Wild places are my cathedrals. They inspire awe, wonder and joy. They reinforce my own delicious insignificance and delight me in the brief opportunity life gives us to experience them. They are the perfect “cleanse” or “detox” to the stresses and BS of a world that seems not to see that continual economic growth on a finite planet is illogical.

The howling winds blow away the grime of civilisation that coats your skin, the driving rain blasts it from the pores and crevices it has imbedded in and the flung hail chisels off any remaining concretions. You emerge fresh and scrubbed, laughing like a baby freshly bathed.

Campbell Island is one of my favourite wild places. I have been lucky to spend 4 days of my life experiencing what it offers and every day is unique and wild in it’s own way. Wild weather is a given in the Furious Fifties. We have, in one day, gone from shrieking wind so strong that standing at the top of the Col Lyall boardwalk was impossible, stinging rain that turned to hail and then a complete and eery calm as snow began to fall on the tops and every sea-lion breaking the mirror surface of Perseverance Harbour, sounding as if it was drawing breath beside you.

The wildlife reinforces the feeling of wildness. Creatures you cannot see without venturing here are so ideally suited to this wild place, having evolved into it. A giant incubating Southern Royal Albatross amongst alien looking flowering megaherbs will lazily open an eye as you pass. Unperturbed, it ignores you, knowing you are unsuited to this place. They have seen men arrive with sheep. They didn’t last long. The damage caused had an impact but they have redeemed themselves and corrected it allowing nature the opportunity to erase their insult.

Photographically the challenge is to try and capture and convey this feeling of wildness in a single still image. I struggle with this. I am so enthralled by the birds that my main focus is try and get engaging images of them, especially in flight. That conveys little if anything about the wildness of the place which needs a wider view to show more context. Gear to show these two views can be mutually exclusive and on the heaving deck of a ship one camera and lens is enough to manage without having another set-up swinging around. My current usual set-up for birds in flight is the Nikon D850 and Nikon 500mm f5.6PF lens which doesn’t comfortably live in a paragraph with the concept “wider view”.

Leaving Perseverance Harbour a little early to try and intersect with a wind window at the Auckland Islands we had some lovely light which gave some great images of albatross, some of which I shared last week. The large wind driven swells destroying themselves against the basalt cliffs in the distance caught my eye and my long lens framed the scene well given the distance. I could imagine the cliffs shuddering as the waves struck just as I could feel the shuddering deck beneath my feet. It was a matter of waiting for an albatross to complete the scene. Fortunately there were regular contenders and I managed a number of frames to select one with a nicely positioned bird and interesting wave action.

This was one of the images I could not pass by without processing while culling my files. For me it captures a bit of what I love about wild places. The strength and power of nature creating a scene in which the duration of a human life would be measured in panicked minutes, if not seconds, as the reflected wave is about to augment its successor. Within it, a wild animal excels, masterfully riding the wind that feeds the swells, expending no more energy than when at rest on a nest.