Landscape, Photography and Land Management

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This is going to be a long post, drawing on several disparate areas of experience and interest. Welcome to my mind…

Photographic Influence

Cirrus clouds above a line of old beech trees, Portpatrick

Nice beech and hawthorn trees – shame they aren’t there any more

The Highlands are not like 18th-century Venice. On driving around – which you can do around here – the landscape is raw, rugged, elemental, positively harsh on a cold day. We do not sit around in powdered wigs playing the harpsichord of an evening.

It is my opinion that landscape photography exists not to make merely aesthetically pleasant images, not even to convey a “feeling” from the photographer’s mind in the name of art, but rather to show and tell forth something of the landscape.

It is all too easy to go for a stroll, to get out into “nature” seeking photographs, to see only the shapes and forms of the land, hopefully cover it in contrasty dappled light; but if that is all that is seen in a photograph then it is the most absurd way to trivialize larger forces at work.

Worse still, it’s even easier to get into a mentality of visiting only known-good photo locations. “Saturday afternoon, Falls of Bruar” – nothing against the Falls, far from it, but it becomes a photographic rut devoid of sense of exploration.

I used to have a motto: “no landscape photos without saying something about the rocks you stand on”. It’s still a good thought, but even though the geology might date back 3.5 billion years, that is only one aspect of pertinent story, perhaps even the cheap and comforting option – looking straight to Old, bypassing the anthropocene; it reduces taking a principled stand to throwing out bland “statement”s or little stories and/or personal feelings, offensive in their inoffensiveness.

The PSNS Experience

A couple of months ago I attended a lecture at the Perthshire Society of Natural Science (PSNS), part of the “Curious Minds” series; the presenter worked for SEPA at Stirling University, and he spoke about Sustainability. Being brutally honest, it was not the most approachable of talks: a business person speaking from a mind of systems-thinking about corporate matters, with that peculiar management tendency to present a metaphorical briefcase of ideas supposed to be complete but leaving one wondering what nuance is missing – that’s not likely to engage the common individual who only wants to know how best to run their own house. I couldn’t help thinking of the only two occasions I’ve had any dealings with SEPA – first to ask how to dispose of film-processing chemicals and second for maps to avoid flood areas when buying a house; if SEPA are to offer the public a service, they have a PR hurdle to overcome…

However, I came away with the seeds of several thoughts that have since germinated.

The lecturer explained how SEPA sees companies on a spectrum from “climate criminals” (knowingly damaging the environment) through careless to compliant to champions. A lot of words containing “C” and “A” and a nice gradation from red to green, but that illustrates the systems-think.

More usefully, SEPA has expanded their remit so they now see Scotland from three points of view: there’s the environment which they still protect for its own sake; there’s social (concerning wellbeing when people go for a walk in the forests); and there’s an economic aspect.

Experiences of Farming

For lack of reason to the contrary, I’ve always kept an open mind opinion about livestock farming. As a confirmed carnivore, living somewhere between town and country, it’s not easy to see bucolic bliss as harm. However, in the past five years there have been three experiences that sounded warning bells.

First: in Galloway, I spent 7 months living in a run-down farmhouse in the middle of a livestock farm on a nondescript C road. If we left the gate open, sheep would come and mow the lawn and cows walk past the study window and fertilize said lawn on their travels. It’s all very well feeling close to “nature” when the sun shines, but when it rains and the slurry runs 4 inches deep corroding your boots whilst walking the dog, it is far from pleasant. It also “never snows in Galloway”, which doesn’t explain the 3′-deep snow that winter, requiring the farmer’s assistance to dig out the surrounding roads – which were made impassable by his own tractors bouncing along compacting the snow into undulating waves of ice in the first place.

Second: also in Galloway, when I spent 15 months living next to a different farm: there was a beautiful line of old beech and hawthorn trees running up a small hill, just round the corner from where we lived; the farmer chopped them all down to make way for root crops to feed his sheep.

Third: two years ago, I went for a walk along a glen and found a particularly pleasant viewpoint, a U-shaped glacial valley with corrie lochan and lonely pine tree in the basin.

