As promised in the January blog I thought I’d do a blog post about our road trips and what it takes to organise one as its not as easy as some may think. I dread to think how many hours I spend researching locations, reading books or trawling social media in search of our next place to photograph. The problem is sometimes you may see something in passing and remembering about it months or maybe years down the road (pun intended) is unlikely so I tend to utilize Google Maps. To help my poor memory I star locations I’d one day like to visit or revisit if we didn’t quite get the conditions we would have liked. As you can see from the below graphic we’ve got quite the bucket list to tick off which will take years and years to tick off. Even if by some miracle a “We’ve got news about your ticket” email comes through with a big enough win to stop working it wouldn’t be a quick job to tick the list off. Lets be honest we all have that dream and its exceptionally unlikely but how lovely that would be if my numbers came up. I’d be straight out looking at buying a campervan to travel the UK in (after my notice at work had gone in of course). I hope some of these full-time landscape photographers know how lucky they’ve got it!
Anyway, less about me rambling about winning the lottery and back to the point. Looking at our UK map with more spots than a teenager we’d sit down and point to a rough area we’d like to travel round. It’s not quite the throw a dart at a map and see where we’re going method but that might be just as useful! For 2026 we’ve picked 2 areas, firstly we both wanted to return to the Isle of Skye. Having visited in 2023 on our first road trip we loved our time there but with only a couple of nights, nice light wasn’t something we were blessed with but the beauty of the place and missing visiting some places we’d aimed to it always meant we’d have to go back. Secondly, on our 2024 Scotland trip we included the Isle of Mull and headed further North than before and went up just above Inverness but this year we’ll be going further North and incorporating the infamous John o’ Groats. Who knows, maybe next year we’ll head all the way down to Landsend to balance it all out. Next for us is to create a rough dot-to-dot to plot a rough route we’d take with areas that are must-do while also having a maximum drive length in mind to enjoy a photography trip rather than just a driving tour of Scotland after all I’m a photographer not an Uber driver. If an area was to be explored then we would draw an imaginary circle round a number of stars and aim to find a campsite in that circle to set up base from so we were in a good place that we wouldn’t have to drive far. A short drive in the early hours of the morning to do a sunrise shoot or in the dark post sunset makes life a lot easier as a 3 o clock alarm followed by an hours driving and an hour before sunrise and going through until 8/9pm at night is a rather long day and that hour can make all the difference especially when its an hour per day for a couple of weeks. What you may see is a nice photo but this is what it takes to get to that point. Early mornings, late nights and lots and lots of background work.
Andrew
