Eilean Donan Castle, Scottish Highlands

(Infrared film, hand printed and hand coloured, 1995)

Every image has a back story. I drove up from southern England to Scotland with my wife in the summer of '95. We had no route planned, just stopping wherever we wanted to for the night. Some nights we stayed in hostels, others in bed and breakfasts and on two or three occasions, we just slept in the car when we couldn't find anything else... this was pre-internet so you either booked something in advance, or just knocked on the door of a suitable looking place and hoped for the best. We knocked on a lot of doors on that trip.

The night before I made this early morning picture, we had searched in vain for a place to stay and ended up in our little Fiat Cinquecento for the night, parked next to a small country church. We had to keep the windows down a little for airflow, but the midges came in and bit us all over. It was incredibly uncomfortable. Around 2 or 3 in the morning, we drove off to air the car out and hopefully get rid of the little biting bugs, and drove over to look at Eilean Donan, returning back to our parking spot a little while later.

This image of the famous thirteenth century castle was made the next morning– long before the tourists showed up– using black and white infrared film. I later printed it in my darkroom (my apartment kitchen back then) and hand coloured the print, using photo oils and pencils. I used to do a lot of that in the 1990's, winning a few awards for my work and selling a number of fine art prints, as well as writing a regular column for a hand colouring website. Now almost no one does it anymore– it's a lost art.

But that’s not the end of the story… at some point during the night, I woke up and looked in the rearview mirror of our car and saw a shadowy figure approaching behind us. He walked right past the car and straight through the hedge in front of me. But that’s another story for another time…