The Delayed Effect of Weather Will Influence Your Landscape Photography

The weather influences your photography in several ways. I witnessed that firsthand on my tour through Glen Coe in Scotland.

Living in Denmark, our weather rarely gets extreme, simply because of our geography. Besides being protected by the surrounding sea and neighboring countries, we don’t have any mountains, which in combination with low or high pressure systems can create some very local differences in the weather, which of course will affect the atmosphere of your landscape photos.

On our way through the famous Glen Coe and Glen Etive in Scotland, I had an epiphany, where I realized the weather influences the landscapes in two ways: Immediate and delayed. The immediate way the weather influences your landscape photography is obviously what you see in the moment: showers, sunrises, tornados, snowstorms, etc. all affect your photo a great deal. The delayed way the weather influences your photography is the effect of a given type of weather. An example could be how a shower rains on a mountain, and the water from the mountain has to run off before you will see an increased amount in the streams. To many people, this is blatantly obvious, but I never really gave it a thought before I stood in a situation where I could observe the same waterfall over a period of several days and see how the amount of water increased and decreased fairly quickly. How the immediate and delayed effect of the weather played a role in my photography you can see in the epic video from Glen Coe above.