REINDEER GAMES BUT NO FAKE NEWS – OR FAKE VIEWS

EARLY January 2009, and I had pulled in to a layby above the shores of Loch Merkland in the lonely moorland sweep of Sutherland. I hadn't met another vehicle or person on the single-track A838 since passing through Lairg.

I was getting ready to head up Ben Hee, the shapely Corbett rising to the north-east of my parking spot, and had walked a few metres away from the car to take a picture of the snow-capped mountain landscape before setting off.

That wasn't the only photo I ended up taking, however. As I passed the red triangle sign warning to watch out for animals on the road, I noticed the black deer silhouette had acquired a red nose. Someone had got into the Christmas spirit and turned this little deer into Rudolf.

I took the picture and thought no more about it. Until, that is, I was off the mountain and driving back towards Lairg. Now I saw that every similar sign along this stretch had been decorated with a red dot. The practical joker(s) had obviously gone to a lot of time and effort with their reindeer games.

A few years later, I had a set of five Christmas cards printed to sell along with my Moonwalker calendars to raise funds for Scottish Mountain Rescue. I had four winter landscapes plus the Rudolf one. Guess which one was the best seller?

In fact, this card was still in demand more than three years from its first sale. While the others had long been forgotten, people kept coming back and asking if I had any more Rudolf cards. Some wanted packs of five or ten with this image. I even had a friend receive an email greeting from Arizona innocently containing this depiction.

In his insider tale of the Hollywood film business, Adventures in the Screen Trade, the late, great author and screenwriter William Goldman famously said: Nobody knows anything.

The man who wrote the scripts for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Princess Bride among others was referring to the fact that no-one in authority could ever predict which films would be hits and which would flop. But his theory could apply in any walk of life. I certainly never thought that a joke picture would prove to be ten times more popular than beautiful winter mountain scenery. And in the days before fake news became an everyday provocation, it seemed more than a few people were under the impression that my picture had been manipulated or altered. I would never have even thought of doing that: if the sign hadn't been changed I wouldn't have taken the picture (later enquiries suggested it was a council roads crew who were responsible to add a bit of festive light relief).

So no fake news and no fake views. I don't alter my photos. I do sometimes tinker with light and contrast and adjust some of the shadows to bring up the foreground, but I never touch the colour settings or use photoshop or similar to add anything. I feel that mountain vistas look better and are more honest in their natural state.

A more recent photo also had a few wondering whether there was any manipulation. It was a shot of perfectly concentric ripples in the otherwise still, deep blue water of Loch Lee on a day of superb reflection in Glen Esk.

Some suggested it may have been a fish. The simple explanation was that it was a pebble thrown in the water with the camera at the ready. The picture was the most perfectly captured of many taken by many hands.

And just to prove the point it wasn't a fluke (not the fish kind), I did a re-enactment in August with similar results. No fish, no fakes, just a small stone in the water and a flurry of shots to catch the best image.

Have a great Christmas everyone and all the best for 2026 from myself and Rudolf, the non-faked reindeer.