STRATHPEFFER, MY HEIL`N HAME
By Rev. John Buchan (Area One).
I live in one of the most beautiful places in the whole of Britain. Ross-Shire, is a beautiful county. It has everything that can be considered photogenic. I look out on the slopes of Ben Wyvis and see either Heather slopes or sometimes they are covered with snow. I can jump into the car, and in the course of my normal daily routine, I come across water-falls, Glens or Valleys. I need never be stuck for subjects to fill my view-finder. Ross-Shire spans the whole breadth of the North of Scotland, from the North Sea coast to the Atlantic on the West. There is fishing (if you can afford it) or mountain climbing (if you can brave it), there is Hill walking (if you have the stamina for it). You need never be stuck for something to photograph!!
Of course there is the warm Scottish - Highland hospitality to savour as well as the sheer breath-taking beauty that surrounds us. We are a tourist area and can offer most things. Inverness, the capital of the Highlands can offer a beautiful little theater, the Edan Court where there are many fine performances, from drama to orchestral and many other types of performances that attract the most ardent theatre goer. If on the other hand you prefer architecture, there are such things as St. Andrew`s Cathedral in Fortrose, on the Black Isle (Not really an island, but a most interesting area) you could go through quite a bit of film in this area without realising it.
I have suggested so many things and have left out much more that I should have mentioned. Time and space forbids me rhapsodising on my part of the country and it would delight me to see many of you as you pass through the area armed with Konica 100 (or for that matter, even Kodachrome).
We have lovely soft water for processing films; lovely soft light and blue skies that make your slides a joy to behold. At this time of the year the daylight is quite short, but we more than make up for it in the month of June when we have daylight for nearly eighteen hours.
All this seems too good to be true. There must be some draw backs aren`t there? Well, I suppose I have to concede that there may be!! If I need some special item of any kind there is Dixon`s shop (but that isn`t a photgraphic shop, only a a camera shop - and not a good one at that). If I need to make an enquiry about anything photographic, it requires a long distance `phone call` - and an expensive one at that, to some faceless voice somewhere in deepest London or Birmingham or some other strange place!
Have I given you an appetite for the North of Scotland? I hope so, for so many of your Southern colleagues have come to live here, but notvmany of them seem to go about with a camera slung round their necks. Hopefully you may wish to hitch up your caravan or trailer tent and taste the beauties and the grandeur of mountains, Glens and Straths. And all I can say is you`d not be wasting your time, film or energy.