The light and landscape that provoked further exploration

 

Seeking to revisit and explore further, I researched the area on Google Earth and figured, with a choice of two, the better track would be one running up the south/”left” side of the glen to reach further into the mountains. So a month ago I set forth, with young dog on a lead beside me, to explore.

About 300 yards from the carpark, we rounded a corner and saw a herd of Highland cows and calves. By chance, the farmer came by in his Landrover at exactly the same moment and said not to take my dog any further. Fair enough – answered my dithering wonderings on the matter pretty quickly – and the exchange was pleasant enough.

However, that does not explain why, having driven off ahead of me, he promptly shut and padlocked a 6-foot-tall gate across the path, leaving me and my dog on the wrong side with the cows.

Inconsiderate farmer shut this gate right across the path, blocking my escape with a young dog.

With no way through or around the gate, I had to persuade my dog to climb precariously over that ladder, knowing that if one paw slipped he could be seriously injured.

As for outdoor access code – “right to roam” – it would have been more considerate if they had erected some sign warning of impaired access nearer the carpark…

With three strikes against livestock-farming kind, it’s time to start formulating an opinion.

Connected Thinking

So after a bit of a delay we rejoin the walk along the glen, this time going down the right side of the river instead.

Realisation dawned.

The first realisation was that the view I had seen a couple of years previously relied on a trick of perspective – the grassland appears continuous over distance while actually the river lurks below the level.

As I reached the furthest point of my walk a few miles into the glen, turning back, I observed how the river had cut straight vertically down a metre or two, exposing dead tree roots in the bank.

Half-way back, I noticed dead trees all along the river bank, and just off to the side of the path I found a large expanse of land full of the bleached white remains of pine tree roots and it hit me that this was a peat bog – a genuine example of the kind of thing one reads about in “the Highlands”, as though that were some far-off place – well here we are, soil/mud/peat at our very feet.

Genuine peat bog, full of bleached white roots and remains of pine trees

And so I looked at it through SEPA’s eyes. Environment + Social + Economy <= Sustainability.

Following research, peat is deposited at a rate of about 1mm per year, so the 1.5-2m depth of peat beside the river corresponds to 1500-2000 years’ accumulation.

What we have here is not the wilderness beloved of landscape photographers, it is barren.

The interplay of light and shape and form of the landscape is utterly irrelevant while the natural pine trees that should be here lie dead in a large carbon sink, their place taken by monoculture fenced-off in enclosures for commercial gain. The parts of the glen that are not directly peat bog are bare through grazing of livestock whose methane and CO2 emissions are a major contributor to global warming. In the words of Henning Steinfeld, Chief of FAO’s Livestock Information and Policy Branch: “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation“.

This is not wilderness, it is barren. It is not a wonder of nature, but artificial. It is not contributing to society’s welfare but its unsustainability harms the planet.

Sometimes, one has to remove the rose-tinted sunglasses and see how one glen encompasses in every aspect a microcosm of all kinds of problems. Just because it’s a sunny day does not make it a happy story.

What Next?

I’m still thinking about it. I’ve spent long enough wondering if certain environmental charities are “a bit hippy”, but the facts are irrefutable: that glen stands for the worst combination of (un)sustainability factors. Peat bog itself is a valuable ecosystem, but given the choice I would far rather have the pine trees back that belonged there in the first place. The idea of rewilding meets with favour. While I would not want to join or recommend any “-ism” (vegetarianism or veganism being defined in terms of negative ideologies), I am also in favour of taxing the supply of meat and other livestock products to better reflect the true costs, including environmental factors.

Autumn Holiday 2016: Heading Home

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Having spent a few days based in my favourite Glen Affric hunting scenery up in the far North, I drove back down Loch Ness. Thinking to take a detour along the A827 (toward Skye), I joined the A87 south only to be met with road-closed signs.

There was a bit of light in the layby while I made my mind up…

The view from the layby also included a classic interaction of mankind and nature – rarely, for me, this is highly manipulated (several partial wind-turbines removed and the remaining one moved across the frame and inverted) but illustrates the concept and contrast quite nicely:

“Speaking to the Sky”
Originally a photo of a few large wind turbines on the slopes of Meall Dubh; made into a bit of a statement.

