buy something!).

After saying hello, we went over to Easdale’s slaty beach to capture some coastal rays and to browse around for shots. My Dad and I kept finding square and triangular holes in the slate and spent some time trying to work out where they had come from (triangular worms??) and eventually we found out that the slate was embedded with iron pyrites! As we wandered around the beach we found large swathes of coastal slate studded with protruding fools good. Obviously this couldn’t go without an attempt at a photograph.

I knew the bright blue sky would cast an intense blue onto the transparency and left the shot unfiltered. The setup was a little hairy (dangling in approaching water, see picture) but eventually I fired off a couple of shots and we drove back to Glencoe as the weather was closing in..

Here’s the picture and a shot of me taking it (taken with my iPhone to record time and date and gps position)