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Alex Roddie
Alex Roddie is a professional editor, writer, and occasionally photographer active in UK outdoors print media. He’s editor of the magazines Sidetracked and Like the Wind, and regularly writes for The Great Outdoors. He’s passionate about analogue photography although rarely dares take his vintage film cameras out for a spin in winter conditions. Alex is based in Scotland with his wife Hannah.
A dive into the lessons the mountains teach us, capturing the essence of real human experience through photography.
It began when my stove exploded on the summit of Ben Macdui in the Northern Cairngorms late on one freezing evening just after New Year.
I’ve always found Ben Macdui an enigmatic place. Although it lacks the sheer grandeur and hint of remoteness projected by Braeriach, its neighbour across the Lairig Ghru, Macdui, is just far enough from the ski centre to feel like a place with an identity of its own, and there can be a delicate aura of… something… around its summit. Would it be stretching things to say an awareness? A personality? Especially around dusk or dawn, the place’s character is tangible. Why does it keep drawing me back? What does it want, and what do I want while I’m there? What experience is it I’m seeking?
I had felt a little vulnerable a couple of hours before in the winter twilight as I stamped out a tent platform in the snow. My plan: to camp on the summit in deep winter conditions, then get up early to photograph the dawn light show over Braeriach and its accompanying peaks away to the west.
Actually, that’s not quite true. I’m going to make an important distinction. Although I’d gone there with a camera and tripod and fully intended to return with some quality images, photography was not my main goal.
My philosophy of photography has evolved a few times over the last decade, but there’s a core question I keep coming back to: am I doing a thing in order to create images, or am I doing it to have an adventure and maybe create image opportunities along the way? Connected to this, what does adventure even mean now that it has become so thoroughly commoditised and commercialised? What higher purpose does it serve, if any?
On this summit camp, as I sat in my tent porch swaddled in my down jacket and heard the spurt of fuel from my stove’s faulty valve an instant before it turned into a fireball, such thoughts were far from my mind. I wasn’t thinking about the anticipated dawn light show the next morning, either. I was thinking, ‘Holy hell, my tent is about to burn down, and I’m in the middle of the Cairngorms after dark.’