Blizzard

Lockdown gave everyone a lot of time to walk the same routes repeatedly. This was one of mine — a pre-sunrise hike up to Chew Reservoir from home, familiar enough that a map would’ve been an insult.

What I hadn’t planned for was the blizzard. By the time I reached the top, the weather had other ideas — visibility dropping, everything going white, and my water bottle quietly giving up somewhere on the way. In hindsight, ideal conditions for a photograph.

The falling snow was the shot I was after: something solid enough to anchor the frame, dissolved into white behind it. The valve tower delivered. The diagonal of the dam wall pulls you in from the bottom left, the tower emerges from the murk just enough to hold the eye, and everything else — sky, moorland, any sense of horizon — simply ceased to exist. The blizzard did all the heavy lifting compositionally.

Sometimes the best light isn’t light at all.