Sunset, Rhue by Arisaig

I wouldn’t be the only person to favour Scotland’s west coast – its beautiful landscape, impressive geology.

After a day exploring outside and around Mallaig, I stopped at Arisaig to catch the sunset and was not disappointed.

First, a couple of obvious scenes at the end of the road, the low warm light skimming lines of rock

I flew the drone a little way out over Loch nan Ceall for a more elevated perspective. The light was turning red, catching the rugged hills nearby

The view out west directly toward the setting sun was particularly impressive

The 360º panorama is one of my favourite art-forms: for best results, the optimum workflow is:

  • choose a location directly above some non-uniform structured area – not just directly above the sea but over a reef, so the panorama can stitch properly
  • think about the contrast-ratio from brightest to darkest areas of the scene; if the sun is visible, use a narrow aperture (f/10 or thereabouts) so the diffraction-spikes cling closer to the sun; choose an exposure such that the brightest part of the scene is just beginning to overexpose – typically you can recover 2/3EV highlights in post but the shadows get noisy fast and with a direct into-the-sun shot the shadow-side can easily require a 3EV shadow-lift
  • shoot RAW DNGs and ignore the JPEG
  • use RawTherapee to convert the JPEGs – apply lens distortion correction and a small amount of tonemapping, maybe even the dynamic-range-reduction module
  • use Hugin to stitch the panorama: optimize for position, barrel distortion and view but not translation; use equirectangular projection and auto-straighten; ensure the FoV is 360×180º (it may be out by 1, ie 179º); use blended+fused output for noise-reduction, unless it introduces stitching edge artifacts
  • finish, including toning and noise-reduction/sharpening, in darktable.

[sphere url=”http://soc.sty.nu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PANO0001-PANO0026-v2_blended_fused-0-0017-scaled.jpg” title=”Arisaig sunset over Loch nan Ceall”]

Finally, just as I started the return drive, the sky provided yet more drama to see me on my way:

A selection of the above photos are available on my gallery website as prints, cards, masks and other products: Arisaig on ShinyPhoto.

Around St Fillan’s

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve driven through St Fillan’s over the years, always en route to somewhere else the other end of the A85, barely stopping a handful of times to take the obvious photo the length of Loch Earn. Even the couple of craggy rocky outcrops on the way into the village were much admired from the road but I think I stopped once to shoot them for their own sake.

So last Sunday afternoon I rectified matters, slowed down and parked in the usual layby and walked back through the village, over the road, around the golf course and up St Fillan’s Chair, admiring the mountains behind a little closer.

A day of symmetry – on the way out I noticed a view up the path to a small Church of Scotland kirk was particularly appealing; on return, the view along the loch was pure calm still reflection in the water.

 

Approach to Dundurn Parish Church

Prints and things are available from my main ShinyPhoto website: Loch Earn.

Caithness Holiday Day 4: Duncansby Head and Stacks

Ignoring the previous post about offensive misuse of woodland, my fourth day of the holiday started out pretty well, with a trip to John o’Groats – awful tourist-trap of a place but at least they’ve renovated the hotel since I was last there and the ice-cream (2 scoops) was excellent. 

The sea stacks themselves are pretty awesome to behold, middle red sandstone showing evidence of having formerly been attached to the land but eroded away by the sea.

We proceeded to Duncansby Head – ignoring the lighthouse, walking down the coastline to the sea stacks. On the way, a large group – maybe 60 folks – were crowding some of the cliff-tops looking south, watching a small pod of Orcas swimming off distant headlands. Unfortunately the one kind of lens I didn’t have with me then was a long zoom – but the shouts of joy when one of the orcas blew or jumped were incredible.

On the way back, a disturbance in the water just away from the cliffs caught my eye: a peculiar kind of standing wave with the shape staying more or less constant. Obviously a conflict of two tides, one running along the north coast between the mainland and Orkney, the other flowing up the North Sea; on checking wikipedia later, that corner of the Pentland Firth is known for two tidal races, the “Duncansby Race” and the “Boars of Duncansby”. 

Wave interference – a standing wave pattern at the eastern end of the Pentland Firth – a tidal race as the east/west and north/south currents conflict around Duncansby Head. I’m not sure if this is the Duncansby Race or even the Boars of Duncansby, but it caught my eye as I was heading back up the coast.

Caithness Holiday Day 2: Whaligoe Steps and Camster Cairns

Many moons ago… the parents and I were on holiday around Caithness and having trouble finding the way to Whaligoe Steps. As his tractor turned by the end of the field, we stopped a farmer to ask directions. To southern ears, the instructions sounded memorably like “turn right at the fussky-osk”. With a little thought we established the meaning… and twenty-two years later I still remember the turn of phrase and was pleased to identify the first phone-box in this Spring’s return visit.

