I’ve just found out my image Stormshield is the photography winner of John Muir Trust Creative Freedom Exhibition!. It’s a favourite of mine as it fits well with my philosophy of the found image. I’ve never planned to be at a certain place at a certain time but prefer to wander with my camera, a mountaineer travelling through the landscape, noticing, listening, experiencing. Always with camera and notebook to hand or in the rucksack if I’m scrambling. Now and then nature will stretch, give a wonderful yawn of satisfaction at her world and my muse will shove me, shouting “look, look at the beauty” and a found image will be my reward for being in nature.

It was on a wild winter December morning I struggled into a headwind along the the old marble line through Strath in the south of the Isle of Skye, bent double at times with stinging blasts of hail and rain rattling off my jacket, my camera in its bag over my shoulder, protected from the onrush of weather behind me. The landscape was shrouded with dark, fast moving clouds with nothing to be seen beyond a few the single track road snaking past the old church at Cille Bhride.

As I reached the remains of the old winding wheel at the top of the steep rise the storm faltered on the jagged crest of the Clach Glas ridge, the clouds were torn to shreds and a brief blast of sun broke through the maelstrom to brighten the village of Kilbride, snug and sheltered below the stormshield of the mountain wall of Blaven, Clach Glas and Sgurr nan Each.

I swung the bag round, fumbled open the zip in the freezing wind and braced against the gale which was punching me sideways as I framed the landscape in the viewfinder, took and held a deep breath, feet planted firmly against the storm and pressed the shutter button.

The clouds engulfed the ridge, the wind howled round the rocks around me and the rain came back to sting my face as the mountains retreated once more to their storm-world. I stood for a long time, buffeted and pushed sideways by the gale, looking into the dark distance, overflowing with joy and a grin like the Cheshire Cat. My muse had called on nature and they had played in front of me in the midst of full on Atlantic storm that was heaping snow on the mountains and I was left with a fantastic found image, to treasure forever.