There would be no photography of Edinburgh Castle that day. Light, or more precisely the lack of it, is one of the constant headaches for Scotland’s landscape photographers. “It was a beautiful day in Edinburgh just yesterday,” he said wistfully. “Clear blue skies, just wonderful. But you know the old Calvinist admonition: when you’ve enjoyed a real cracker of a day, the sun shining, the sky all blue, people know it won’t last and warn, ‘we’ll pay for this’. We pay, all right ” he said with a wan smile, “we pay big time.” Over the past 30 odd years Lindsay Robertson has learned to live with the vagaries of Scotland’s weather. He’s become accustomed to waiting, waiting, waiting for precisely the right moment to trip his shutter. When that moment arrives, something quite extraordinary usually happens. In that instant the image he’s previsualised and very carefully composed through his lens takes on a life of its own and through a process of intensification and purification, begins a journey that will eventually see it transformed into subtle shades of stark black and white. In the modern era, a time when most photographers have become hooked on the technical wizardry of instantaneous digital imagery, traditional black and white prints have a unique clarity and depth, an almost old-fashioned aura. It’s a craft most professional photographers turned their backs on long ago, and yet Lindsay says he can’t imagine working in any other medium. “When I left school,” he said, “I went straight into commercial photography and in time I succeeded at producing the kind of slick colour images that advertising art directors wanted.

I had established my own studio. I was doing well and yet I wanted to do something a bit more meaningful with my photographic skills. I’ve always been deeply in love with the wild beauty of the Scottish landscape, so one day I decided to follow my heart, head up north to the Highlands and try landscape photography. I chose the black and white medium because I felt that would best capture the subtleties of light and shade that are so much a part of the mood of the hills and glens.” Although he says his aim was simply to capture “a moment in time”, he has in fact succeeded in making images characterised by a quality of utter timelessness. His images are not so much photographs as works of art. Indeed, they are the kind of pictures that the great Ansel Adams himself would have been proud to have made. “It’s such a great privilege to be part of the landscape,” he said, “to see things that perhaps others cannot see and to share those things with people who in all probability will never get a chance to see them. That’s what I mean by capturing a moment in time. In the Highlands in particular, if you have any sensitivity at all, you quickly become aware of your own insignificance. You’re surrounded by rocks as old as the earth itself and there’s a palpable sense of the infinite. That can be quite daunting at times.” Lindsay says he often spends hours at a location “just standing, looking and thinking about his composition.” “People see me out there in the middle of nowhere,” he said, “and they think I’m some kind of nutter. They ask themselves, ‘what on earth is that guy doing out there in the middle of that bog?’ The answer is that I’m drinking it all in. I’m looking at the light, I’m feeling the wind, I’m assessing all the elements that will eventually inform the image.

If the conditions are not precisely as I want to them to be, I’ll pack up and go home. It may be a week, two weeks or even a month before I come back and try again. Patience: that’s the key; the one element that’s essential for good photography.” Lindsay was well into his twenties before he discovered the work of Ansel Adams, the most revered landscape photographer in the world. “I saw a documentary film on Adams,” he said, “and I thought, ‘wow, that’s what I’m trying to do!’ His landscapes, the tonal quality of his pictures, really were sublime. That was a pivotal moment for me. I went out and bought books on Adams work. He became the inspiration I’d been looking for. I followed the trail he blazed all those years ago in California, in Yosemite and the Sierra Mountains. Ansel Adams has been a great source of enlightenment for me. In a sense I’ve probably unwittingly tried to carry on where he left off, but obviously in my own style.” One measure of his success is that Lindsay Robertson’s work is probably better known and more widely appreciated in the United States than it is in his native Scotland.

He was the first photographer to be offered a residency at the Hermitage Artists’ Retreat in Englewood, Florida. That residency led to Lindsay’s work being recognised by the Eastman House, the world’s pre-eminent museum of photography. He was given the opportunity to be the only photographer ever to exhibit alongside Eastman’s own Ansel Adams Collection and entrusted to bring the exhibition to Scotland from America. It was to be one of the most significant exhibitions in the UK and attracted visitors from throughout Europe. “The significance of that achievement has taken a while to sink in,” he said. “The recognition has certainly stimulated my creativity and driven me on to capture more elusive moments in time.” Although Lindsay is unfortunately right about the paucity of recognition at home, his work is of such outstanding merit that it has a life far beyond Scotland. He sells his work through exhibitions and online and, thanks to the internet, there’s no shortage of people out there who appreciate his talent and are only too willing to pay for the privilege of hanging his work on their walls. I have no doubt that the shade of Ansel Adams would not only approve, but applaud.