Last Saturday, I returned from a week spent on the Isle of Harris, in the Outer Hebrides, photographing the autumn landscape with my friends Ian, Martin, and Phil. I'm going to post a series of postcards from Harris on this blog over the next week or so.
While I have been to Scotland many times before, I had never previously been to the Outer Hebrides: these are islands with dramatic and varied landscapes within just a small area, so they are much loved by landscape photographers. Even though I don’t classify myself as a landscaper, I'd been looking forward to this trip for months.
The weather forecast before we arrived was for frequent showers blowing through on strong winds from the north-west – and for the first couple of days, good grief, that was what we had in abundance.
Sunlight, rainbow and showery rain over the Western end of Taransay from Scarista beach. Nikon D810, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 70mm, f/6.3, ISO 200, 1/500, polarising filter
We stayed on the west side of the island, and for the first couple of days, we concentrated on the beaches of Luskentyre, Seilebost, and Scarista. Since the wind was from the north-west, we were almost always facing into it while photographing. The showers always came towards us, their passage marked both by visible downpours and rainbows. We quickly realised that if a rainbow appeared, we were probably going to be under a dump of rain a couple of minutes later.
Living in the UK, we are all used to seeing rainbows from time to time. But on the beaches of Harris, I've never seen as many rainbows coming and going so quickly: sometimes they were a faint, almost ghostly colouring to the clouds; other times, they stretched as a full arc across the sky with a second, fainter rainbow outside.
I'm just showing three pictures here, all taken from Scarista beach, just to illustrate the point. As with so much of my experience of Harris, it was a great privilege to live this.
One small point is that while the weather was frequently chilly and drenching wet for those first days, I never got cold and soaked. I had waterproof over-trousers and jacket, with several layers underneath, together with a hat and gloves: I strongly recommend thinking carefully about clothing if you are going to Harris. Keeping warm and dry made it a pleasure to take time to watch the changing landscape as clouds, rain and sunlight sped through, the distant hills alternately lighting up in sun, and then vanishing under showers. As always, I made a point of putting the camera down from time to time (well, stepping away from the tripod) to experience the place with both eyes open. There’s no point going to the Outer Hebrides only to see them through narrowly through a lens.
A rainbow joins the threatening clouds to Taransay. Nikon D810, 24-120mm f/4 at 82mm, f/6.3, ISO 400, 1/160, polarising filter.
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A quick technical note. I tended to keep a circular polarising filter on my normal (24-120mm) and tele (70-210mm) lenses on my D810: the light from rainbows is heavily polarised, and they show up strongly against the background with a correctly oriented polariser. Having said that, rotating the filter through 90° away from the best orientation eliminates the rainbow altogether, so the filter has to be carefully and actively managed. Blue sky is also polarised, but it varies as you move the view around the sky: an ultra-wide angle lens, like my 20mm, reveals this variation and makes the blue of the sky look unnatural; for this reason, I didn’t use it on the 20mm.