Stormfront

We were moving that day, packing out of the Trossachs for Glencoe, and Loch Earn was a stop on the way. I’d already shot Loch Rusky that morning. By the time we reached St Fillans a front was stacking up over the water — thick, active cloud, and the wind starting to work.

There’s a statue at that end of the loch, the Mirror Man, and most people stop for it. I liked the jetty better. It’s well past its prime but solid enough underfoot to walk out on, and it gives the frame something to stand on and a line to follow west down the water.

This is still the only trip I’ve made to Scotland. The thing I keep failing to describe about it isn’t any single place — it’s the accumulation. Lochs like this one, weather that never settled for an hour, hills and forest stacked behind each other. Somewhere in all of it I got the odd feeling of having come home to a country I’d never been to.

The wind was the actual problem here. It was breaking up the surface and taking the reflection apart, so I put a six-stop ND on and ran two seconds to flatten it back. That’s why the water reads like glass in a photograph called Stormfront — the sky is what was happening, and the water is what two seconds does to a loch with a breeze on it.