The question of the role and the importance of realism in landscape photography is one that keeps coming up over and over again. On the one hand we have the purists, holding onto old fashioned notions of truth, arguing that landscapes should be true to the land; on the other the free creatives, raising that millennia old question ‘What is Truth?’. And, broadly speaking, the former seem to have long lost the argument.

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My shoulder hurts from the seatbelt, plumes of steam bellowing from underneath the bonnet; I am sure I can smell petrol. Shaking fingers fumbling with the buckle. The driver side door won’t budge. Scrambling out over the gear stick. I put some distance between myself and the car, expecting it to burst into flames any moment.

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The NC500 is a travesty. The idea of car touring holidays harkens back to the environmental ignorance of mid 20th century and is wholly unfit for these days of an unfolding environmental catastrophe. VisitScotland, the Scottish Government, and all those who lend their name to promoting this anachronism, should be ashamed of themselves.

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A flame stretching up to heaven. The newsrooms can’t get enough, a journalist’s dream come true. You, me, everyone, glued to our screens, riveting stuff. (Honey, make us some popcorn, will you?)

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A recent UKH Opinion piece dealing with the ecological cost of the forthcoming Glen Etive micro hydro, and micro hydro in general, includes this statement: ‘[we can] produce large amounts of truly “clean and green” energy … through solar, offshore … and tidal energy solutions’. I have come across permutations of this argument before, and it strikes me that our assessment of the environmental cost of renewables, and our understanding of renewables in general, is somewhat simplistic, glossing over what it is renewables actually do.

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Some of the photographers of old get rather upset when folk say ‘film slows you down’, so I won’t say that, but I’ll say it slows me down for sure. It’s not just the ‘on location’ pace, but also the time it takes before I get to see what I tried to visualise.

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Film is experiencing something of a renaissance these days, as attested on social media (#ishootfilm #filmisnotdead), and, perhaps more importantly, by the reappearance of numerous previously discontinued film emulsions—there is, again, money to be made from film.

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I was going to write the usual annual retrospective, but sometimes life just gets in the way. They say a picture is worth a thousand words; perhaps it is, so anyway, here are a few.

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Glen Ogle. Most of the time a place on the way to somewhere else, somewhere more exciting. Yet, for me also a special, magical place where years ago my inner eye first really glimpsed the beauty of this land.

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I saw him as soon as I came over the rise. Hard not to, perched on a rock some hundred yards ahead, completely out of scale in this landscape.

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There are three of them up there, and what a racket! Correction: the racket, that’s just the two of them. She is soaring silent, near motionless, regal; aloof. Her path seemingly unalterable. On a mission permitting no distractions.

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It’s been 10 years since the birth of the M4/3 camera system. I got my first M4/3 (Lumix GF2) in 2010 and never looked back. Indeed, I am about to argue that during that decade M4/3 has become the best camera system both for the landscape photographer on the move and a wildlife photographer alike, hitting the sensor size sweet spot. And yet, it’s completely overlooked by the outdoor movers and shakers!

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I have mentioned the Vargo Triad and Decagon in an earlier post on Cooking with Alcohol. I have now had a chance to use both stoves for real, and the experience was, unfortunately, not so good.

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I saw the front in a distance. A solid wall of water, just obscuring where Kings House once stood (a view improved, I dare say). It was upon me before I had the tent up, a scramble to get inside, wait it out by candle light.

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When the row over the National Trust for Scotland trademarking the name ‘Glencoe’ erupted last summer, I had never heard of a company called Hilltrek. But for a while then I had been on the look out for some clothes for pottering about the woods with binoculars and a camera during the winter months, and had not seen anything that would be well suited to the (sodden) Scottish conditions. And I liked what I saw at the Hilltrek website.

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In the last couple of years I have become a great fan of alcohol stoves. For three reasons. On short trips they are very weight-efficient. Alcohol is a much more environmentally friendly fuel than gas. And alcohol stoves are cheap to run!

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