How to Photograph a Scottish Island When the Wind Hits 80 mph

Autumn on Iona brings low sun that can light the island for most of the day, but it also brings squalls that roll in off the Atlantic with little notice. You get minutes of good light at a time, so you have to decide on exposure, framing, and where to stand before the next band of rain hits.

With two storms heading for the UK, Simon Booth moved his trip forward by two days. He drove six hours to Oban, crossed to Mull, and caught the last foot ferry to Iona with about 10 minutes to spare. His first outing went badly. The storm arrived as he reached his spot, the light vanished, and he threw out the whole session. On the second try, he walked about half an hour past the Abbey to the island's north end, found a relatively sheltered spot in the dunes, and built a plan around the marram grass whipping in the gale.

The idea is simple and easy to borrow. A slow shutter turns moving grass into a soft, blurred base for the frame, so Booth focused on the middle distance and didn't worry about foreground sharpness. When the sun broke through, he exposed for the lit foreground and let the sky behind the island fall into a dark, brooding gray. He shot at f/16 and 1/10 of a second with the camera's image stabilization switched on to fight vibration. On one frame, he dropped the exposure a third of a stop to make the clouds look heavier than they did in person. He also took a longer exposure for the grass and a separate one for the sea, so he could blend them if the waves softened too much. A cheap rain cover, about three pounds and forgotten in his bag for months, let him keep shooting through the showers.

He framed the storm scene in a 65:24 crop, the aspect ratio of the Hasselblad XPan. That camera came out in 1998, developed with Fujifilm and sold in Japan as the Fujifilm TX-1, and it shot 24x65mm frames on ordinary 35mm film. The format nearly disappeared with the film bodies, then came back as an in-camera option on digital cameras, most visibly on Hasselblad's recent medium format bodies and on the Fujifilm GFX100RF, which puts aspect ratios on a dedicated dial. Shooting the crop in camera changes how you compose, because you see the actual edges while you work instead of guessing where you'll trim later. The format favors scenes that run sideways: a coastline, a line of breaking surf, a strip of texture on a beach. If your camera has no panoramic crop, many let you show frame lines or a grid you can use as a rough guide, and you can then crop the raw file to match.

Two days later, the wind had dropped to about half its earlier strength, after gusts estimated at 80 to 85 mph that had him walking at an angle just to stay upright. Booth went back to the same beach with no plan and flat light, looking at the edges of the dunes for smaller scenes. After half an hour, he found a clump of weed trapped in pristine sand, with patterns fanning out around it. A bit of red weed nearby bothered him, but cutting it would have hurt the composition. He placed the plant on the right side of a vertical frame because its branches lean left, so the negative space belonged on the left, and a few small stems anchored the right edge. With his 35-100mm zoom at about 40mm and the tripod legs spread wide, he shot at f/16, ISO 100, and 1/6 of a second with plus one and a third stops of exposure compensation, since the bright sand was fooling the meter. He used a two-second timer, cloudy white balance, a single raw exposure, and a centered focus point, all while standing well back so his feet stayed out of the sand. Later that afternoon, with rain hanging over Mull, he found a much broader field of sand patterns, kept the black and white sand evenly spread so the frame had no blank spots, and overexposed by a stop and a half to keep the sand bright.

Booth admits he rarely goes out of his way to photograph historic buildings, yet his last frame in the video, Iona Abbey with the 12th-century St. Oran's Chapel leading the eye toward it, is one he says simply presented itself.