Shooting in Northern Scotland
My final year of university gave me the freedom of creating a photographic project completely based on my own brief, continuing with my previous themes of memory and catharsis I chose to base my project in Thurso and the surrounding areas. For those of you that don’t know, Thurso is the most northern town of mainland UK and it has a population of just over 7,000 so it is pretty secluded. It is also where my Dad grew up and where I spent all of my childhood summers.
The landscape in these highlands has the perfect balance of bleakness and beauty. Vast rolling expanses of nothingness blanket the earth up there and for a girl whose imagination has never dwindled from her younger years, it’s a place of endless wonder.
For the first time ever I had seriously splashed out on film, there was no chance that I wanted to run out of shots because I didn’t pack enough film. That being said, I did also pack my digital camera, a Canon M50, which was used a lot by both me and my assistant (my big bro). It was good to have the security of a back-up camera because this was the last and most crucial of my trips to Scotland to shoot this project and if anything happened to my film then I had back up shots.
Anyway, back to film, I had purchased a box of 5 rolls of medium format Ilford HP5 which has an ISO of 400, this has great versatility for lighting conditions but it also has a more defined grain. A couple days before I was due to leave I’d been reminded that film stocks of lower ISOs were better for landscape photography because they can capture crisper details because of their finer grain…Of course, I don’t know why I hadn’t considered this before but now I’m on the hunt for more film. Along with the HP5, I’d also purchased 5 rolls of Kodak Portra 160, a colour film with a fine grain. The idea behind this was that I would edit them into black and white in post-production but still had the variety of some colour shots in case I changed my mind. I found some Ilford FP4 on Amazon, this has an ISO of 125 so there wouldn’t be much of a noticeable difference between the grains of the colour and black and white film, allowing my shots to have consistency, perfect! Paid for them, didn’t check the delivery date, they are due to arrive the day we leave…Damn. The next day I frantically call all the camera shops in a 15 mile radius asking if they have any FP4, BINGO! My most local shop had exactly 5 rolls and I bought the lot.
I had 15 rolls in total to shoot and because I was using the Mamiya 7II which shoots a 6x7 ratio, I was going to get 10 shots per roll. This was the most film I had ever owned and I won’t lie, I felt like a pimp. Regardless of the ego inflation, this amount of film gave me the freedom of experimenting more with my shots, making sure I get my angles and exposure correct and giving me options when it comes to the final photo selection, rather than the student budget friendly– shoot one frame and move on.
The day I developed these rolls was one of the most fun days I’d had in the film lab at uni, 9 rolls of film, 70’s rock music blaring and a whole day dedicated to developing, I was on fire! Here are a couple Polaroids taken that day in the film lab.
Thurso and its surrounding areas are seriously frozen in time, I hadn’t been there for 12 years and not a single thing had changed. As cliché as it sounds, the pace of life is slower here and shooting on film, which is known for its time consuming processes, was the right way to capture the land.
Here are some of the final shots:
I was pleased with these shots, I love the vastness of the landscape and the lack of visible modernity. None of the above actually made it into my final project selection and having had some time away from looking at them and returning with a fresh perspective, I realised there were some cracking shots just sitting in my archive folder. So make sure you look back over your contact sheets, you'll be pleasantly surprised!
I’ll forever speak of Scotland in whimsical ways because I have a deep rooted love for it and it will always be somewhere that I’ll return, hopefully at some point for an extended period of time. But for now, my advice for anyone making the pilgrimage to photograph the North is to not rush it, there is no need to rush in a place of such static beauty.
Until next time,
Eleanor x
