The Best Photos I Never Took

Some of the most striking images I’ve ever seen were never captured. Not on film, not in pixels, they aren't forgotten, buried in a folder on a hard drive.

Around eight years ago, I took a roadtrip around Scotland with my (then) husband, and my two daughters. Those three weeks are still preserved as a set of perfect picture-postcard memories in my mind. A black and white collie leaning lopsidedly against the rusted red body of the Kylerhea ferry. A windy picnic, such a civilised thing, among the wild architecture of the Quiraing. The otherworldly landscapes of Lewis and the silence of the view from Achmore to Loch Langabhat. Machair and mountains in the south of Harris, the soft moonscape of North Uist. The Summer Isles, seen from Ardmair, dusky cut-out silhouettes against an almost violet evening sky. Ben Hope resplendent under a heavy golden sun, flying insects glitter in the air. 

I shot thousands of images and discovered that some landscapes generously and faithfully translate themselves to photographs. All the landscapes I mentioned above fall into that category. The geographic photogenic.

Then there are the places that remain elusive. No matter how hard I tried, those landscapes would not be conveyed, and their scale, textures, colours, atmospheres roamed free, remaining stubbornly uncaptured. 

Some landscapes seem made for photography—offering the obvious: clean, dramatic lines, striking contrasts, perfect light. Others just refuse to translate. No matter how carefully I frame the shot or adjust the exposure, they collapse—colours muddied, texture and scale flattened, something essential lost in the process. Maybe those places are what some would call 'thin places'—landscapes where the boundary between the seen and the unseen feels barely there, where history, presence, and the unnamed press in close. And maybe that’s why they resist being photographed. A camera deals only in the tangible, in light and shadow. Some landscapes will hand themselves over easily. Others insist on being experienced.

As a child, I fully experienced the outside world. Wordlessly, unmediated. Out in the landscape, fully open to all that was around me, I had created memories that I could not only see but feel. As an adult, although photography had offered a way for me to relate to the natural world, it also acted as a buffer, keeping full connection just out of reach. For a while in my life I had needed that. 

Through the lens, I could observe without being fully present—taking something with me, yet giving nothing in return. There was safety in just looking, in simply framing, dealing in the tangible. But in doing so, I often missed the moment itself.

But in the wild, uncapturable places, that shifted. The unseen stepped forward to meet me once again.

On that trip, I accepted that the only way to truly record these landscapes was to experience them. To leave them as they were—untranslated, unfiltered, unphotographed.

Which is why there’s no image here. Some things are meant only for memory, not megapixels.

Adapted from my book Drystone - A Life Rebuilt.

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