You film in the dark by accepting that the only light in the frame is the light your subject is carrying, and by building the day around the moment it runs out. On the winter solstice in 2025 we climbed Ben Hope by head torch and finished a round of golf at Durness in the blue dark.
What actually goes wrong
The equipment is the least of it. We set off at six in the morning with two and a half hours of climbing before any light would appear, and for all of that the world was a pool of torchlight about five metres across. You cannot see the ground you are about to film on. You cannot check a frame against anything, because there is nothing behind the subject to check it against.
Near the summit the temperature dropped below freezing and the ground turned icy. The wind was not gusting, it was a continual forty to fifty miles an hour off a cliff face to our left. Hands stop working long before the camera does. Lenses fog. There were two of us on Ben Hope and nobody else, so if a camera had failed there was no second operator standing by and no reason to think we would ever be back.
Why a head torch changes the shot
A torch is worn, which means the light goes wherever the person wearing it looks. You are not lighting a scene. You are following somebody’s attention, and the beam tells you what they are attending to before they say a word.
That is a gift and a trap. It hands you the most honest lighting there is, and it removes any option to fix the frame afterwards. Point the camera at the wrong thing and the right thing is not underexposed, it is simply absent. The clearest example we have is a putt taken by head torch on the ninth green at Durness, and what happens to the ball the moment the player lifts his head. We took that frame apart in Durness, and what a tight shot would have missed.
Can you plan a day with no light in it?
Only by letting the clock write the structure. We picked 21 December deliberately, because the far north of Scotland gives you a few usable hours and no more, and we committed to running the day once. No staging on the hill. No going back to Durness for a better sky. If the cloud never lifted, the cloud was the film.
We had not planned this one at all. We were in the north west for a different film, plans changed, the equipment was already loaded, and rather than stand the day down we turned it on ourselves. The edit follows the order the day actually happened in, because there was never any other order available. It runs under eleven minutes as Chasing Light.
What would we do differently?
Carry less. The last line spoken in the film is that next time there would be less camera equipment, and after a night climb in ice and wind that is not a joke about weight. Every extra body on a two person shoot in the dark is another thing to find by torchlight, another thing to change with numb hands, another decision taken at the exact moment you should be watching.
Darkness strips a sport down to one thing, which is where the person is looking. That happens to be the thing this company is named after, and the research behind it is set out on The Quiet Eye. A mountain at six in the morning makes the argument for you. There is nothing else in the frame to look at.