About half way through my year with the Wych Elms of Assynt, and I’m still finding new aspects to these trees, despite the ongoing leafless months of winter.
These are about to come to an end though; the buds are getting fat, and it won’t be long before flowers appear.

Think about it; trees like this stand out there constantly through the years: decades or centuries.
They get everything; all weathers, seasons, inhabitants, consumers.
No break either; no warm lounge to escape the winter, no holidays to relieve the stress.
I’m trying to reflect this by photographing them through changing conditions, showing them in the landscape as well as the details close up.

Night time.
A silhouette maybe; probably better in the winter without leaves.
And for this, a source of light: a full moon.

The wish list of how to achieve this had me thinking.
I’m going to need a sky visible through the canopy: not a rock face or other trees then.
And a suitable angle of view to shoot the tree and the moon too.
A bit of research later, and I had an idea of shooting east just after moon rise.
Consulting the map and the contours, I think I’ve found a suitable candidate; and it happens to be only a short walk in the dark too.
The predicted altitude of the moon was a bit of guess work standing in my own garden trying to match an estimated angle with what I found on the ‘net.

Full moon day: 24th February 24.
We’d already climbed Quinag (mountain) in the snow during the day, so it was a quick turnaround before my Saturday night out.

Other preparation I’d done included finding out how to do automatic “bracketing” of exposure on my camera. It’s actually a basic thing for a lot of keen photographers, but not a function that I’d used before. And I reckoned that it might be essential due to the huge variation of brightness between the moon and my tree. Adjusting the settings without touching the camera and knocking it out of position.

So I left the car park with camera, tripod, alternative lenses, warm clothes and four different torches, and launched myself into the darkness.
Except it wasn’t that dark really; the rising full moon gave enough light that I didn’t need a torch to follow the track.
Across the grass and dead bracken towards my tree-for-the-evening, I could already see its silhouette against a slightly brighter sky.
A lot of rustling and footfall had me reaching for the torch, to see about eight red deer legging it up the hill.
Already realising that the moonlight would be in my face, and the bottom of the tree would be in shadow anyway, I’d taken a small diffused camping light that we keep for power cuts at home, and I was going to use it to partially illuminate the foreground.
There is a stone wall between me and the tree, so I lodged the lamp on the other side, and took a while to walk backwards and forwards to the camera position to check that it was about right.
The sky was getting brighter all the time, and I knew that the moon was about to appear, so my initial relaxed attitude was replaced with a sense of urgency. Once it appeared, the moon wasn’t going to stop whilst I fiddled about, was it!
Kinda blessed with a thin veil of cloud, which might take a bit of brightness from the moon.

Then it appeared, and I grabbed the tripod and repositioned it to get an “interesting composition” and pressed the button.
The camera took a sequence of five photos at different exposures: guesswork was about right; three of the five were usable to some degree.
Now the moon had moved again, so to repeat the process, I had to move my kit and start again too.
Reviewing images, I thought that I might not be able to improve anything much right now, so packed the kit away.
On cue, a big cloud came and obliterated the moon. Lucky, or what!

Back down the track; drive home; crack a beer……

The next day, I’m pleased to say that I hadn’t wasted my time.
I used computer software to combine 3, 4 or 5 frames, to get the brightest tree and the dullest moon, so put together, the exposure just about balanced.
Tried to make it look plausible.
Cameras, even the poshest, don’t have the dynamic range of a human eye, so this was necessary for me to produce a photo that looked like what I’d seen myself.

Next time: Milky Way.
I do love the Milky Way, so I’ll be considering how to do this one.
And instead of a full moon, it’ll be “no moon”, so I really will need my torch.

A couple of “also-rans”:

And these are the four photos that were combined to make the image at the top of this blog:

Lovely to see people turn out in poor weather to attend this first “Wych Elm in Assynt” event at Inchnadamph!

I got there at about 10am for a one o’clock start, which is quite keen, but I had an extra motive: a “new tree” that had evaded the previous list.

I’d seen it walking back down Traligill valley a few weeks ago, late in the afternoon with fading light, sticking out of a limestone crag.

I wasn’t even sure that it was a wych elm at that distance, but it kinda looked right.

The hunch paid off, but with the weather being “damp” at best, the photo opportunities could have been better.

So I put my back to the wind, to keep the moisture off the lens as best I could, and yes, the shot scrubbed up OK!

Back down to the car park for lunch, I was a bit wet myself from climbing a hill with waterproof “boil in the bag” clothes, so changed into some spares too.

The Main Event started, introduced and facilitated by Mandy Haggith, and then we walked back to a fairly accessible wych elm tree, where Euan Bowditch gave us a fascinating presentation about elms, wych elm in particular.

Euan is from the University of Highlands and Islands, a forester and the leader of the Highlands Elm Project, so it was great to have him there with his enthusiasm and knowledge.

We spent some time at this big old tree, and after Euan’s input, I did a piece about photography, describing my approach to getting a portrait of a tree.

Moving on to the banks of the Traligill river, we had a look at some wych elms in the steep gully hanging over the fast flowing water. These trees have an extra ecological relevance: they are well covered with mosses, lichens and ferns, such as common polypody. And these are indicators of remnants of the temperate rainforests that are believed to have once been widespread along the wetter west coast of the British Isles.

