“Can you find us a wet cow? Oh, and we need it in a couple of hours…”
Pretty standard newspaper request, really! Rain can be surprisingly tricky to capture – conveying just how miserable it feels in a single frame isn’t as easy as you might think. Enter this majestic Highland cow, looking wonderfully driech (Scottish for dreary) in a soaking paddock somewhere off the A9 in Highland Perthshire. I remember thinking it was a little touristy for the brief, but a picture is better than no picture!
It had been raining for weeks, with no sign of stopping. The slightly off-centre framing? That was thanks to a five-bar gate I couldn’t move her away from – but I ended up liking it. Sometimes putting the subject dead centre isn’t as interesting. A shallow depth of field combined with a high shutter speed to catch droplets helped tell the story of just how wet it was. I’m a big fan of this image. It’s proof that Highland cows remain utterly majestic, even in the pouring rain!
