Cloud Dream
In the world of conservation I am inconsequential. If there is a subplot to this website, beyond simply a celebration of the natural beauty of Britain's wild places, it is to encourage, explore and try to explain the attraction of being out in the wild and the appeal of making photographs while you are there.
My suggestion, and it is by no means an original thought, is that time spent in the natural world - looking, touching, relaxing, thinking (or not thinking) - provides a balance to our experiences in the technical and industrial world. Distilled to a sentence: time spent in the wild enriches your life.
Some feel, to varying degrees, that many of our wild places are endangered because of a modern-day lack of understanding about their vital role in the Big Scheme, and these wild places suffer too from the increasing number of people who visit and have an impact upon them. It could be argued that I am making this situation worse by highlighting them through my photography.
I can only answer that part of my aim is to encourage an emotion and respect for these places that may lead over time to an appreciation of their true value. A consequence of this could be an urge to make a change in lifestyle, however small, that when duplicated eventually leads to the conservation of wild places.
Were these thoughts racing through my mind as I drove along a single track road in Inverpolly in the North West Highlands of Scotland, hitting the brakes of my fuel-hungry Land Rover in an emergency stop by an unnamed lochan to frame a quick shot of the stunning cloud reflection with a camera constructed using a sizeable amount of Earth's resources and produced by one of the world's biggest multi-national conglomerates? I regret to say that my answer is no.