Messing about in boats – and panoramas

Web EditorNews

One hugely enjoyable job is getting photographs for the website or for printed brochures.  Even more fun is spending a day “working” with the photographer to produce iconic shots for publicity use.  In 2000, I was obsessed with the concept of using old driftwood as a background for printed brochures.  So Tom Baker, an old friend and superb photographer (www.scotphot.com), and I spent a wonderful afternoon in a boat on the windward side of the islands outside Badcall Bay.  Delving through the discarded plastic on the beach we found some beautiful planks broken off a clinker built boat.  To my great delight, one of them had copper rivets in the wood which had decayed to verdi-gris with heather growing through it.  In my naivety, I felt I had discovered the perfect background  ‘texture’ for the brochure and Tom dutifully photographed this.  It has remained unused – until today! (see below).

boat

Those familiar with our website will know that the home page is dominated by a wonderful panorama of Badcall Bay taken by Tom on a perfect June day.  In the foreground the bay stretches out towards the Minch with our salmon house to the left, local lobster and prawn boats in front and our pens to the far right.  The mountains dominate the shot, reaching back to An Teallach 40 miles away south of Ullapool.  Loch Duart loves this image as it ‘puts us in our place’ – we’re an operation dwarfed by wild countryside in which we are trying to farm as sustainably and responsibly as possible within it.

cropped-TMA_LD-Panorama.jpg

Even further south than Ullapool is Mozambique!  Loch Duart is a shareholder in a wonderful company there producing dusky kob in Pemba Bay.  Someone asked me if Dusky Kob was a Country & Western singer – the answer is ‘no’ – it’s a delicious silvery fish that grows up to 75kg in the wild around southern Africa.  Gavin the MD recreated my boat trip with Tom in Eddrachillies Bay last month to get the wonderful panorama below.

_DSC8666-2

Your local swimming pool will be at around 28°c and so is the water you are looking at – nearly all of the year!  The baobab tree on the left is an iconic east African tree symbolising to many the wild beauty of Mozambique.  More about the wonderful Dusky Kob in future blogs.

Andy Bing