Hogmanay 2016/2017

Happy new year! I saw the year in from Blackford Hill looking at the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle.

Watching folks arrive was almost like a scene from Lord of the Rings – this line of torch lights processing along the hillside track, reminiscent of the last march of the Elves.

Hunting Kelpies

Situated right beside the M9, the Kelpies are a bit of a tourist trap, but it had to be done…

Rather stupidly, I set out with intentions of making long exposure photos of the kelpies – and then found after a few miles down the road that I’d left all my filters in the other camera bag. So, f/22 was deployed, along with a lot of stacking for synthetic long exposures. In one case it took over 60 images median-blended to eliminate the humans milling around. Still, it’s probably better that way – I’m always happier when image data arises from photons than algorithms or localized manipulation.

And some of my favourite shots are from the boardwalk through the marshes on the way back to the carpark.

Foggy Nights

Continuing the theme of failed attempts to do astrophotography, I spent an evening out at Newport-on-Tay in Fife. There’s a neat little road leading down to a carpark with a tiny beach and rocky outcrop… with the interplay of artificial lights and huge blanket of fog, it needed photographing 🙂

Scottish Air Show, Ayr

Today was the airshow in Ayr, marking the last Scottish flight of the Avro Vulcan XH558.

Last weekend I saw inside its sister plane, down in Carlisle. This week, I enjoyed watching it fly – and what a beautiful bird it was. So elegant – when cruising around slowly it was as though she was toying with the audience. And when they opened the throttle to accelerate or head upwards…. wow. What an engine roar.

The Red Arrows were also there – an impressive display of several fly-pasts ludicrously close and at high speed.

I’ve also made a little video of the Vulcan:

In the Woods

It’s been a while since I made photos of closeups in the woods – and for the most part, last time around I avoided contrasty light for the purpose too. Last night, I took a single prime lens (my favourite Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 of old) and one of my favoured strolls over Craigie Hill around the golf course, seeing what there was to be seen under the trees…

Noctilucent Clouds, Perth, 20150623

A classic location for long-exposure night-time photography: standing on the bridge over the M90 at Rhynd, with the road snaking away into the distance… and a clear display of noctilucent clouds above Kinnoull Hill.

From wikipedia:

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the “ragged edge” of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. Noctilucent roughly means night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can be observed only when the Sun is below the horizon.

They are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth’s shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885.

Perth close-ups: floral colour

The last in a short series of photos from a stroll around Perth.

These are all processed slightly differently from my usual workflow – instead of darktable, I used RawTherapee with a film emulation (allegedly Fuji Provia). As with the others in this series, all images were made on a Helios 58mm f/2 prime lens, pretty wide open.

Around a Graveyard

A small set of photos made in Kinnoull Graveyard, Perth.

A friend from the photo-society had posted a handful of photos of this graveyard on facebook a few days previously, so I had a few ideas for scenes to shoot when we went there last November.

In particular, the obvious manipulated moody photo is an example of bokeh-panorama aka Brenzer technique – using a comparatively long focal length lens at wide aperture to narrow the depth of field and stitching a panorama to restore the field of view angle. In this case, it was a Zeiss 50mm f/2.8 lens, but the resultant shot would require a lens of 13mm f/0.85 to achieve in a single exposure.