I’ve decided to admit to something :-)

On my workshops and tours, I must admit that it drives me nuts when folks start to tell me what the weather is going to do. I’ve had folks saying to me ‘we better not go out as it looks like it’s going to rain in half an hour’, to ‘Looks like Thursday will be a write-off’.

Most of the time I’ve found that forecasts are wrong, and even when I have gone out and it is wet: I’ve often got interesting and good shots :-)

The adage ‘if you don’t go, you don’t get’ still holds true in my book, and there is something beautiful in ‘not knowing’ about what the future will hold.

Forecasting as useful as it is, shouldn’t be used to rule our lives. Reading into weather forecasts too much can stop you from going out, and besides, you don’t know what the weather will bring you when you do'.

Most of my best images were created in what folks would call ‘bad weather’. Only recently, on the Isle of Harris, the ‘bad weather’ days turned out to be our best. We had reduced visibility with the backgrounds becoming veiled and ‘foggy’ due to the light rain we had.

Conversely, photographing in dry weather (oh how much of a reprieve this may feel after wet weather), is often extremely boring: one dimensional. Like a postcard. Dull.

So my advice would be : unless the weather forecast is telling you that a storm will wreck your new hair style : go. Go and see what happens (and leave that forecasting machine back at the hotel).

You just don’t know what you’ll get, and that is the beauty and inspirational part of it all.