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A slightly abstract image here. I've been a bit bored with the dark mornings and was reading about sports photography lately so I wanted to try out something a bit different. I do hope you like it! Taken by zooming in from a wide angle to a tight one while snapping the shot - and a bit of post-production in Lightroom

Spotted while walking the first section of the West Highland Way last summer. If you look near the leaf you can see the eggs. Not sure if it was spiders or moths or something else, but the whole tree was covered in this fine webbing.

High winds blew this bad-boy into my garden....

First attempt at using Lightroom....

As soon as we hit the summit at 3:15, we decided we would head back down straight away since the weather was closing in very quickly. There was a quick job to be done first though. You know those little whisky favours you get at weddings? Well, I found a few when we moved house and decided that the best place to drink them is at the top of a Munro. So this trip was the turn of Chris and Vicky, with a cheeky single malt, split between the two of us on the summit. It tasted incredible against the backdrop of the howling gale and snow. Thanks Chris and Vicky!

We got all our warmest gear on (crampons were on by this point) and started to descend the way we came up. Or so we thought. We should have taken a bearing because we were losing height too quickly and coming off the wrong side of the hill. It was starting to get dark so we took a few bearings and got ourselves back on track. We made it back to the bikes for 5:30. That’s the first time I’ve had to do night-nav with the compass and it’s a lot more difficult than during the day, but it is a great feeling when you find that the practice you’ve put in through the years pays off and taking a bearing and following it becomes an automatic skill.

Back at the bikes, we figured it wasn’t too late to head back down the western side of the track, by the bothy. The road was downhill almost all the way but the bikes were sliding about in the snow and visibility, even with a decent set of lights was still difficult. It was absolutely exhilarating, and I fell off a couple of times, but we made it back to Bridge of Tilt in about 1:45 – a lot faster than it took us to get up there in the first place.

We made it back to the car, exhausted and red-faced from the snow exposure but glad to have climbed the hill. Then, it was a quick trip to Pitlochry for scampi and chips and finally the long drive home.