The Buachaille Etive Mor

I published my first landscape print of the Buachaille Etive Mor back in the autumn of 1983 shortly after the creation of Mountain Images. I recall very well the moment when the image was taken on a lovely crystal clear late September morning which followed overnight rain. I stood in the Coupall River with water up to my knees, and using an Olympus OM1 camera fitted with a 28mm wide angle lens charged with Kodak Ektachrome Professional 64 film captured a shot which featured the great north face of The Buachaille Etive Mor. I chose my viewpoint carefully because I wanted the image to include some of the mountain's best-known climbing routes - Curved Ridge, Crowberry Ridge and Crowberry Gully.

Twenty-five years later it was time to re-visit the location and bring the image up to date - not that the mountain had changed in that time, but photographic technologies and print quality certainly had; I returned in 2008 with a Canon EOS 1DS Mark III camera. I looked again at the Coupall River and walked its bank from the junction with the River Etive to the stepping stones near the club hut at Jacksonville. What I wanted to do was capture the Coupall River shot in panoramic format, giving it the character I liked in the Etive River shot. At the same time I wanted to maintain the focus of the image on the north face of the Buachaille Etive Mor and in particular the popular climbing routes. After walking the river bank several times, it became clear that the original location that I had identified in 1982 near Jacksonville was indeed precisely where I needed to be to capture the best view of the face. I was perhaps a little suprised that even after twenty-five years and all the millions of gallons of water that had flowed down the river in the intervening time, I could still identify the rock patterns in the river that pin-pointed the exact location where I had taken my original image.

The major difference between the opportunity which presented itself to me now and that of twenty-five years ago was the camera system that I had in hand - a digital Canon EOS 1DS Mark III camera. Using all the excellent features that it offered I would now be able to capture not just a single image, but a whole series of images that would eventually be stitched together to produce a new majestic study of Buachaille Etive Mor in an ultra-wide panoramic format.