The weatherman said that it’s spring a couple of weeks ago, although it is quite hard to tell some days.

But the snowdrops in the garden have now gone over and the daffodils are fully out.

Looking further, not much has changed?

Getting closer: it’s actually changing quite rapidly.

Primroses and celandines are out now too.

The little dark brown, almost black, buds on the wych elms have been transformed through dark red blobs to open flowers. In profusion on some trees.

Even from 100 yards away, the trees have changed, despite no leaves appearing yet.
So I’m trying to get some flower photos……Not that easy!

Currently, I’m refusing to pick a twig and take it home, so I’m battling with the breeze, a really low depth of field from using a telephoto lens, and access.

Access because the low branches have long gone, courtesy of browsing animals, AKA deer.
I got a couple of shots in Lochinver village a few days ago, followed by one in Clashnessie, but I really want one in a more natural environment, so I headed off to Inchnadamph.

The first hurdle is that it’s clearly a later season over there, and all but one tree are way behind those that I visited earlier, nearer the coast.

Hanging precariously over Loch Assynt, I added to my flower-foto tally.

But, whilst I’m here…..

I’ll check out a few previously visited trees, and look for another one: a grid reference that I’ve not been to yet.

On the way, there’s a grove of trees that might be worth a look; nothing previously recorded here, but promising, I think.

Loads of birch, and getting towards the far end, running out of trees, nearly giving up…..

There it is!

A pretty big one too.

So I get my camera out and make its acquaintance.

I also meet three ticks, my first this year.

I brush those off my trousers and hope that there’s no more lurking. Guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

New tree in the bag, I walk along the hillside to the target grid reference, and meet another one, in quite a challenging place on a limestone crag.

Either side of it there are two nice surprises: aspens with catkins about to break open.

Aspens don’t flower very often, so this is quite a good discovery in itself.

Finding a way to climb up the crag, I get to the top of the tree on another terrace, and further up, trees and ivy are all over the cliff; not a familiar sight at all.

At the end of the day, I did get another flower photo, albeit not enough to satisfy me, but the day scored really well with other features thrown in for good measure.

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.