Friday 01 January 2010

Christmas visit to Forres

I'm rather fortunate to not only have a girlfriend with great parents, but also a girlfriend with great parents who live somewhere that's great to photograph! This means it takes no persuading to get me to agree to a week's visit. So I find myself up in Forres on the Moray coast in Scotland again for the Christmas period – camera packed and ready for a change of scenery.

For the past couple of months I've been working exclusively close to home in the Peak District on a project that is going to take all year, I won't be releasing any of this work until its completion, so it's good to have a break and get the chance to make some images that are independent of this output.

The 23rd of December and I've been offered the choice to go with the rest of the family to see the pantomime in Inverness – or go out on my own to do some photography all day. So I was up bright and early ready for a day out at the pantomime...Oh no I wasn't...

I've certainly seen a change in my photographic subject matter over the past year. In some way this has been a conscious decision – wanting to focus more on the Peak District – my local environment. But I've also found myself wanting to move away from seascapes. Maybe I've seen enough wide angle, slow mo, golden seas now to put me off. Of course it is possible to produce lovely coastal images – I love the work of Andrew Nadolski for example, but for now, I think I'll be keeping away.

So for a change I found myself not heading off to the lovely Moray coast on this visit. There had been a lot of snow in the Highlands prior to our visit so I decided to head inland to Dava Moor, through which the Forres to Grantown-on-Spey road passes for my day's photography. On the way over on Monday we had driven along the side of Loch Ness (no we didn't see it) and the snow on the trees was magical – I was hoping to find something similar on today's outing. I had also noted a couple of lochans on the map just off the road that I thought would be interesting given the frozen conditions.

I has very disappointed to find it had been raining overnight, so as I set off out of Forres, I was gutted to find the snow had been washed off the trees. Thankfully as I pressed on, and the road became more and more challenging to drive on, I realised all was not lost and there was some scope for snowy photography.

The next problem I encountered was finding somewhere to park, the lay-by next to the first lochan was deep in snow and was completely unusable. After a couple of passes up and down the road I managed to find an area that looked OK to pull off the road on to, I parked up and set off through the snow to the lochan. This wasn't easy as the snow came to well above my knees (and up to my waist at one point).

I made a number of images here, drawn to the patterns of snow and frozen ice. I've stuck mainly with the square format I'm favouring these days, I have a square mask on my large format camera which allows me to use the whole width of the 4x5 sheet. I also did some comparisons with Fuji Astia and Kodak E100G, the Astia results being much more desirable. The E100G has a decidedly blue cast and would have benefitted from a warm up filter.

After a flask of coffee and a sandwich in a more usable lay-by I headed up to the Blairs Loch on the outskirts of Forres – as it has started snowing again I didn't want to venture further afield.

I was instantly taken with the contrasting leaf colours in the plantation that boarders the path to Blairs Loch and made a number of images that highlight the lingering golden leaves contrasting against the snow covered ground and the evergreens behind.

The loch itself wasn't too interesting, the fading light (at about 3pm at this time of year) wasn't doing a great deal. Still, I made a composition with the lovely reeds in the frozen water and then had a walk around the loch and enjoyed the scenery.

As I was heading back to the car the sky had turned a wonderful deep pink colour in the opposite direction to the sun set. I managed to quickly find a suitable foreground composition and with no time to set up the large format camera before the colour faded, I made a couple of exposures with my digital SLR, the results of which you can see below.

All in all a great day out, I'll be posting new images from this and a couple of other days out in the Recent Work Gallery over the next week.