Six Favourites - IML Autumn 2020
19th October 2020
Earlier in 2020 I was asked to write an article for Mountaineering Ireland's quarterly magazine, the Irish Mountain Log. I forgot about it, til a few friends said they'd seen it in the latest issue. It's about some of my favourite mountain/climbing themed images, how I made them and why I like them. Hopefully it'll provide some brief escapism in these uncertain times.
___________
We’ve all been captivated by stunning scenes while out walking and climbing. The chance to be present for these moments is a big part of the reason many of us head out, and especially so for those of us who like to bring some sense of them home as photographs. Anybody who’s planned photography in the hills will know how rare it is for all the elements to line up as you want them. While we can have control over a precise composition there is only educated guesswork to try and bring ourselves to these places at the right time when light and weather conditions add the much needed magic that can transform a scene. Luck plays such a big part in making photographs, especially as landscape photographers tend to find blue skies boring and cloudy days, especially in the mountains, are so much more unpredictable. It’s best to be flexible and not have tunnel vision for a particular shot, lest you end up blinded to sights you didn’t plan for. But when the plans come good it’s very satisfying indeed. These are some of my preferred photos from my walking and climbing life, a mix of planned and spontaneous scenes from great days out in beautiful places.
Brandon Peak
This is one of my favourite images of my own; I have a big, framed print of it above my office desk to remind me of an enchanted afternoon. It’s a rare case of a specific scene from my mind’s eye turning out more or less exactly as I’d hoped it would. A few weeks before I made this image I was up here before dawn, just barely afloat above a roiling mass of thick cloud as scraps of high cirrus took their first hints of colour from the rising sun. Having time to spare I thought I’d cross the ridge to Brandon Peak, but I couldn’t find any decent composition there. I should have stayed put on An Géarán; from here the ridge looks more defined, and I knew that at either end of the day the low sun would split it into a fine light and shadow line rising to Brandon Peak’s shapely summit. A dark sky would complement the low warm light, or maybe a cloud inversion could add some magic. A fresh fall of snow would be the icing on the cake, but already I was getting carried away with a scene so rare that even if it did happen the chances were slim that I’d find myself there at the time.
But less than a month later I was slowly slogging upwards through heavy hail showers towards an invisible summit. My friend carried on to Brandon Peak but I stayed put this time, settling myself next to this untrodden snow drift, the contours of which were barely visible in the flat light. The cloud slowly cleared and bright beams of pristine light began to spread out over West Kerry, fighting with the wind-bent sails of huge hail showers blown in from the sea. It was among the most mesmerising light shows I’d ever seen. I could hardly believe it when a gap seemed to be opening up on the horizon, and no more cloud was drifting in to block it. I turned back to this view towards Brandon Peak, and shortly afterwards a pale pink glow lit the summit slopes and spread down along the ridge to where I stood, elated.
It’s a simple photo really; there’s no technical camera work involved, no filter, no use of slow shutter to render some sense of fantasy or mystery. It’s just a lucky combination of variables that I happened to be there for.
Sea of Sandstone
Richard Cussen examining the way upwards on The Bishop’s Move, at the Seven Heads in West Cork. This is a fairly obscure crag, too brittle and too dependent on low tides and calm seas to ever get very popular. But the setting is scenic and the lines are often quite strong, particularly here on the main wall. For this image I scrambled out to a barnacled reef to get a front-on view of the cliff, and its pleasing geometric geology. Even Richard’s rope and limbs seem to match the straight lines of the crag’s cracks, a nice example of the climber being shaped by the contours of the cliff. Such subtle adaptations always seem necessary to me if we hope to get through these steep places.
Winter Still
Self-portrait from a stunning day in the Brandon Range. The skyline here is the Faha Ridge, reflected in one of the paternoster lakes beneath the summit of Mount Brandon. Like most of my preferred images there’s nothing fancy happening here from a technical point of view. I’m not particularly interested in injecting drama into scenes either with the camera or with editing software afterwards. I prefer to find scenes that are inspiring enough as they are and just try to present them truthfully. The rarity of days like this in such beautiful surroundings is enough to make them special. There’s nothing to be added that wasn’t already there; these sights don’t need embellishing.
