A shoot in Scotland

I have now started and progressed quite well in editing down over 3,200 images I have taken over the last year of "a year in the life of" an estate on the Borders in Scotland. I am working on bringing them down to about 800, before beginning to design and layout a book of around 400 pages, showing the changing landscape and gardens, farming activities, building maintenance and development and most wonderfully, the hunting, shooting and fishing.

Today I have been working on scenes from several shoots, and am just so pleased with the images that I have to share some of them on this blog.

The completed book will be given to family, friends and all the amazing people who work on the estate and who make it all look so beautiful and work so well.

Salmon leaping in the Tweed

I have just spent a weekend in the Borders in Scotland, photographing for a project that will chronicle a life of a farming, shooting and fishing estate over a whole year, starting with the fishing.

I am still sorting through 100's of images, but these two of salmon leaping whilst several anglers toiled away trying to catch them stand out so far!

To get them, I just had to stand there eyes glued to the viewfinder and try to react in time when a fish broke water.

Using the Leica M8 and a 90mm F.2.8 lens made it slightly easier than using a DSLR as the rangefinders 90mm frame only occupied a quarter of the screen, so I could see what was going on outside the coverage of the lens. These were two successful shots out of maybe 20 taken over two hours or so.