I got out of the van a bit further up the Glenleraig road than usual, planning a circular walk to try to find some Wych Elm trees.
Consulting my friend Mr O Survey, it looked like I could save myself a bit of road walking by heading across the moor to my first waypoint: a lovely little loch with a view back across the water to Quinag.
I had second thoughts about this; about a dozen times actually. Dead bracken was tangling around my feet, and if I got out of that, I had tussocky Molinia grass with boggy bits hiding between. Hard work.

Some context perhaps?

A few weeks ago, I got a message from “Mandy-the-author” asking me whether I’d be interested in participating in a project that she was about to launch to celebrate Wych Elms in Assynt.
Take some photos?
Oh yes please; right up my street!
Mandy explained that she was planning to write a book and also offer some activity days to the community over the coming seasons.
Before it was too late.
Too late???
Yes, the dreaded Dutch Elm Disease (DED) was still marching north; its progress possibly being assisted by warmer weather in recent times.

Striking a chord it was: I remember hedgerows (lots of hedgerows) with lots of English Elm in Northamptonshire when I was a kid.
Then, quite quickly, virtually all of the mature trees succumbed to “DED” and became dead themselves.
Tragic.

By chance, “Ian-the-botanist” mentioned that he was collaborating in the Assynt project too, and that he could supply a list of existing botanical records along with grid references. Perfect.

I have a few photos of Assynt Elms already, but this was an opportunity to create a body of work, and I do love a project.

I started at Calda burn, as I knew of a very large, very grand tree standing next to a little waterfall, and I went to capture it whilst it still had its summer plumage.

On my map there was one glowing like a beacon: Gleannan a’ Mhadaidh, south east of Suilven. “Wolf Glen”. Wanted to go there for a while, now I had a reason.
Round walk: 20 kilometres; legs aching; feet wet.
Fabulous location; loved it, and a tangled-up multi-stemmed elm tree talking to me from the crag slightly above me.

Then there was the one with a waterfall behind it at Liath Bhad.

And a line of them along a limestone outcrop at Inchnadamph: very photogenic.
And a couple on the side of the rocks in the dry part of the Traligill river valley……

By now I’m hooked.
Not sure that it’ll be a “definitive collection”, but I’m certainly enjoying meeting these isolated outliers.
Might consider repeat visits somewhere, to catch the same tree through the seasons; something that floats my boat.

Now Grace Slick is belting out of the speaker behind me, and my singular typing finger is trying to keep up. Smokin’

Back on two feet; I get around the back of Loch Torr an Lochain, and the view of Quinag is super.

A reflection across a sheet of particularly thin ice in the foreground. “Cat ice” we used to call it, but I can see any cats right now.
Similar experience at Lochan Rapach, but still no cats.

Getting warm now, homing in on my grid reference, but it is only a six-figure reference from 1992, so I have no idea what I might find, if anything.
False alarm: climbing up to get a better view, its a hazel…..
A few more yards: difficult yards; the Molinia tussocks are aggressive here, if grass can be aggressive. I’m hopping from one to another remembering Indiana Jones spelling “Jehovah” incorrectly in The Last Crusade.
There it is.
Elegant.
And I really got lucky: its up on a crag with a blue sky behind it, peppered with little white fluffy clouds. Oh baby; you’re the best!

Around the corner, I change direction; north east now, and the walking improves, thankfully.
Its November 16th, and I’m still brushing ticks off my trousers and sleeves. Three different sizes too. For goodness sake.

I head to a beach that I’ve not visited before, but its boulders and rocks, and not my mission today, so keep walking.
At the corner of Loch a’ Meallard the OS map shows a number “3”, and although I found no sign of this “3” (!!!), the view of Quinag across more cat-ice had to be my favourite of the day.

Lunch was trying to get out of my rucksack, but the weather was due to change, so I stuffed some confectionary and carried on: my second location not far away.

An oak!
Maybe scarcer than elm up here? Yes, I’ll get your photo too, thank you!

1992 record says “huge wych elm on boulder scree, other elms nearby”.
And it was indeed huge. A bit of a challenge to photograph, within woodland and amongst boulders about five feet across. A very large branch had partly fallen years ago, so there was a tangle of boughs the diameter of my arm or my leg reaching down to the floor.

Finishing off here and the light faded as clouds arrived, so I was wise not to stop for lunch earlier.

The third side of my triangle of my circular walk was back to the van, and there was a gert big erratic on the hill that I headed to for lunch. It was soooo big, that it was much larger than Quinag, the mountain behind it; just look at that: 

Mission accomplished, I reckon; so long as I didn’t mess up the camera settings.

Trudging up the hill, I came over a slight rise, and suddenly there’s this thing in the sky.
Was it a bird? Was it a plane?
Splash. Wallop.
As I watched the sea eagle cruise over my head at telegraph-pole height, I put my foot in a hole full of water and fell over.
You couldn’t make it up. It was a great view, as I sat in the bog trying to work out which way was up.
Anyhow, no old men were hurt during the course of this adventure……

My Wych Elm photos are now being collected in the gallery here:

https://www.jacksonphotography.co.uk/elm-in-assynt