Eastern Reeks Ridge
My friend Will Dowling moving west to east along the Reeks. I like this photo because it reminds me of all the reasons why I find being in the mountains so enjoyable. The simple hugeness of hills impresses us all. Mountains are big by definition, and things that are big are often described as mountainous. That feeling of being small and insignificant can be strangely liberating, freeing us from the often-overwhelming worlds we occupy in our minds into spaces where trivial preoccupations are crushed under the weight of space and time the mountains occupy. Those huge lengths of time are as evident in this image as the size of the hills is; the bands of buckled rock that Will is scrambling over are clear indicators of the momentous forces that shaped the Reeks into their present state over unimaginable spans of time, and continue to do so at a speed too slow for us to see. The mountains also command a wide range of observation in the present tense; from the attention to their smaller ripples and edges required to navigate safely over their steeper sides, to the huge, broader views that stop us in our tracks, mountains can keep us rooted in the here and now at every scale of their details. These wider perspectives help me to sort through what is and is not so important in life, and I see them all in this photo now that I’ve been tasked with writing about what it is I like about certain images that come to mind as favourites.
On a less philosophical note, this image reminds me of the pure pleasure of time spent in the hills with good friends, moving freely over exciting, exposed terrain, feeling fit and free to navigate the world whichever way you want, something that seems harder to do in the lowlands.
Mountain Wall
Steep streams in spate on the south-east slopes of Brandon Peak. I made this image early one morning after a night of heavy rain in August. Most of these streams are thin trickles of water much of the time, barely visible across the four kilometers this view is seen from. But having noticed them fill up after previous downpours I planned to come back when early sun might quickly proceed heavy rain. The clouds drifting by on this particular morning brought welcome contrast to the warm, low sunlight, adding dramatic lighting to a dramatic landscape, made briefly more alive by all that rushing whitewater. The scale of the scene can be hard to make out at first but if you look closely you can see fence posts along the rim of the corrie. The falls on the left is about 200m high, from where it steepens to where it spills into the small lake hidden here, Loch an Mhúnáin according to the OS map. I can’t find the word múnáin with a quick Google search. The closest is múnláil, an architectural moulding. It’s probably a bit of a stretch to jump to the conclusion that this lake is The Lake of the Moulding, from the bowl-shaped hollow it sits it, a cast moulded by glacier. But places come alive in the Irish language, much as they do when briefly shaped by nice light and sudden streams, so it’s always worth seeking out the roots of their meaning, even if you end up a million miles from the truth.
Dream Morning
Looking towards Brandon Peak at sunrise in midwinter. It’s all contrasts; the hard, immobile edges of the hills all in shadow versus the soft and sunlit edges of clouds drifting past, changing the scene by the second. Cloud inversions are hard to beat for that feeling of being transported to another world. This was one of the better ones I’ve been lucky enough to see.
___________
We’ve all been captivated by stunning scenes while out walking and climbing. The chance to be present for these moments is a big part of the reason many of us head out, and especially so for those of us who like to bring some sense of them home as photographs. Anybody who’s planned photography in the hills will know how rare it is for all the elements to line up as you want them. While we can have control over a precise composition there is only educated guesswork to try and bring ourselves to these places at the right time when light and weather conditions add the much needed magic that can transform a scene. Luck plays such a big part in making photographs, especially as landscape photographers tend to find blue skies boring and cloudy days, especially in the mountains, are so much more unpredictable. It’s best to be flexible and not have tunnel vision for a particular shot, lest you end up blinded to sights you didn’t plan for. But when the plans come good it’s very satisfying indeed. These are some of my preferred photos from my walking and climbing life, a mix of planned and spontaneous scenes from great days out in beautiful places.
Brandon Peak
This is one of my favourite images of my own; I have a big, framed print of it above my office desk to remind me of an enchanted afternoon. It’s a rare case of a specific scene from my mind’s eye turning out more or less exactly as I’d hoped it would. A few weeks before I made this image I was up here before dawn, just barely afloat above a roiling mass of thick cloud as scraps of high cirrus took their first hints of colour from the rising sun. Having time to spare I thought I’d cross the ridge to Brandon Peak, but I couldn’t find any decent composition there. I should have stayed put on An Géarán; from here the ridge looks more defined, and I knew that at either end of the day the low sun would split it into a fine light and shadow line rising to Brandon Peak’s shapely summit. A dark sky would complement the low warm light, or maybe a cloud inversion could add some magic. A fresh fall of snow would be the icing on the cake, but already I was getting carried away with a scene so rare that even if it did happen the chances were slim that I’d find myself there at the time.
