Modern digital cameras would appear to do it all: red-eye reduction, face recognition, image stabilisation, powerful multi-segment automatic exposure — the list goes on. When all’s said and done though, photography comes down to two fundamental decisions: where to point the camera, and when to release the shutter. I’m not aware of any consumer camera that can assess a scene’s composition in real-time, and provide feedback to the photographer. That’s where much of the art of photography comes in, and it’s hard to see how this could ever be effectively managed by a machine.

That second decision — when to release the shutter — is often not millisecond-critical in landscape photography. That’s not that say that timing isn’t important for landscapes. Natural light can, and does, change dramatically over the course of just a few seconds, but the sub-second responses demanded of, say, a sports photographer, are rare.

That said, every now and then a photographic opportunity may present itself that would have been almost impossible to plan for. Such was the case as I was trudging through deep fresh snow, heading up the valley between Sgurr Thuilm and Streap, a little west of Fort William in the Scottish Highlands.

I was attracted by the steep northwest face of Streap, which was being raked by the wind and sporting interesting whirls of spindrift. A waxing gibbous moon made for a focal point in an otherwise uninteresting sky. As I was about to release the shutter, a jet hove into view, probably US-bound, and on a path seemingly just below the moon. Arguably, the image is stronger without the intrusion of the plane, but it undoubtedly added a frisson of excitement to the moments leading up to releasing the shutter.

Moonrise, Glen Finnan, Northwest Highlands, Scotland

You can find this image, among others, in the Scotland Gallery on “A Wild Vista”.