Starting out 1 - Preparing for my first photography trip

In 2022, I was working as Managing Director for a business I'd been working with since 2012. Life was busy but good.

Outside of work though, there was very little and all of my energy was in the work I was doing.

Perhaps not particularly healthy, but I was happy.

In the Autumn of 2022, the other director's decided it was time for them to move on from the business which meant a sale.

As I wasn’t in a position to buy them out, and frankly didn’t want to, we started the process of selling.

This isn’t something for this blog, but that was a very interesting experience from a number of levels.

The whole process took about 12 months and we completed the sale in early October 2023.

As part of the many hour’s of thinking I’d been doing during this period, I’d been thinking about what came next.

I’d been working in the business for over a decade. I’d dedicated myself to the business, and now that was all changing.

This wasn’t a bad thing, just a different thing.

As the sale approached I decided I needed a break, a week off to decompress and step away from everything.

I’ve never been good a holiday’s though. The idea of sitting on a beach doing nothing doesn’t appeal. In fact, it’s something I’ve actively avoided.

I needed a purpose, something to focus on, so I could stop my mind moving back to thinking about work things.

But, I needed a break, it needed to be something relaxed, without pressure.

I’d seen a few YouTube video’s around the NC500 route in Scotland, and had seen some YouTube video’s of people doing photography, seemingly really enjoying themselves.

This got me thinking about the idea of a photography trip.

I already had a camper van, which I loved using, so the idea of a road trip appealed, as did the scenery of Scotland.

And the more I watched people on YouTube doing photography trips, the more the idea appealed to me.

So, the day after the sale of the business was complete, I booked a week off, booked some campsites and prepared to go on a photography trip 2 weeks later.

A couple of days later it started to dawn on me that I actually knew nothing about photography, or the NC500 route (I’d booked campsites I’d seen other people use in videos based on how long google maps said it would take to get there).

I didn’t even own a camera at this point.

This wasn’t an issue though, and actually as a true nerd, was part of the fun.

I quite liked the idea that I’d had to figure all this out soon, so that I could go, and quickly started looking at eBay for camera’s.

It didn’t take long to find an old Nikon D5100 that someone was selling with everything.

It had multiple lens, a case, spare batteries, SD cards. Everything I needed to simply shove into the van and take on a trip.

And that’s pretty much what I did.

I did very little research into where I was going (other than knowing where I was parking the van each night).

As I’d been down the YouTube rabbit hole a few times watching videos, I also thought the highly cliched line ‘how hard can it be’ and decided that I should vlog the trip, and so went a bit eBay mad and along with the DSLR I’d bought, I ended up with a GoPro and various stands, microphones etc. so I could vlog the trip.

Now, in hindsight, as an introvert who’s always hated the sound of his own voice and sometimes even struggles to look in a mirror, it was optimistic to think I’d be producing any form of vlog.

This didn’t stop me though, as I’ll probably write about again.

So, having no experience of any kind, a camera I’d bought second (probably third or forth in reality) hand from eBay and only a vague idea of where I was going and what I might do, I set off in the early hours of a cold October day to drive from my house in Oldham to Inverness where I’d spend the first night of my first photography trip.

Read about the trip here