Whaligoe Steps themselves are 365 steps down the side of a steep cliff to a former port for offloading herring boats; women would gut the fish and carry it up in barrels.

The place itself is quite an impressive geo with a fault nearby in the rock – strata lines pushed up by thrust – and pleasant views out to sea.

Further down the road are Camster Cairns – quite impressively large piles of rocks with interior chambers, perhaps the oldest buildings in Scotland at 5000yr old.

It had been another ludicrously hot day, with temperatures up over 25-28ºC, so we finished the day’s explorations on the north coast at the Slates of Fulligoe in East Mey, where the setting sun was partially obscured by a thick sea haar – very pleasantly cool.

 

This was the second evening I’d set out to make a timelapse of the sunset into dusk. At least this time I was prepared for haar coming in off the sea (chose a safer less-cliff-top location near the path back, for starters). It did not disappoint: over the course of an hour the sun moved, the waves came and went, and a huge bank of fog moved in transforming the scene from brilliant sunset reflecting on the water, to complete white-out. All the possible moods of the landscape in barely an hour – quite awesome.
This photo is a temporal flattening of a timelapse sequence – using the intervalometer to shoot HDR brackets 3*±1EV at regular intervals which can be made either into a timelapse video or averaged-out into a still, like this. (The sun itself is blended from fewer images to avoid motion blur.)

Autumn Holiday Day 1: The Nice Place

There’s no better place to start a holiday than the Nice Place(TM), even if it does involve getting up and on the road at 4am for a 165-mile drive up north.

The sun rose over Loch Beinn a Mheadhoin as I approached:

The Caledonian Forest at Glen Affric was its usual beautiful self – still not cold enough for morning mist in the trees, but brilliant morning sunlight and heavy rain caused a wonderful vibrant double rainbow while I was down by the river.

For a change, I took a long walk a couple of miles along the side of Loch Beinn a Mheadhoin, to be rewarded with a gorgeous view of Sgurr na Lapaich covered in pure white snow, across the water.

Other views from the morning:

The First Morning of Winter

I spent the morning of Dec 22 – the first day of winter – up Kinnoull Hill. There was beautiful mist rising from the River Tay as it meanders through the Carse of Gowrie.

I experimented with a few new compositions too: semi-abstract views of the hills of north Fife, the motorway/A90 junction and the river north of Perth as well.

My favourite two images were the fairly conventional view from above the cliffs, looking past the folly along the Carse of Gowrie. It’s not that comfortable a location to shoot – to get a clear view of the tower, one has to stand in a gorse bush…

Photo-Walk 2017

For several years, on and off, I’ve attended an annual Photo-Walk based in Inverary, Argyll. This year was no exception – always good to catch up with friends I’ve met on the walk previously.

As always, Argyll is a favoured place and Autumn a favoured season; the combination of light and landscape makes for enjoyable drives.

An auspicious viewpoint – right next to the public toilets on Inverary front – but it makes for a cracking view up the loch toward a spot of sunlight illuminating the hills around Ardkinglas.

This time the organizer, Richard, had brought a couple of props – most notably a bottle of Isle of Jura Superstition and I had one or two ideas in mind “just in case” we ended up at a particular favourite waterfall.

 

We made our way down the slippery embankment to the burn, where I set up tripod amongst the boulders to maximize the lead-in lines of water flowing around the rocks up to the waterfall – tripod placement was fairly tricky with a wide-angle (24mm) lens and the slippery lumpy terrain to negotiate – and then as the camera was busy taking 20s exposures (4x with pixel-shift) I trotted back and forth through the water firing a flash-gun down onto the bottle of whisky and surrounding rocks (manual triggering at 1/8 power with the diffuser out and reflector down to stop the light itself registering in the scene).

Product Placement
I quite like Isle of Jura whisky… not necessarily on the rocks though.

I had originally experimented focussing in on the bottle itself and using a wide aperture to restrict depth of field, but that did not fall naturally through the scene – the waterfall was still sharp behind – so I stopped-down to make everything in focus and relied on post-processing tricks in Affinity Photo to draw the eye onto the bottle differently instead – some Orton effect and various soft-light Gaussian blurs, masks and elliptical gradient fills to boost the saturation, make it all glow and still leave the bottle sharp and bright. The final toning came from Snapseed of all things.

