Shooting landscapes in the rain sounds miserable, and sometimes it is. But the difference between a wasted day and a productive one often comes down to how you adapt when conditions refuse to cooperate.
Coming to you from Thomas Heaton, this candid video follows Heaton through a soaking wet day in the Scottish Highlands as he scraps his original plan to drive to the Isle of Skye and improvises instead. He pulls over at Loch Loyne inside the Trossachs National Park, walks the shoreline in heavy rain, and comes away with nothing he's happy with. Rather than forcing it, he moves on, which turns out to be the right call. The rain doesn't let up, but a chance sighting through his van window of trees disappearing into mist along Glen Etive gets him reaching for a 135mm lens and shooting through the glass.
Heaton eventually settles in for the night at the end of the Glen Etive road, and the van management side of things is worth paying attention to here. He runs a diesel heater and a MaxxAir fan to fight condensation, lays wet gear out to dry, and has a practical tip about using a home dehumidifier when he gets back. The next morning he's up early with a polarizing filter stacked on a six-stop ND filter, working through four-second exposures at Loch Etive while rain moves in across the hills. The light is brief and the window closes fast, but he gets the shot.
What makes the video worth watching is how Heaton handles the parts where nothing is working. He doesn't manufacture optimism or pretend the conditions are inspiring when they aren't. At Loch Loyne, he walks back to the van empty-handed and just says he couldn't get his eye in. That honesty about how a location can simply not click on a given day, no matter how much potential it appears to have, is more useful than a highlight reel. The second half of the video shifts to Glen Coe, where Heaton shoots a waterfall using a 20-35mm wide angle lens and a three-stop ND filter, and there's a parking lot confrontation with another van driver that ends with Heaton being shown a waterfall he hadn't planned on visiting. His approach to composition at that location, stepping back from the obvious foreground to build a frame with a tree, moody sky, and mountains, is the kind of practical thinking that rarely gets explained clearly. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Heaton.
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