November, 2007

Near Dornoch Firth, Easter, Ross

Some photographs are easy to make, others are difficult, the latter taking years of planning, hours of hiking, and an exactness of technique to make the perfect print. We have all heard the photo equal of "I walked seven miles up hill through the snow both ways to make this photograph". This image isn't one of those. The truth is that this was a very easy photograph to make.

It is located near Dornoch Firth on the A9 just south before you cross the Dornoch Firth Bridge between Inverness and Thurso. I have driven across this bridge many times on my way from Inverness to the ferry out to Orkney. Traveling north it is hard to see this ridge and trees because the road turns right into a roundabout immediately before the bridge. However, traveling south from Thurso, the ridge and trees are in view just as you cross the bridge.

Richard Barnett and I were returning from Orkney, on our way to Oban and the Highlands on a beautiful day in May when I really took notice of these trees. I had passed them several times over the years and I guess I wasn't ready to make the photograph until this particular moment. I had already begun the layout out for TOUCHSTONES and on this trip I was looking for some specific images. I knew I wanted something to parallel an image from Calanais. After seeing the trees standing like stones on the ridge I knew this was the image I was looking for. The road was too narrow to pull off so I continued south for about half a mile and turned around in the Glenmorangie Distillery parking lot and returned to find a safe place to pull off the road and began to work.

Back at home I had a strong photograph of the standing stones at Calanais outlined across a hill against the sky. I felt the trees on this ridge would be a companion to this image and set out to create a parallel image. I shot the scene in many different ways: horizon line high, low and in the middle of the frame. I shot versions with wide angle, normal and long lenses. I even shot several vertical images with the wall as a leading line running up the center or off to the side. It was a beautiful day, the light was great, and as a result the exposure and development was easy. Every negative I shot that day is easy to print. The clouds are different in each image, but I ended up with a number of images to choose from for the book.

I chose this image because the ridgeline was high in the frame and played off nicely with the low horizon line in the Calanais image. Paying attention to horizon lines while sequencing the book helped the flow from image to image. It is one of the few images in the book that I knew was going to be in the book when I made the image. It was an easy image to procure and for that I am very grateful. There are too many images where I have to walk seven miles in the snow up hill both ways to make. So I am thankful for the easy ones.