Beep! Beep! Beep! I flay about a bit, until my brain works out what is the meaning of the ruckus — my 4.50am alarm clock, a photograph in the making.

I, eventually, came to realise that landscape photographs benefit from at least a bit of preparation and planning: good photographs are made, rather than just taken. It’s not that you could not take a good landscape without thorough prep, indeed there is lots to be said for incidental photography, you know, just whipping out your camera as you stumble into that brief moment of perfect conditions while out on a hike … but the truth is that such moments are rare, and good photos coming out of them even rarer; I can count the decent photographs that I managed to take this way in the last thirty years on the fingers of one hand.

In any case large format camera does’t really lend itself to this style of photography. First, the act of ‘whipping out’ a large format camera takes about half an hour; if I get myself into a true berserker frenzy I can do it in about twenty minutes, but then mistakes are usually made. Second, the novelty of going out for a wee wander with 16kg of camera kit on the off chance you might see something sufficiently worthwhile to go through all that ‘whipping out’ quickly wears off.

And so virtually all the photos I take with the LF camera are planned in advance. After having an initial idea, I do a recce using the Viewfinder mk2 phone app, which makes it possible to simulate pretty much any camera and lens, and also gives me a basic idea what the image would look like in B&W. This way when I turn up with the real thing, I have a pretty clear idea of what image I am after, where the camera will be placed, what lens I’ll be using, allowing me to concentrate on the important things: focusing, movements, depth of field, finalising filter selection, metering, and, of course, the light itself.

Then there is the big question of when. Some photos are immune to this, but for others timing is everything; you really don’t want to lug all that kit to the top of a mountain for first light only to discover it’s a sunset shot, or, worse, that you are twenty minutes too late. I have one particular photograph for which the window of opportunity is, thanks to the geography of the location, only about half an our a day for about two weeks a year; it came together for me in year three, but I know of photographers who have waited considerably longer than that to get the photo they were after (getting a shot like that work out is extremely satisfying, and, if nothing else, it makes for a good tale of dedication).

I did my initial recce for this particular photograph two days ago, deciding on the camera position, lens, and framing. But I could see there and then the light was going to be a problem. Indeed, looking at the location in TPE later, I wasn’t sure whether what I had in mind is actually possible at this time of the year.

So back I went yesterday, with a notebook and a compass, and took a few bearings to determine the optimal position of the sun, and its acceptable limits either side. Back to TPE, I was glad to see this image should be possible, but the window of opportunity is at most ninety minutes, starting around 6am, assuming the sky is clear. Fortunately I don’t have far to travel for this one, and decided to take the breakfast with me, hence the leisurely 4.50am start.

—

I click the kettle on for coffee and draw the curtains open: it is overcast and the cloud is low down; this won’t do, not at all.

Maybe tomorrow, I think as I crawl back to bed. There is (almost) always tomorrow, or next year. But getting back to sleep is hard, for what if the clouds magically disappear in the next half hour?