Urgha, Na H-Eileanan Siar, Scotland

DJI Mini 5 Pro

Lingerbay

Take a flight to Glasgow. Join a friend who has a friend with a car. Drive north through Inverness to Ullapool to catch the ferry to Stornoway. Once you’re across the water, drive to Tarbert and then follow a set of semi-complete directions past the post office. Keep going up by the recycling center and then look for a really small sign next to a turn off to a gravel track road. Follow the road down to a little white house by the edge of slate-blue water that’s so much clearer than you’d expect. That’s how I got to Lingerbay on the Isle of Harris in Scotland.

It’s quiet here. At 58ºN, it’s not the furthest north I’ve ever been, but it’s the furthest north I’ve been in Great Britain. Things move slow. It’s chilly, and moody, but somehow lovely all the same. The weather changes its mind a lot. At times, it feels grey, and then you notice turquoise in the water and golden in the moorland. There’s very slow 4G service which keeps us just connected enough to the world, and no more.

We’re here to make pictures, talk photography as much as we can, and have a bit of whiskey while we’re at it. Politics keeps coming up, and we indulge it for a bit, and then shove the topic aside in favor of talk of composition, seeing, and being somewhere for a bit without the need to rush.

Hi. I’m Duncan Davidson. I’m a software developer and engineering leader with a career spanning three decades. I created Apache Tomcat and Apache Ant. Recently, I served as Vice President of Developer Productivity and Technical Advisor to the CEO at Shopify. Before that, I was a CTO in Residence at Microsoft for Startups.

I’m also a photographer. Notably, I covered the main stage for TED Conferences from 2009 to 2016. These days, my photography work is strictly for myself and I try to write about it here on this site as much as I do technical topics.