Unlike the great success I had with the frozen waterfall photos from Sunday, some photos I did on Saturday and Monday typify the gamble of working on spec.

On Saturday I went around Kingussie photographing some of the giant icicles that have formed after three weeks of sub-zero temperatures. These two photos show one of the largest icicles, hanging from the guttering of a shop, and the shop owner came to stand next to it for the photo, to give a sense of scale:

Neither photo, nor any of the others from around Kingussie that afternoon, were published in any of the newspapers that I sent them to.

And on Monday afternoon I headed up to Inverness to photograph a curling match that had been organised as a small-scale substitute for the Grand Match outdoor tournament on Lake of Menteith, which was cancelled due to safety concerns. The lighting conditions were bad but I got some decent shots:

Sadly not a single one of them was used in any of the papers!

Ah well. That's the gamble when you work on spec. Sometimes you win big, and sometimes you spend the whole afternoon taking photos that do nothing but take up space on your computer!

…but sometmes the stories come to you.

I was heading out for a walk on Wednesday evening when a fire appliance went past with its lights and siren on, and stopped a few hundred yards away, at a junction where an articulated lorry was parked. So naturally I grabbed my camera bag and went along to see what was happening.

It turned out that the lorry's brakes had frozen on, causing a build-up of heat. Not an amazingly dramatic incident but a pictorial example of another way in which Scotland's freezing weather is affecting people's lives.

And last night while I was shopping in Tesco, a girl slipped on a wet floor and hit her head. What made this potentially newsworthy was that there were loads of trolleys lined-up in the car park with "caution wet floor" signs in each of them, to prevent people from parking near the store — so there weren't enough signs left to adequately mark the areas of wet floor in the store.

I talked to the girl and her mother immediately, and did a picture of them outside the store when they'd finished their shopping, with all the mis-used caution signs in the background. I think the story is in tomorrow's Press & Journal.

Last week I had my first story in the Strathspey & Badenoch Herald, about the dangerous access ramp at a Co-op store, and this week I had my first front page story, about a shocking incident in which a pedestrian was hit by a snow plough — because the driver didn't want to stop in case he lost traction! Yes, it has been said before, but truth is often stranger than fiction.

Click here to read the story

It can be interesting to see how stories are edited, shortened and improved as they progress through the editorial process.

For example, here is my original version of this story. Now, the paper saying that it happened on New Year's Day instead of New Year's Eve was my fault, as I rewrote the first paragraph at the last minute and put the wrong day. But apart from that, you may be interested to see how the editor changed the opening paragraphs, and tightened-up the closing section.

Paying attention to all of these little details can stack up to help you improve the quality of your writing, and the likelihood of your story getting published.