File reference: DLA-1422
Tobermory is the capital of the Isle of Mull in the Scottish Inner Hebrides.
This is one of Scotlands most iconic scenes and no self respecting photographer would exclude this from their landscape portfolio. My question however, was always going to be, how do I make it my own and simply not just another copy of an iconic location. When you search for Tobermory on Google images you will see that every angle known to man (or woman) has been shot to death; and then some. So what was the best that I could hope for…great light! Yes, that would do it, great light! I was based in a nearby cottage for a whole week and to my mind, this was the image that I wanted to take more than any other, so I spent that whole week watching the weather for this particular little corner of Mull, hoping for some luck. Each night I would search through the various forecasts and weather applications looking at cloud layers for this location and also those same layers over to the east where the sun would rise. On this morning, I looked out of the cottage window and the conditions were about as near as I could hope for to what I saw on the forecast the night before, so I set off on the twenty minute journey in the dark to Tobermory. When I arrived the high cloud was in place over the village but to my horror, the horizon had a bank of thick low cloud that was nowhere to be seen on the earlier predictions. I was committed by this point so I set up my tripod and camera on the end of the jetty and waited to see what would unfold. The photograph you see here is one I consider myself very lucky to have captured. The low cloud that I so desperately didn’t want to have, actually adds to the image in this instance. The small areas of gaps within this cloud have allowed pockets of golden dawn light to bleed through and illuminate the houses along the front and yet, still set the high cloud on fire. This photograph depicts a scene of beauty and calm, a place where trawler-men have returned home safely for hundreds of years and whilst the dawn on this day was one to behold to the eye, those dark brooding low hanging clouds are a reminder thing can change in the blink of an eye. I however, think I did the scene justice but in no way was it down to my compositional choice, it was a matter of pure luck!