It’s been an incredibly busy couple of weeks since the last issue. I’ve been helping to judge the Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards (WPY), assisting with technical assessments and reviewing entries. I have also been working on critiques for the Nature Photographer’s Network and the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. The quality of entries for WPY is always amazing. Wildlife photographers have an extraordinary patience and an in-depth knowledge of their chosen specialised subject.

Every time I think about this, it inspires me to find out more about my favourite subjects in the landscape. Our local area is renowned for a place where the ideas behind modern geology were developed, and having become interested in the rock through climbing as well as photography, I loved finding more out about it. At the back of a ridge near our house, the Aonach Eagach, there is a line at the edge of the caldera where the whole of Glen Coe collapsed into a magma chamber. The rocks along this edge were ripped off as a square mile of ground plummeted down. On a trip out recently, we found that a river had cut through the magma chamber, polishing it to a smooth finish. Inside it, you can see thousands of chunks of rock that were plucked from the caldera walls.

In the three photos below, you can see where I was, a detail from the river bed and a (hopefully) aesthetically pleasing photograph showing the context of the river against the background of Loch Leven. It’s nowhere near as challenging as having to sit in a hide for a few days to capture pictures of rare birds but engaging with the landscape under my feet was fascinating and made a photography trip ten times more interesting.

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