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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It’s been a long time since Linda and I climbed Beinn Dubhchraig. Just another couple of Munros bagged. Not a very memorable day of drizzle and nay views, leaving a lingering impression of a long trot through a bog punctuated by spindly pine trees, and no urge to return. One that persisted for a couple of decades. But today couldn’t be more different: the sky is blue, the air is crisp, the ground is frozen. And those spindly trees? They are no more.

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Over the twenty something years since the National Trust for Scotland took over the Mar Lodge Estate, the upper Glen Lui (or, Gleann Laoigh Bheag, as it is properly called), has become a real gem of a place. But today is not exactly a gem of a day. There be might fluffy fresh snow on the ground, but it’s breezy, and visibility is limited indeed. Some might think it outright miserable!

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Days like these don’t come around that often. After a couple of brief snow flurries the sun banished the cloud, and now the early morning light glitters on the pristine slopes of Beinn Challuim. It is nearly exactly twenty years since I’ve been up here last, in very different conditions; a memorable day, though not for the best of reasons.

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It was love at first sight. Those smooth curves, precision crafted from a solid block of stainless steel, the needle-sharp point, the smooth black, fully rubberised, shaft on which big red letters proudly declared:

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