Glencoe at Speed

Last weekend, conditions in the Scottish mountains were pretty perfect so I headed up to the Nevis range with Kev for a day on the snowboard. From Glasgow, this means about a 3 hour drive up to Fort William via Glencoe and the stunningly beautiful Rannoch Moor. Due to a dead battery in the car, we ended up leaving home a bit later than intended which meant we ended up driving through Rannoch Moor just as the sun was setting behind the mountains with some absolutely stunning lighting.

We stopped in a couple of places to enjoy the snow and the view en route, but unfortunately couldn't stop the car in the moor itself. So, while Kev was driving, I attempted some out-the-window-at-60-mph shots. They're nothing like as nice as you would get from doing this properly, but sometimes the view is just too good to pass up and some of them didn't come out too badly!

Rannoch Moor in the snow at speed!
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It was probably one of the most stunning evenings to be in the mountains. Click for a larger version.

The boarding up Nevis was also beautiful, but since it was my first trip up a mountain in a year I elected to leave my DSLR in the car which only left me with my phone to try and do the view any justice at all. And it's got a really crap camera, but you get the idea!

Looking down on Fort William, Loch Eil and Loch Linnhe.
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Snow!!
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Coming back home we were a little early for the sunset, but thanks to the hordes of people who decided to park on the A82 to use the Glencoe ski resort (yes, it's a 60mph single carriageway; yes parking on it is stupidly dangerous and illegal. Sigh.) we got held up there by the police traffic control for just long enough for the light to get just a little bit better. This time around the view wasn't quite as nice up on the top of the moor, but we found a wee bit to stop at overlooking a frozen lochan which was just stunning and worth getting my shoes full of snow for!

Tracks leading up to a frozen lochan in Rannoch Moor
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It's nice to be outside again!

Back to the Blog!

Good morning all!

As I'm sure you've noticed, this blog has had a bit of a gap in updates over the last year or so. Blogger reliably informs me that I haven't actually updated anything here since September 2013, which is slightly horrifying... June 2013 or so was pretty much when my PhD really hit crunch time and led to me spending the following 15 months more or less tied to my computer to finish analyses and get the thing written up.

Happily though, that particular academic chapter of my life has now finally come to an end and I have just received final, formal confirmation from the University that I can at long last call myself Doctor!

Yay! I can have a life again!!

Anyway now that I've finished that, I have been able to start on the rather more enjoyable task of reclaiming my free time for fun stuff again! It's been surprisingly hard to shake the guilty feeling of not working every single day, but with a little help from the Netflix back-catalogue, I'm definitely getting there!

What this means for Wild Ocean Photography and this blog is that you should start to see a return to more regular service again. With a bit of luck we'll have some nice wintery weather over here and I'll be getting out with the camera a bit more regularly from now on. I've also got a few more dive sites guides to add to the list and a couple of gear reviews that I've been wanting to write for a wee while now too so they will all be coming online over the next few weeks.

So, to everyone out there who's still reading this: thanks for your patience and I hope that 2015 will be a wildlife-filled year for us!