People ask me sometimes why I stay in Scotland.

Not unkindly but with the implication that someone who has photographed the Middle East and South America and the warm latitudes of North America might find the grey skies and the sideways rain a strange place to call home.

The answer is the light. Not in spite of it. Because of it.

What Scottish light actually does.

In summer, the sun barely sets. At midsummer in Cumbernauld the light is still going at 10pm, a long slow golden hour that stretches across the evening in a way that photographers in more southerly locations can only dream about. The light is low, directional, warm in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. It wraps around subjects rather than hitting them from above. It creates shadows with depth and texture.

In autumn, it starts earlier and ends sooner, but what arrives is even more extraordinary. The sun stays low all day. From the moment it clears the horizon to the moment it drops, it's hitting your subject from an angle that studio photographers spend thousands of pounds trying to replicate artificially.

And in winter, this is the part most people don't understand, the darkness isn't the enemy. The darkness is what makes the brief daylight hours extraordinary. When the sun is setting at 3:30pm on a December afternoon, the light it leaves behind has a quality I've never seen anywhere else. Gold and horizontal and slightly melancholy. The kind of light that makes you stop whatever you're doing and just look.

The Scottish light is low, directional, and extraordinary. It's what keeps me here.

What it means for portraits.

Everything about the way I photograph is shaped by this light. The early morning sessions, out before 7am in summer, catching the first hour before the sun climbs too high. The late afternoon work in autumn when the golden hour arrives at 4pm and lasts barely forty minutes, but in those forty minutes everything is perfect.

I don't use studio lighting. I don't use artificial fill. The Scottish outdoors provides everything I need, if you know when to go out and where to stand.

The horses at the top of my road, backlit on a September morning. Rip running through a field at 5am with the first light catching his coat. A senior grey horse in a paddock on an overcast afternoon, that particular quality of soft Scottish cloud cover that eliminates harsh shadows and wraps everything in the most flattering light imaginable.

Overcast doesn't mean bad light in Scotland. Often it means the best light of all.

Why I stay.

I've worked in brilliant sunshine in South America and the Middle East. I understand what that light does and I can use it. But the work I'm proudest of, the portraits that have meant the most, the sessions that produced the images I'd hang on my own wall, have almost all been made in Scotland.

In low sun. In gentle overcast. In the extraordinary forty minutes before the Scottish winter sunset.

The light here asks more of you as a photographer. You have to know when to go out. You have to be patient. You have to be there, already set up and ready, when the moment arrives.

But when it arrives, and it always does, there is nowhere on earth I'd rather be pointing a camera.

With muddy boots and a full heart,

Jules x