I’m a poor photographer, but Scotland is so photogenic that my pictures come out nice anyway.

We start in smoky Edinburgh with its hills and its alleyways. The city is so teeming with wandering writers you can almost feel the energy trying to come out of a pen. It’s my kind of town.

We board the bus to Loch Ness early in the morning, it’s 5 hours to get there from here, it’s not a place you go incidentally. One must want to go to Loch Ness, and most people are going for one reason: the 2 Million Dollar prize for a picture of Nessie.

Not my party. It’s my parents and I and we wanted to tour the lochs.

The highlands happen right away. One moment you are in the rolling hills of the lowlands with white sandstone yielding to lush green fields and then Buboom. Smashcut. You are suddenly in the highland crags with its deep valleys and mysterious lochs.

What makes a loch? It’s location. Loch must be in Scotland like Champagne is always French. Any old lake can be filled with sparkling white wine or prosecco, but champagne is from the Champagne region of France.

We see many lochs before loch Ness and standing at the edge of them, you understand why people write stories. There weren’t pictures before. How do you capture something like this?

The weather is perfect, it’s misty and rainy one minute and sunny the next. It’s exactly how you might expect Scotland to be. Few places live up to the hype, but the lochs do.

Before you know it, while you’re still marvelling at the dramatic landscape softened by purple heather, you are in Fort Augustus.

One expects more from such a famous place, but honestly, it’s perfect. It’s a small Scottish town with a little section of kitsch for the really ambitious tourists.

It’s 8 hours to this place, few people will be willing to make the trek. And if they are, it’s for her.

For Nessie.

The legend was born in 1933 when two people reported seeing her cross the road and slink into the loch. No pictures.

Since then there have been a few snaps of the monster, all proven hoaxes. Everyone wants to know if she’s there, somewhere, evading capture.

I thought I’d be more hopeful, more curious. I thought I might get carried away and maybe, just maybe, I’d think: What if?

But no, instead I wanted to capture how incredible this place was. Lush steep slopes and dark water. There were ducks on the shore waddling around.

My dad asks me if I want to kayak out into the loch. It starts to rain. I say, a picture is fine.