Gallagher's Sutherland

Page 3

The Highland Midge

Talk to anybody returning from the Highlands and the conversation will eventually involve midges. Read a Scottish Tourist Board publication and you are unlikely to find any mention at all – indeed when they conducted a survey on the impact of midges upon the economy they refused to make the findings public! For those who are unaware of the problem, the Highland Midge is a specific and separate species which conducts part of its life-cycle by biting warmblooded mammals, sucking blood out of the hapless victim and then using this to feed its developing eggs. It appears around the middle of June and disappears around mid-September. During the biting season, the midge is inactive in high light levels. In photographic terms think of a light level requiring a smaller than f5.6 at the ISO speed rating (ie 1/125 for 125ISO). Thus midges will bite during the day providing the cloud cover is substantial, as well as under dusk, cloudless skies. The peak in biting activity is between 130 to 160 w/m2, equivalent to 9pm summer conditions or heavy low cloud cover or between 5am and 8am on a summer morning. The number of midges that rise from a suitable area of land is alarming. Figures of 500,000 midges trapped out of a control area of 2mx2m have been recorded and biting rates (of humans) of between 2,000 and 3,000 per hour are measured in experiments. Under such an assault most humans are rendered helpless, army fighting units are effectively neutralised – small wonder then that the military have invested so much money in seeking a repellent. Midges must also be good photographers as they are most active at the very times when photographers like to be about, ie dawn and dusk. They rest up during the less photogenic hours, ready for the onslaught later.

Is it possible to do anything about midges? Probably not; certainly none of the topical applications seems to work very well even when they come with a history of working on wimpy southern midges and mosquitoes. Prevention is the best cure and a tight-fitting hat with a net covering the entire surface of the face is a successful, if inelegant, solution (don’t even think about any model photography!). At least with digital capture you can cope with a less than perfect view down the eyepiece and check out the screen after capture. Taking vitamin B1 complex for 30 days before exposure seems to help with the skin reaction to biting, but not prevent it. Avon Skin So Soft is reputed to be used by the Royal Marines as an excellent repellent. We did not see any Royal Marines but can assure the readers that it had no effect whatsoever, the midges absolutely loved it!

Clashnessie Bay Having driven past this small bay the day before, I was disappointed to see that some earlier visitors had spoiled the smooth sand and rendered a shoot impractical. I returned at first light the following day to find the tide had done its trick and wiped the sand smooth. As I stood on the edge of the bay I was rewarded with a fantastic array of clouds against a blue sky and the water that surged and swirled around the rocks at my feet. A long shutter speed (two seconds) was enough to emphasise the movement and patterns of the sea water and the morning light did the rest.

Slioch When travelling along the edge of Loch Maree there are several Munros but none that hit you in the solar plexus quite like the first time you pass beneath Slioch (Spear). The setting certainly has a lot to do with it with the majestic beauty of Loch Maree, its Caledonian Pine woodlands and scattering of islands. On this trip if there was one mountain I would have begged to be topped in snow it would have been Slioch. I walked about a third of a mile from the car across some of the deepest quagmire I have experienced to a small sandstone outcrop above and amidst the glacial boulder field left behind by the Late Devension Glaciation over 10,000 years ago. I waited over half an hour with this composition set on my ground-glass until the cloud structure above Slioch was perfect. It seemed to point towards the summit and my small erratic boulder was bathed in a milky sunlight, casting a thin shadow.

Stac Pollaidh Having seen the wonder of Stac Pollaidh and other mountains of this range from the opposite end of Loch Lurgainn I intended to head towards Strathcanaird and south towards Ullapool, but circumstances rapidly changed that plan. I had what I call one of my ‘rear-view mirror moments’. It is often easy to get all too engrossed in what is in front of you and forget that if you turn your head (as it was designed to do) you can see things from an entirely different perspective. This was one of those moments, but without the neck movements! I used my car rearview mirror and almost crashed the car! Stac Polliadh is one of those mountains that regularly and rapidly disappears and reappears behind foothills when you are travelling and I had all but given up on another good vantage point without climbing and I was not going to consider that option in the prevailing temperatures. The rear view mirror reminded me that I should stop the car from time to time and get out. The light, break in the cloud revealing a pocket of blue sky and vantage point were a gift.

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Photo Quote: Photography for me is not looking, it's feeling. If you can't feel what you're looking at, then you're never going to get others to feel anything when they look at your pictures. - Don McCullin