Edinburgh said October. I said obviously.

I did not want Edinburgh in October. I said I wanted somewhere warmer, somewhere south. He said Edinburgh in October and then stopped talking, which is how he indicates he considers the matter closed.

He was right and I am writing it down once so it is recorded.

What actually happened

We landed into grey. The kind of grey that isn’t disappointing, it’s just the right colour for the place. The Royal Mile at 7am with almost nobody on it. Fog coming off the Castle Rock in a way that made it look painted. I got twelve frames before 9am that I would not have gotten anywhere else.

You kept saying warm. Warm light, warm city, warm feet. What you wanted was interesting. Edinburgh in October is interesting. Warm is just a preference.

The closes are the thing nobody tells you about. The narrow alleys running off the High Street that tourists walk past because they don’t look like anything. At blue hour they look like exactly what they are: four hundred years of stone with the light doing something to it that takes some explaining.

The argument we had

He wanted me to shoot the castle from Calton Hill at dusk. I said it was the obvious shot, everyone shoots it, I wasn’t interested.

He said I was wrong and gave me a fifteen-minute case for why the dusk angle from Calton Hill in October with low cloud is not the same as every other shot of the castle, and that the people who all shoot the same thing are shooting it wrong, not from the right spot, not in the right light.

I went. He was right again. I am not writing that down a second time.

What I’d do differently

Earlier. 6am not 7am. The fog was best before I was there.

His verdict going in: October, castle, closes, blue hour, commit fully. Final verdict: exactly what he said it would be.