A moment of joy

One of the many joys of landscape photography is the unknown.

Those of you who are well acquainted with the rather less enjoyable feeling of being rudely shaken from cosy dreams by the blare of an early alarm may know what I’m talking about.

Whether you are the sort of photographer who spends hours planning every aspect of a dawn patrol or one who prefers to just go out and see what you find, it makes no difference. You can never quite know what will unfold.

It isn’t just about the weather, although that can be wonderfully unpredictable. Weather forecasting clearly isn’t an exact science, occasionally it is right, often it isn’t and even if it does deliver the weather you were hoping for, vagaries of the clouds mean the sunrise and light may not do what you expect anyway. But there is more to it than that.

It’s the infinite randomness of it all, the stumbling upon a moment in time when everything falls into place. Finding a composition that 364 days of the year may have gone unnoticed if it wasn’t for the way the light was falling at the exact moment that you happened to be looking. Nowhere is quite the same twice so every visit is a new adventure.

Of course, those moments don’t happen every time or even necessarily that regularly but it is their rarity that makes them so special and, if this year has taught us anything, it is to appreciate every moment of joy we get.