I’ve done a little product-photography before but never tried blending [bad pun intended] it with landscape work, let alone pairing it with light-painting, but I think it worked – certainly compared to the straight shot, the bottle with its amber glow just makes it.

Just One Photo

Black Spout Waterfall, Pitlochry

Some days you only need to come away with one landscape image to justify an excursion.

On Saturday I set sail with Doglet and a friend and strolled through Black Spout Woods around Pitlochry, up to the viewpoint across the gorge where you can see the full height of the waterfall, and then round to the more accessible bit near the top of the falls, which still takes a fair amount of scrambling around on the river bank to get down to.

 

A nice stroll through the woods, a view across the gorge to the full height of the waterfall, some scrambling around on the banks to get down to this level (a small fraction of the total height down from the top) with friend and dog… A good way to spend an afternoon

Technicalities:

There are three conscious aspects to this shot:

Composition

I wanted to make the most of the 15-30mm lens, so with a bit of wiggling around at the scene I found a spot right in front of the cascades that would showcase the 16mm ultra-wide field of view with a strong foreground. Nothing clipped; there’s negligible cropping except for lens-correction. There’s something in each pair of corners: the strong diagonal line of the dead tree-trunk in the foreground is echoed by the three distant trees in the far top-left; the negative space of the burnt-out sky has an echo in the expanse of run-off water in the bottom; treated as three stripes, there’s a balance between the height of the frame given to the run-off, to the bright white cascades, and to the woods+sky at the top.

Sensor controls

I made 10 source images on the Pentax K-1, varying the exposure as follows:

f/13.0 1/50s; f/14.0 1/8s;
f/16.0 0.4s; f/16.0 0.5s
f/16.0 0.5s; f/16.0 0.8s
f/16.0 1/4s; f/16.0 1/8s
f/16.0 1/8s; f/18.0 1/6s

This set of exposures spans a large contrast range from bright grey sky down to dark shadows in the rocks; it varies the shutter speed so at least a few will make the water look like brushed cotton; it varies the aperture partly to cater for the range of shutter speeds, and partly so as much of the shot as possible has a frame with maximum detail before diffraction. Enough data that enfuse could find a good midtone maximizing local entropy (detail) at every pixel.

Each of the above had pixel-shift enabled for greater resolution, totalling 40 frames of 36MPel resolution. The shutter was open for a combined total of 12s.

Post-processing

I used my open-source Pentax K-1 pixel-shift workflow on each of the 10 images above, and then reused it again to blend all 10 together into a combined HDR average. Opening this in darktable, I proceeded to correct lens-distortion, finalize the crop (16:10 aspect-ratio, one of my favourites for landscape), set detail modules (no need for noise-reduction! some balancing of detail, local detail, equalizer modules though) and exposure, toning (including tonemapping and low-pass filter) and colour (Velvia). There are not many localized modifications, but there are significant grad-ND filters both down through the trees and, opposing that diagonally, up from the bottom of the frame, along with two instances of the vignetting filter (one significant, one just clipping the corners); there is also extra local contrasted masked into an area around the dead tree trunk. Finally I opened the image in The Gimp and ran the G’Mic filter suite including colour-grading twice (once conventionally, once with extra highlight/shadow duotone effects, blended together – this has the side-effect of changing the tonality in the green leaves to make it look brighter/sunnier than it actually was). A tweak to the curves to lift the overall gamma and then I overlaid my favourite texture image, a photo of a sheet of Hahnemuehle Photo-Rag paper, in soft-light mode to soften the contrast and add a small amount of texture into otherwise barren areas.

Why this Workflow?

Working this way hits a sweet-spot in terms of convenience and image-quality.

I did not fall in the river. That’s a good start.

With such a wide field of view, every centimeter counts when choosing the location. With the 15-30mm lens I was able to experiment, iteratively varying location and focal length, until an optimum position was found, all the while seeing exactly what the final composition would be in live-view.

Pixel-shift – moving the sensor around in a 1px square pattern – works as a great way to increase the resolution.
The alternative would be to shoot a panorama, but that would still require HDR blending of frames as well as risking motion-artifacts in the trees; with just HDR on its own, the ghosting of the leaves from averaging multiple frames is a more pleasant indication of movement rather than errors in stitching. Additionally, shooting a panorama would require just as much care over camera position but would not allow a preview of the composition.
As a hybrid option, with cameras that lack pixel-shift or equivalent technology, one could compose approximately and then vary the tripod position subtly to emulate hand-held camera-shake; this is almost identical to pixel-shift in terms of super-resolution, but varying the camera position risks introducing artifacts from lens-distortion and parallax between foreground and distant parts of the scene, that pixel-shift avoids.