Given that the first detour was closed, I went a little further along to Loch Cluanie on the road to Skye and had a quick play with the new Nisi filters[amazon], admiring the sunlight on the loch shore:

Perhaps not the best light for landscape work, being late morning / nearly noon, but quite nice and bright sunlight on Loch Cluanie nonetheless.

A rather late lunch was had at my favourite pub in Glencoe, the Clachaig Inn.

The weather turned foul as we travelled through Glencoe, but it made for an interesting timelapse video of the clouds and mist lapping around two of the Three Sisters mountains (Beinn Fhada and Gearr Aonach):

And this is what it looked like shooting it… complete with chamois leather cloth to keep the rain off the camera:

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At Tarbat Ness

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Continuing the third day of my holiday last November, having been to the Reelig Glen in the morning, with the weather still mostly inclement, I went for a nice long drive up to Tarbat Ness by Portmahomack. The lighthouse – the third-tallest in Scotland – was engineered by Robert Stevenson in 1830, a stripy shapely construction standing on cliffs above the Devonian old red sandstone shore, making a great classic scene to photograph.

And this is the more immersive view of what it’s like to be there:

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Chilling with the trees

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On the third day of my holiday last year, the weather took a turn for the worse and my chosen route for the day was closed until Spring, so I went for a walk around the Reelig Glen just outside Inverness.

To be more accurate, the first walk around the glen was favourably interrupted by a very friendly wee collie dog, so I did the whole route a second time with the camera…

It was beautifully relaxing, good for the soul. A place of shapes and light and more shapes and green and autumnal orange colour.

About half-way around the route, just round from crossing the bridge, is Dughall Mor – a Douglas Fir tree that at one time was the tallest in Britain. They do not put any signage by it, except for a very tiny mark on the bark, but I know which it is.

One of these trees used to be the tallest in Britain.
(I know which – they don’t advertise it for safety reasons, save for a very small mark.)

About six years ago, on my first visit to the glen, I also met a small dog and attendant human; the conversation has stuck in my mind, partly for the subject-matter but mostly because of its gentle and slightly surreal nature. A person who knows there’s nothing better to do than to sit on a bench watching the old dog play in the burn. At the time, I wrote about the encounter thus:

The Shadows of Importance

As I came nearer, crossed over a small bridge over a burn, I saw an elderly Westie playing, slowly investigating all around… with his also-eldery designated human sitting on this bench.
And we conversed.
About the important things.
Dogs, trees, and somewhere waaayy down the line, people.
We walked through the woods and he showed me a tree that once was tallest in Britain.
The world of bright city lights was gone, a garish cheapness for and of strangers, long forgotten, as though it never was.
And there was complete serenity.
Some days I’d post an admiration of the forest. Today you get the waypoint where Hamish played and Geoff sat.
Or maybe it’s still an admiration of the forest anyway…

Scene of an encounter

This time of making the circuit around the Reelig Glen, there was no sign of Geoff or Hamish – but I remembered them, and was grateful for all the dogs who love me.

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The light, when the clouds permitted, was glorious – illuminating the foliage beautifully.

Landscape and Geology – an NC500 road-trip

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Back last November I spent a very happy few days staying up North; the first day was spent in Glen Affric (sunrise, trees, water and light).

Photo Map

Photo Map – a long drive around Wester Ross

In the few years since I was last up there, there’s been a concerted push to market the road around the far north of Scotland as an “answer to Route 66” and thereby promote it as a tourist attraction.

The second day of my holiday saw lousy weather, completely overcast and foggy for much of the time. So I spent the day driving around Wester Ross wondering where the scenery had got to… trying not to think of it as the NC500 but actually enjoying several stops along the route that I’ve been to previously.

The first stop was the well-known view from a layby in Glen Dochart, above Kinlochewe to admire the sinuous road:

An obvious scene: the road wending through Glen Dochart toward Kinlochewe (not depicted: Kinlochewe, because of the mist).