But less than a month later I was slowly slogging upwards through heavy hail showers towards an invisible summit. My friend carried on to Brandon Peak but I stayed put this time, settling myself next to this untrodden snow drift, the contours of which were barely visible in the flat light. The cloud slowly cleared and bright beams of pristine light began to spread out over West Kerry, fighting with the wind-bent sails of huge hail showers blown in from the sea. It was among the most mesmerising light shows I’d ever seen. I could hardly believe it when a gap seemed to be opening up on the horizon, and no more cloud was drifting in to block it. I turned back to this view towards Brandon Peak, and shortly afterwards a pale pink glow lit the summit slopes and spread down along the ridge to where I stood, elated.
It’s a simple photo really; there’s no technical camera work involved, no filter, no use of slow shutter to render some sense of fantasy or mystery. It’s just a lucky combination of variables that I happened to be there for.
Sea of Sandstone
Richard Cussen examining the way upwards on The Bishop’s Move, at the Seven Heads in West Cork. This is a fairly obscure crag, too brittle and too dependent on low tides and calm seas to ever get very popular. But the setting is scenic and the lines are often quite strong, particularly here on the main wall. For this image I scrambled out to a barnacled reef to get a front-on view of the cliff, and its pleasing geometric geology. Even Richard’s rope and limbs seem to match the straight lines of the crag’s cracks, a nice example of the climber being shaped by the contours of the cliff. Such subtle adaptations always seem necessary to me if we hope to get through these steep places.
Winter Still
Self-portrait from a stunning day in the Brandon Range. The skyline here is the Faha Ridge, reflected in one of the paternoster lakes beneath the summit of Mount Brandon. Like most of my preferred images there’s nothing fancy happening here from a technical point of view. I’m not particularly interested in injecting drama into scenes either with the camera or with editing software afterwards. I prefer to find scenes that are inspiring enough as they are and just try to present them truthfully. The rarity of days like this in such beautiful surroundings is enough to make them special. There’s nothing to be added that wasn’t already there; these sights don’t need embellishing.
Eastern Reeks Ridge
My friend Will Dowling moving west to east along the Reeks. I like this photo because it reminds me of all the reasons why I find being in the mountains so enjoyable. The simple hugeness of hills impresses us all. Mountains are big by definition, and things that are big are often described as mountainous. That feeling of being small and insignificant can be strangely liberating, freeing us from the often-overwhelming worlds we occupy in our minds into spaces where trivial preoccupations are crushed under the weight of space and time the mountains occupy. Those huge lengths of time are as evident in this image as the size of the hills is; the bands of buckled rock that Will is scrambling over are clear indicators of the momentous forces that shaped the Reeks into their present state over unimaginable spans of time, and continue to do so at a speed too slow for us to see. The mountains also command a wide range of observation in the present tense; from the attention to their smaller ripples and edges required to navigate safely over their steeper sides, to the huge, broader views that stop us in our tracks, mountains can keep us rooted in the here and now at every scale of their details. These wider perspectives help me to sort through what is and is not so important in life, and I see them all in this photo now that I’ve been tasked with writing about what it is I like about certain images that come to mind as favourites.
On a less philosophical note, this image reminds me of the pure pleasure of time spent in the hills with good friends, moving freely over exciting, exposed terrain, feeling fit and free to navigate the world whichever way you want, something that seems harder to do in the lowlands.
Mountain Wall
Steep streams in spate on the south-east slopes of Brandon Peak. I made this image early one morning after a night of heavy rain in August. Most of these streams are thin trickles of water much of the time, barely visible across the four kilometers this view is seen from. But having noticed them fill up after previous downpours I planned to come back when early sun might quickly proceed heavy rain. The clouds drifting by on this particular morning brought welcome contrast to the warm, low sunlight, adding dramatic lighting to a dramatic landscape, made briefly more alive by all that rushing whitewater. The scale of the scene can be hard to make out at first but if you look closely you can see fence posts along the rim of the corrie. The falls on the left is about 200m high, from where it steepens to where it spills into the small lake hidden here, Loch an Mhúnáin according to the OS map. I can’t find the word múnáin with a quick Google search. The closest is múnláil, an architectural moulding. It’s probably a bit of a stretch to jump to the conclusion that this lake is The Lake of the Moulding, from the bowl-shaped hollow it sits it, a cast moulded by glacier. But places come alive in the Irish language, much as they do when briefly shaped by nice light and sudden streams, so it’s always worth seeking out the roots of their meaning, even if you end up a million miles from the truth.
Dream Morning
Looking towards Brandon Peak at sunrise in midwinter. It’s all contrasts; the hard, immobile edges of the hills all in shadow versus the soft and sunlit edges of clouds drifting past, changing the scene by the second. Cloud inversions are hard to beat for that feeling of being transported to another world. This was one of the better ones I’ve been lucky enough to see.