Additionally, shooting every frame 4x over, automatically, increases the overall exposure time into multiple seconds, even in daylight, which avoids the need for Big Stopper-type filters (especially handy on a lens that would require a special holder for such).

Portknockie

Continuing the mega road-trip drive from a day in April: having taken in Dunnottar castle I proceeded up to Portknockie on the north Moray coast. A well-known location with lots of scope to explore, sitting on a transition between red sandstone conglomerate and quartzite underlying rock.

 

Bow-Fiddle rock itself is situated just beyond the mouth of a cove with interesting caves to the north side:

The approach to Bow-Fiddle rock at Portknockie.
We’re heading down to that strip of a pebble beach…

There’s a classic composition to be had by heading down to the boulders just beyond the pebble beach, plonking one’s tripod on the rock and adding enough ND filters to make a long exposure. With the right light and the wind kicking-up choppy waves, it can make for pleasantly dramatic arty photos. And despite being a sunny day, having to lie down on the hard rock to keep my shadow out of the shot, it definitely didn’t disappoint…

Technical details:

Pentax K-1; Samyang 24mm f/1.4 lens at f/11; Nisi ND1000 (equivalent to a Big Stopper) and circular polariser filters; ISO 100; 30s exposure using pixel-shift for a total of 2 minutes’ exposure at high resolution.

Around Glen Affric: water

I had a short holiday at the start of last November, a few days spent in Glen Affric. There are several aspects why it’s my favourite part of the planet, but for the purposes of this post, we consider the role of water in shaping a landscape, eroding its way through rocks to form river, gorges and waterfalls.

First, the impressive 150-foot drop of Plodda Falls from the top:

Second, some of the cascades in the River Affric, part of the way around the River Walk, rich autumn colours glowing in the morning sunlight:

And finally, a couple of 360-degree panoramas, partly to offer a behind-the-scenes view – they take a little while to download once clicked:

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Along Loch Tay

It’s a classic viewpoint – at the head of Loch Tay standing on the shores at Kenmore, looking down the length of the loch past the Crannog and island to mountains in the distance. Even without dramatic contrasty sunlight, it didn’t disappoint.

For the record, these were both 8-second exposures, around f/4.5 and ISO 400 using a Nisi circular polariser filter to balance the light between sky and reflection. Both images are a pair stacked for noise-reduction.

The Falls of Acharn

Today’s random philosophical question: is landscape photography actually deterministic?

Research maps. Check weather forecast. Think about time and location and the maximization of opportunity. Take camera and go. Point it at things. Come back, process to some degree of satisfaction.

The process is certainly repeatable and it takes an incredible amount of luck to sway the results.

A couple of weeks ago, having passed by the village a couple of times this year on other travels, I set out for Acharn on the south side of Loch Tay with intention of using camera and tripod. They were duly deployed. And here are the results…

I was particularly pleased with the last pair, longish-distance zooms across the gorge to the water cascading over some very silvery-grey rock with two tree branches aligned like chopsticks beside the splash-down.

Finally, just for a sense of context, a making-of snap from the phone – this is how the last two were made:

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Loch Lomond: At Inversnaid

There’s a couple of picturesque views to be had just below the hotel at Inversnaid harbour – the waterfall cascading down amongst the rocks one way, and opposite, a line of boulders leading toward the Arrochar Alps across Loch Lomond. Can’t complain.

I don’t often use the Pattanaik algorithm in LuminanceHDR, especially for colour results, but it seemed to work really well with the waterfall, nicely balancing low-key levels and saturation.

Loch Chon Reflections

I’ve had it in mind to visit Loch Chon in the Trossachs for a little while now, to see if I could find similar views to other photos of the area.

It didn’t disappoint – there were some wonderful reflections of colourful trees to be enjoying.

Around Ardkinglas

Driving home form the Argyll Photo-Walk, along the shores of Loch Fyne, I couldn’t help but stop to appreciate the golden evening light on the mountains surrounding Glenkinglas.

The Olympus Pen-F has a hi-res mode, which is a bit of a mixed blessing for use in the landscape. On the one hand, it constructs an 80-megapixel image never requiring more than 20 megapixels resolution from the lens. However, it does it by interleaving with sub-pixel super-resolution, for a total of 8 source frames per image, which results in dithering patterns around moving subjects. In the case of water, this can be mitigated by using a long exposure; in the case of clouds, much longer. For the photo showing Ardkinglas house across the water, I had an ND8 filter to make it a 1-second exposure. Unfortunately this introduced some serious colour-casts – so new filters have been ordered!