It’s been a week since we have been back from our two week summer holidays in Lewis, and, it already seems like it didn’t even happen (but the freshly developed negatives say otherwise).

We got another two weeks of glorious blue sky, midge-free, weather this year (some say it’s always like that, others that we should come more often). Conditions perfect for walking and exploring, of which we did great deal, from a couple of walks on the Harris / Lewis border, up to the Butt, our favourite outing being one along the coast between Bragar and Carloway, on which we saw twenty three different bird species, from tiny waders to a very close encounter with a golden eagle.

Of course, blue skies are not so conducive to photography, at least not to my kind of photography, but I did manage to take eleven photographs with the 4x5 (well, six really, as six are a temporal sequence of the same thing); most of it on the first day, which was the only overcast day of the fortnight.

All but one of these are studies of standing stones, of which there are great many on Lewis. This is something I have meant to look into on our previous visits, but didn’t get to, so it went higher on the TODO list this year — I have now developed the eleven primary negatives, plus six of the secondaries (a few dirty, minimally edited, scans are on aye.photos), and of the eleven there are four or so I think I might be able to work with.

The one I am fairly certain I will be able to print to my satisfaction is an image entitled Five Millennia of Erecting, taken at the Callanish III site. I was really hoping that would come out as I pictured it, for it’s intended towards a project called Also Scotland, which explores Scottish landscapes beyond the conventional landscape framing. It’s something I have been working on since before COVID, and it’s been slow going, but I am gradually getting close to having enough material to do something with it (in a few more years time 🙂).

Another one I’d really like to get a decent print from, but which will challenge my printing skills, is also taken at Callanish III; I was hoping to capture the layering of the hills in the background, which is fine, but the (grey) stones themselves are not well separated from the (green) background.

This didn’t come as much of a surprise. In general, I find the summer landscapes hard to photograph, primarily because it’s mostly green, and green is very hard to control in analogue black & white, as it lies bang in the middle of the visible spectrum. Things are not helped by the fact that here in Scotland it’s mostly just a single shade of green, and Lewis is very green that way; this image is a good example of the problem.

The photo that took the most effort is a sunrise at the stones at Barraglom on Great Bernera (the story behind that is here). Sunrise is not what one might call a typical black & white subject, but one of the stones there has an absolutely wonderful structure, which I thought might work well in the ‘quiet light’. This too will not be easy to print, but I think I can manage this one; I expect to be doing some test prints in the next couple of weeks.

On the analogue photography subject, I have finally managed to visit the Island Darkroom Gallery in Achmore. I have meant to do that on our two previous visits, not least as it is always great to see somewhere supporting the old craft, but somehow always ended up driving by after closing time. And, yes, it’s definitely worth a visit, as Mhairi Law has some good work there both on display and for sale (and I am delighted to mention that this now includes my cameo prints).