I've been back on the Isle of Harris for the past few days, getting ready for the start of a master class workshop I'm doing here. The guys arrive today and I'm all excited now.
The weather in the UK the past few days has been somewhat 'nuts', and in some ways, being up in the western isles has allowed me to see better weather than most. But it has been dramatic to say the least.
I seem to be getting a penchant for rainy weather. The light has been so changeable over the past few days and for example, in the last 10 minutes I've just seen rainbows followed by hailstones from the window of my hotel. It's absolutely stunning up here and I can't wait to see what will happen over the next 4 days.
Which brings me back to the subject of weather.
One of my most recent acquisitions is an Umbrella. Dramatic light tends to happen at the edge of changing weather, whether it's the edge of a storm coming in, or the edge of a storm passing over. It's a challenge to keep the front lens element dry (I don't worry about my camera getting wet as I've found that most gear is pretty sturdy for this kind of thing). But the one thing I do want is a dry front lens element, especially any ND grad filters I'm using. So I now have an umbrella to help me out here.
I get a lot of enquiries from people wanting to come on the workshops with me, who ask 'what do we do if the weather is bad?'. Well, there's no such thing as bad weather from a photographers view point. If you want to capture something exceptional, you have to be out there experiencing the moods and dramas of the light and that can often only happen when the weather is challenging.