Highland Shepherd

We’d woken early on our first morning in Glencoe, because I’d been looking forward to this mountain more than almost anything else on the trip, and driven out to a small side road off the highway where there was one camper van in the lot and nobody else about. Very little is signposted out there, so we found some trails and followed them. The first view I came to put a waterfall dead centre with the Buachaille standing behind it, and the whole arrangement fell flat.

So I moved around until the river started doing something useful. From where I ended up it cuts diagonally across the frame and carries you from the white water in the foreground onto the lower slopes, along the ridge to the point, and back down again to the big tree that holds the left side together.

Because it was overcast in every direction with no colour coming, black and white was half decided for me before I started. The other half was that there was too much colour to manage — autumn ground cover, the river, the tree, grey rock and blue-grey cloud all pulling at once — and monochrome sorts that out. The second at f/11 is for the water, and with no wind at all I had nothing to worry about in the foliage.

That mountain sits at the entrance to the glen like something posted there deliberately, and it’s the thing you see coming in. We’d arrived the previous morning from the Falls of Dochart, where we’d photographed the falls and had our first proper Scottish breakfast.