Pity about the mist…

A little further along on the way through Kinlochewe are two mountains – Beinn Eighe to the left and Meallan Ghobhar and Coille na Dubh Chlaise to the right. We pulled off the A-road and Doglet had his breakfast more or less directly on the Loch Maree fault-line whilst admiring the quartzite rock strata.

There wasn’t much to be said for the views across Loch Maree, although the contrast of dull grey skies and warm autumnal orange and yellow colours was pleasant.

Some years ago, there was a TV documentary, a former politician’s search for the most natural woodland in the UK. After much searching around down south in the New Forest, he came north and explored Caledonian Forest remnants, finally finishing up on an island in Loch Maree – a rather bizarre arrangement of an island with a lochan with another island inside that – on which he stated the trees were least likely to have been touched by mankind. There is an obvious viewpoint, a small section of beach, at Slattadale toward the north-west end of Loch Maree, from which the group of islands can be seen.

Of all the photos I made during that day, this was perhaps the most classical landscape, in that I had the idea for these photos – the location, leading lines of foreground boulders, large expanse of silvery water and Slioch in the distance – planned in my mind for ages before revisiting the area.

What you don’t see is how, while I was making these photos (long exposures, totalling a minute’s exposure, focus-stacked) there was another photographer sitting 20yd away, cooking his morning breakfast – so the photos fail to include the clouds of fragrant bacon and fish smoke billowing past the camera…

Speaking of lunch, mine happened at Badachro, at the Inn. Highly recommended – everyone loved Doglet, which is a good start, and the burger was tasty as ever. Mostly the thing I like most is how the coastline is just like Plockton – west-coast rocky sea-lochs and seaweed – but without actually being Plockton that everyone else flocks to see.

And this is what it’s really like at Badachro:
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On a previous trip I had explored as far as Poolewe but not had a chance to go further; this time I stopped off at Loch Tollaidh to admire the rocky outcrops across the water (Lewisian Gneiss and other igneous rock).

Classic Wester Ross landscape – huge lumps of Lewisian gneiss, beside Loch Tullie

Signs of industry: on the shore of Loch Tollaidh is a small jetty, presumably a put-in for boats to go inspect the small salmon farm. That and the remains of a very dead boat, wood bleached inland, caught my attention:

On travelling up the coast to Mellon Udrigle (what a wonderful name!) I was struck by the view across the Wester Ross Marine Protected Area to the mountains on the horizon on the mainland. On the left, a bit of misty cloud drapes over the top of Beinn Ghobhlach; to the right, there’s more mist flowing over Sail Mhor but the huge bulk of An Teallach was completely hidden behind the cloud.

A wide-angle panorama: low-lying cloud (with a bit of precipitation) and mist flowing over Sail Mhor – the full bulk of An Teallach is completely hidden in the cloud beyond.
The mountain on the far left is Beinn Ghobhlach.

By the time I got back onto main roads, with a very long drive ahead, the light was fading fast toward dusk and the blue hour and clouds in front were thick and closing in fast, so I made one final photo for the day by the side of Little Loch Broom and scarpered fast.

Lots of mist in the distance, travelling the A832 past Beinn Ghobhlach.
I was rather glad to get back in the car and head off before the weather got really bad!

Winter along the Provost’s Walk

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This is fast becoming one of my favourite walks around town – not least because it’s less muddy than the other track out the back. Yesterday I awoke to find the world had turned white, complete with snow-drift piled-up on the front lawn by a passing snowplough. Naturally, over-inflated reports of traffic confusion abounded, although by the time I had to drive anywhere in the evening, the roads were as clear as a bell.

Anyway. I like this path. The Ruthven Water makes a great spot for the Doglet to paddle. All very relaxing and shiny in the white snow.

This is what it’s like around here…

Provost’s Walk:

Arty photos:

All shots taken on the Pentax K-1 using my new hand-held HDR workflow.

Around Glen Affric 3: Morning Sunrise

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I first visited Glen Affric in September 2006, more or less 10 years ago. Not long after, I discovered the joy of standing at my favourite bench watching the sun rise behind the distant mountains, its light casting shadows of the trees on the mist. Since then I’ve been longing for a second chance at the same scene – and this year, with a bit of good timing, I think I managed it.

