Spring Greens

​May is one of my favourite months of the year because it is the month in which the landscape well and truly awakens from its winter slumber. This was certainly the case this year because the intense ‘spring green’ colour that is such a potent sign of new life arrived in its full splendour to adorn the woodlands at the top end of Loch Sunart during the first week of the month, compelling me to go out and capture a small piece of this beautiful and vibrant sight.

​My first outing took me to Phemie’s Walk near Strontian and to my favourite place in the woods there. It is a place well off the path where a stand of magnificent birch trees creates an almost cathedral like space and on the morning I was there, their leaves were backlit to create an incredibly iridescent canopy that covered the space around me and tinged the trunks and branches of the trees with a beautiful green hue.

​A couple of weeks later and the leaves on the ancient oak trees that cover the hillside around my house at Resipole had well and truly made their spring entrance as well. This, along with the greening up of the previously dry and russet scrubland, had turned this part of Sunart into a verdant oasis and provide me an opportunity to use the drone to capture the ‘spring green’ from a different perspective.

After capturing the panoramic view of the verdant oak trees that cover the hillside to the west of the house and Ben Resipole, I turned the drone to face the other direction down to Loch Sunart and the rocky shoreline down to where the oakwood stretches. It was late in the evening and some beautifully soft light from the low Sun was such that it accentuated the shapes of the trees to provide the perfect opportunity to take some top-down shots showing the interplay between the oak wood, the rock and the sea.

​One of the things that always fascinates me, when I’m flying the drone above the oakwoods with the camera facing downwards, is how distinct each of the trees can be. When you’re on the ground looking up through the tree canopy it seems to blanket the entire sky, yet looking down, reveals gaps and lines where the trees seem almost afraid to touch each other. This is a phenomenon called ‘crown shyness’ which is thought to be caused by the trees detecting a frequency of visible light called far-red light, which can tell them how close they are to their neighbours. When they sense they are close, they stop growing and thereby maintain their exposure to light and optimise the process of photosynthesis.

​I had a second outing with the drone in the hope of capturing more soft evening light on the trees, but this time around the bay that is Sàilean nan Cuileag, a mile or so east of Salen. However, despite the conditions looking hopeful, cloud rolled in from the northeast meaning that I had to content myself with a couple of shots of the bay that were more subdued that I had envisaged. 

​Both images show the bay at high tide, filled with seawater and therefore at its most attractive for ariel photography. The first is looking out of the bay, southwest down Loch Sunart, while the second is looking northeast into the bay and back towards Ben Resipole and is perhaps my favourite image from the month, probably because I feel it captures so much of a place I’m lucky to be able to call home.