Another Friday evening, another great way to end the week with a camera in hand. As I finished up work, wondering whether to mow the lawn, I looked out the window and saw awesome clouds zipping past.
Grab camera, grab Dog, go walkies and shoot whatever happens. There was rain. There was sun.
And after the rain, the sun illuminating the gently undulating crop fields contrasted amazingly with the remaining ominous clouds beyond.
Simple undulating rural countryside – with dramatic clouds above.
For years now, my photo-processing workflow has been 100% open-source. However, in the interests of greater portability – hack on photos whilst on the go – and partly gratuitously for the sake of variety, I recently acquired an iPad Pro 10.5″ and installed the Affinity Photo app.
As a user experience goes, it’s really quite pleasant. The best way to synchronise files around the LAN seems to be Seafile, which is open-source and available for Linux, iOS and android. My Linux-based workflow regularly produces 64-megapixel images, working on multiple intermediate TIFF files, 16-bit ProPhotoRGB-linear; somewhat surprisingly, seafile, the iPad and Affinity Photo seem able to handle files around 450MiB in size. There are a few small gotchas – I had to import a few ICC colour profiles by hand and as yet, there doesn’t seem to be a way to customise export options (so you have to select JPEG 99% sRGB lanczos yourself afresh every time); I’m sure these things will come in time however.
So here’s a shot from last Sunday afternoon. As I was heading out of Muthill I saw this characterful old tree in a field; on the return journey a few hours later, not only was it still there but the clouds were darker in the background and the golden sunlight caught the bare branches. A very quick bit of parking and even quicker sprint back to the optimum viewpoint and it looked stunning. So I processed it a little further, realising an intention for how it should look that was apparent from the start.
Sunlit tree
More experiments with the Olympus 7-14mm lens: a study in trees around Glen Lednock.
Straight and curved, young to characterful and spooky: the many and varied moods of trees. A handful of photos taken on a stroll around Birnam Hill.
A classic Trossachs view – sunlight on snow-capped mountains (Sron Armailte, Ben Vane and part of Ben Ledi), from the Duke’s Pass.
A handful of photos taken after dark from the Queen’s Bridge in town, waiting for the fireworks to happen.
Don’t ask me why Perth council thought to have a winter festival in the middle of November, when it’s not Christmas, it’s not Advent and it’s not even Winter yet… but the fireworks were well pretty!
And why not? No need to multiply words of explanation. Just, roadside geranium.
One of the few New Year resolutions I’ve ever made was this year, and it was to look for photo opportunities characterised as much by areas of dark as by light – a kind of counter to the principle of seeking “good light”, largely because I find the term distasteful, so rather than photography, “writing with light” I hoped to print with dark instead. It’s actually been quite a successful strategy, over that I hope to continue using on occasion, as often as I remember anyway.
After a comment on blipfoto today, I did a bit of research into ferns. Earliest fossils of ferns data back to the Carboniferous period (325Mya), although the more modern species go as far back as the Cretaceous (145Mya). So now we know…