And another behind-the-scenes 360-pano selfie of what it’s like to be there…

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Around Glen Affric: Trees

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Having contemplated the role of water in the landscape, the second aspect by which to contemplate Glen Affric is the trees. Home to the largest Caledonian Forest reserve, the place boasts beautiful naturally-seeded old Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) trees, their orange-brown bark full of gnarly character; there are also birch and juniper to be seen.

The river walk forms a small circuit around an isthmus connecting Loch Affric and Loch Beainn a Mheadhoinn; it is best taken anticlockwise from the carpark, descending to the river and then returning back through the pine forest.

This particular morning I was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful autumn light, but also by how the snow on Sgurr na Lapaich melted in the less-than-an-hour it took to walk around.

Those are the official landscape photos – this is the immersive 360-degree panorama showing what it’s really like to be there:

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Driving away from the favoured river walk, I just had to stop to admire the birch trees by the roadside, glowing vibrant autumnal yellow gold and orange back-lit by the sun.

And just for amusement, a selfie from the Nice Place itself at the start of the river walk route:

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Around Glen Affric: water

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I had a short holiday at the start of last November, a few days spent in Glen Affric. There are several aspects why it’s my favourite part of the planet, but for the purposes of this post, we consider the role of water in shaping a landscape, eroding its way through rocks to form river, gorges and waterfalls.

First, the impressive 150-foot drop of Plodda Falls from the top:

Second, some of the cascades in the River Affric, part of the way around the River Walk, rich autumn colours glowing in the morning sunlight:

And finally, a couple of 360-degree panoramas, partly to offer a behind-the-scenes view – they take a little while to download once clicked:

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Along Loch Tay

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It’s a classic viewpoint – at the head of Loch Tay standing on the shores at Kenmore, looking down the length of the loch past the Crannog and island to mountains in the distance. Even without dramatic contrasty sunlight, it didn’t disappoint.

For the record, these were both 8-second exposures, around f/4.5 and ISO 400 using a Nisi circular polariser filter to balance the light between sky and reflection. Both images are a pair stacked for noise-reduction.

Around the Black Mount

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Detail of blades of grass poking throuhg a frozen Lochan na h’Achlaise, Rannoch Moor.

At the end of November I spent a happy Saturday afternoon driving out to the Black Mount area in Rannoch Moor, with photos in mind.

Didn’t help that I left the main camera battery at home in the charger, so was limited to the spare. Well, it makes one think when even turning the camera on to compose through the EVF uses finite battery life, especially in the cold. Lots of “pre-visualising” going on to keep the film-throwback photographer purists happy.

There were plenty of cars zooming along the A82 but a little stroll out into the bogs resulted in some nice landscape.

The crowning joy of the photographic excursion, however, was the total cliche scene of the Buachaille from the River Coupall. It’s sufficiently well-known that folks groan when it appears in photo-club competitions. The composition is more or less fixed, with varying extremity of weather conditions providing the value-additions to the photo.

This time, I spotted a little wisp of mist coming up Glencoe as I turned off down Glen Etive. There were only two other folks at the location; they said it was their second attempt that day as, on the way down the glen, there had been 20-30 folk milling around.

Funny how such an iconic landscape location still has people who will shoot it in suboptimal light.

We took a few photos, and dusk fell, with glorious shades of warm purple tints and an orange sky.

My temporary companions departed, leaving just me – well into post-sunset dusk blue-hour – at which point the wisp of mist rounded the base of the mountain underlining it in white to match the waterfalls in the river. And that is the shot of the day.

Buachaille Etive Mor from the River Coupall, Glen Etive

Stob Dearg – Buachaille Etive Mor from the River Coupall, Glen Etive

Hogmanay 2016/2017

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Happy new year! I saw the year in from Blackford Hill looking at the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle.

Watching folks arrive was almost like a scene from Lord of the Rings – this line of torch lights processing along the hillside track, reminiscent of the last march of the Elves.