Contributing editor Jim Richardson is a photojournalist recognized for his explorations of small-town life. His photos appear frequently in National Geographicmagazine.
The islanders on Skye call it the Hairy Loch. I call my image of it (for the "Edge of the World" story about the Hebrides) Skye Pan I. The photograph was stitched together from frames 14, 691, 14,692 and 14,693.
I've always loved the Hairy Loch and have driven past it often. The intricacy and regularity of the reeds in the loch was always alluring, but at the time I had no idea of just what a complex and storied place it was. That would come later when I explored the history of the Hairy Loch, properly called Loch Cill Chroisd.
For all the times I had seen it, I had never really gotten a picture of it until this morning when I was hurrying to the Glasgow airport to take a flight home. Once, some 13 years before on a previous National Geographic assignment, I had stopped here for a gorgeous sunset and tried to photograph it but was defeated by the dreaded Scottish midges (or "midgies," the way Scots say it.) The midge is species of invisible, flying piranha known to eat the flesh off the bones of a photographer in minutes. I gave up.
When this scene of Loch Cill Chroisd unfolded before me, I had to stop the car. The sun was rising, the fog was thinning, and I worked frantically to photograph the view before it was gone. I asked myself, why the hell had I lingered for so long at the loch up the road when this was waiting for me here?
The scene cried out for all the detail I could capture. Oh, the great heap of Beinn na Caillich rising above the horizon didn't need the detail. It was the water's reeds, dappled with floating leaves, that needed detail. They needed a subtle rendering that would give each blade of grass its due credit in making up the matrix of life in this stunning landscape.
The ability to stitch several digital images together to form a panorama is a powerful tool for landscape photographers. And it results in a huge file, brimming with information that renders fine detail precisely and maintains lush tonalities. So grabbing my tripod, I quickly mounted the camera, leveled the head, and started shooting multi-image sets of images for later processing in the computer.
There are ways in which digital processing actually removes distortion from images. Before joining one image to the next, the software takes out some of the stretching that lenses inevitably produce when rendering the real world onto a flat surface. (It's a necessary byproduct of optics, roughly analogous to the kind of stretching that happens when you project a spherical Earth onto a flat map.) But readers of National Geographic remain shy of anything that smacks of "digital manipulation" (as we all should be) and so when we published the image, we duly noted that it was a panorama made up of several images.
The resulting image had a strong sense of serenity. Several of the other variations I tried had this same sense of calm, but this particular set seemed to have the best harmony. Plus, the detailed rendering suggested something more.
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