It’s always good to go for a walk with the camera. Even if I have nothing specific in mind I’ll make a decision to use a particular lens for the walk and not change it and quite often the subject will suggest itself. So it was today when I went for a lunchtime bimble, down to Drochaid a’Mhuillin in the south of Skye and into the woods on my “writer’s walk”.

I really love this woodland walk as it helps me think about what I’ll be writing next. Whether that be a magazine article, blog post, or in this case a book and as I walked down to the shore I noticed the play of sunlight on the flowers by the side of the road and decided today would be a good day to “meet the locals”.

Not worrying about lens choice and going with what you have frees you up in a way. When I’m climbing mountains I usually take the wide angle and the telephoto but sometimes I’ll also take the 40mm macro. Today it was the 35mm which on a crop sensor camera equates to round about 50mm, the standard for 35mm cameras. Confusing? It’s just a case of multiplying the focal length by the crop factor. On my Nikon it’s 1.5 so my 70-300mm becomes in effect a 105-450mm and is very handy when I’m out in the mountains.

Beinn Sgritheall is a favourite mountain as I see it quite a lot, whether out walking or slaving away at the computer. I liked the rough texture in the rocks that contrasted with the smooth flowing lines of the strata with of course the hill in the background, across the Sound of Sleat. At f16 and a focus point on the rocks I kept the foreground sharp and let the distant hills melt into the dreamy cloudscape.

With nothing in particular planned, just wandering with the camera, practicing aperture choice, compositional techniques and new angles of view, for me, is akin to “morning pages” from the writing world. When I write these pages I start as soon as I wake. Ramblings in my notebook with no fixed subject. Touching on this, thinking of that, commenting on the day’s work waiting to be done or the happenings of yesterday. It’s a tried and tested technique for honing one’s writing craft, finding one’s voice and this aimless wandering with my camera is just like those morning pages, only visual.

I always carry my notebook, although which one depends on which camera I have. When I’m in digital mode the camera records everything for me. Shutter speed, aperture, ISO, all that gubbins is written down for me. All I have to remember is why I created the photograph and today my ‘real’ notebook came into play as I practiced writing just that. What did the scene tell me? What did it suggest? What did I see in it? Were there metaphors or were the subject just interesting in their own right? This is the basis of my book, where I match vision with explanation but in a poetic way and I hope to blog about that quite soon.

I have other notebooks for film cameras where I note the aperture, shutter speed and ISO (always fixed for the roll of course!) but I also record the weather conditions. Wind direction, where the light is coming from, what time of day it was and how I arrived at the exposure I used and how it differed from what the camera was suggesting. It’s this level of involvement in creating the print that I love. There are only so many shots available on a roll of film and although with 35mm the zone system is difficult to apply, I’ll usually try to match one of my old Minoltas to previous weather conditions and develop the film with the print in mind.

This old safe used to be under a grand old tree on the shore but recent storms have shifted it into the river. I’ve noticed in the last couple of weeks a shift in the colour of the light in the evening. It’s beginning to turn autumnal and I can feel a shift in how I connect with the landscape. It’s almost as if we’re getting more intimate, getting ourselves ready for winter when I’ll go to the summits in wild stormy weather of wind and snow and enter a completely different world.

The light is certainly helping me with the last details of the book. That shift in perception is opening up a door into a numinous world of shifting wraiths of imagination from which I draw my inspiration. This time of year is one of the best creative periods.

In the forest the light was beautiful and all was calm and I sat at the viewpoint in the warm sunshine and scribbled in my notebook, noting new thoughts and feelings. Is it really true you can hand hold at the reciprocal of the focal length? The experts reckon you can but it must be the effective focal length of the lens. So my 35mm Nikkor on my Nikon D5500 is effectively a 52mm. So in theory I should be able to hand hold the camera at 1/50th of a second and still get acceptably sharp images.

It depends though. Today was difficult due to the wind and the awkward postures I was getting into in order to photograph “the locals” so hand holding at 1/50th produced some blurry shots plus I’m still learning this lens and its depth of field but on the whole, these were “morning shots” to complement my “morning pages”. I’m coming to learn that this duality is my hallmark. Words and images inextricably linked via the medium of poetry, the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

But that’s a whole different story to be explained in the upcoming John Muir Trust journal where I write about how I use Gaelic to link what I see in my mind, with what I produce in the print. Exciting times…