8 Seconds Over Loch Airigh na Saorach

Loch Airigh na Saorach

On the road between Broadford and Armadale lies Skye’s own version of the “Flow Country”. It’s a low-lying flattish area of boggy ground, pools, lochans and burns.

The actual Flow Country is a vast area of blanket bog spanning Caithness and Sutherland in the far north of Scotland. As well as being a reserve for many rare species, it is a huge carbon sink of international importance.

Back to Skye. I’ve always been intrigued by the many lochans that are dotted around this area. You can see some of them from the new road, and walk alongside them on the old road that is now a foot/cycle path.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to photograph them at night for the book, and I settled on an idea to isolate one of the lochs in the landscape by using the moon to reflect its light from the surface creating a bright and crisp shape in an otherwise dark and forbidding landscape. This shot would require a high vantage point, and given the lack of suitable mountains, it meant the drone had to come out to play.

I have a Mavic Air 2 drone. It feels quite low tech these days, such is the relentless march of the evolution of such things. Newer drones have bigger sensors, are smaller, have higher quality lenses and better flying dynamics. But one must resist “upgradeitis”, and instead make the most of what one has got.

The scene I had in mind required a fairly still night to get good reflections of the moon on the water, but not so still that there were no ripples on the surface. Too still would mean the moon would become a solitary bright spot in the surface reflection, whereas some ripples and small waves would result in moonlight being reflected over the whole surface of the loch to highlight its shape.

With a nearly full moon and clear skies forecast, and light winds, I headed out. Things weren’t looking good initially as the wind was a lot stronger than I thought. The stronger the wind, the harder it would be for the drone to remain still in the air for what I knew would be a long exposure. A moving drone would result in blurred images which definitely was not what I wanted.

There are several lochans to pick, and after some trial and error I ended up with Loch Airigh na Saorach. My reasoning was that it was small enough to fit entirely within the frame without me having to exceed the maximum 120m legal flying height, it had well defined edges, and a fairly simple outline without lots of distractions. It also happens to look like a running dog.

To pick this lochan, and get the right exposure, took a lot of flying and repositioning of the drone, going through two batteries before I settled on a nice composition. I could then get to work.

For context and scale, I wanted some scenery in the background so I decided to include the horizon and the peak of Sgurr na Coinnich. I also elected not to include the moon itself in the shot as it is so bright it would immediately attract the eye away from the main subject of the lochan. This also meant I had to position the drone in such a way that the direct reflection of the moon wasn’t present on the lochan’s surface either - it’s just below the bottom edge of the lochan in the final image.

Being very dark, the settings I ended up with were an exposure of 8 seconds, and ISO of 1600. The fixed focal length of the drone’s lens is 24mm with a f/2.8 aperture so no adjustment possible there. 8 seconds is an exteremely long exposure for a drone, requiring all of DJI’s know-how to stabilise the camera while 120m up in moderate winds. ISO 1600 is also rather uncomfortable for the little sensor, and I knew it would result in a grainy image. But I’d rather have a grainy-but-sharp image than drop the ISO down and have a non-grainy-but-blurred image.

To maximise my chances of getting anything remotely sharp I took about 40 images. Surely one of them would be sharp enough? I also played with light trails from some cars passing on the road alongside the lochan, and while interesting I decided that they distracted too much from what was an otherwise clean and crisp composition.

Back in the Skye At Night HQ’s editing room, I keenly downloaded all the pictures and looked through them all. Happily I had 4 that were sharp enough to devote some more time to. I picked the one with the nicest combination of clouds above the skyline.

The chosen image was indeed very “noisy” or grainy due to the very high ISO setting for the drone. ISO 1600 wouldn’t be a problem on my other “proper” cameras with much larger sensors, but when you have a much smaller sensor it’s not good. Using Lightroom, my first action was to use the amazing new AI-based noise reduction function. This is truly incredible. The nature and composition of the scene is analysed by Adobe’s artificially intelligent thingy, which has been trained on billions of images, and it de-noises to superb effect. It almost means you don’t need to worry about ISO any more. Almost, but not quite as it’s always better to start with a clean image than repair a noisy one.

I did some more work on the image to bring out the shape of the lochan by tweaking the contrast levels selectively, as well as removing a few strange bright spots that I think were reflections in smaller ponds dotted about. My intention is always to remove distractions and make the image as clean and simple as possible. The end result is pretty much what I had in mind, which is always nice to achieve. I did check through all my other compositions, and I had also tried some ground level shots with my Leica Q3 on a tripod, but nothing matched the cleanness and crispness of the shot you see above.