Field notes · Sep 22, 2026 · 6 min read
Three days of gales, one cottage, and the twenty minutes of light that made the whole trip worth it.
The forecast said the front would pass overnight. It did not. For three days the wind came straight off the Atlantic and the rain moved sideways past the cottage window, and I did what you do on Harris in weather like that: I made tea, cleaned lenses I had already cleaned, and read the tide tables like a novel.
Waiting is most of the job. People imagine landscape photography as a long walk to a viewpoint and a click at sunset. In practice it is checking the sky every twenty minutes, packing and unpacking the bag, and learning not to take bad weather personally.
On the fourth morning the wind dropped at about seven. The cloud broke into long grey ribbons, the sand was washed completely clean, and for twenty minutes the bay turned the colour of sea glass. I made eleven frames. Three of them are in Tide Lines.
I have stopped thinking of those storm days as lost. They are the reason the beach looked like that when the light came, and they are the reason I was already standing there when it did.
Elena CrossLandscape and travel photographer, writing between trips from Edinburgh.
