New Toy: Meet the Wobbleometer(TM)

I’ve had my eye on the Raspberry Shake seismometer for a couple of years now. Last week, I finally succumbed and bought both a new Raspberry Pi (just a 4B 2GB RAM – cheap yet more than adequate) and a Shake 1-D.

The 1-D is a simple seismometer, responding only in the up/down direction. Other products are available…

Mine arrived as a kit, that even I was able to stick together in under half an hour (thanks to a youtube video showing what most of the screws and things were for).

I installed and levelled it on the downstairs windowsill and plugged it directly into the main ADSL router – when you’re uploading a hundred samples per second, minimizing latency is essential.

Obviously, being based in mainland Scotland, I don’t expect to see that many significant earthquakes. We get a handful of ~magnitude 2.5 around the country every couple of years if we’re lucky. However, recently YouTube has sent me down a rabbit-hole of geological analyses of goings-on in Iceland’s Reykjanes peninsula – the recent sequence of volcanic eruptions alternating with tiny earthquakes as the magma chamber refills.

The very first night, I spotted a magnitude 3.6 quake in Iceland.

Since then, the live data stream has sadly been unavailable for about 5 days, but when it works, the ability to select a quake event and then click on a station and see the station’s raw data really rocks.

There was another magnitude 3.7 earthquake along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge offshore a few miles south-west of Grindavik yesterday. The live-data view is currently working in the mobile app, leading to this analysis – showing the P and S waves propagating from the event.

As monitoring equipment goes, I’m impressed. It’s a wonderful device, very sensitive yet easy to set up and works well. I’ll continue to watch for all quakes nearby and larger ones further afield, if only to be able to say “I saw it” 🙂

Canon vs Fuji: R5 Fail

Last summer, I thought to upgrade from the Fuji X-T4 to the Canon R5.

It didn’t last long.

I spent ages poring over specs sheets online, checking image quality, etc.

As a geek interested in various forms of nature photography (closeup, landscape and astrophotography), for over a decade I’ve made a habit of shooting more than one RAW per output image. Whether the scene in front of me benefits from simply average-stacking, HDR, focus-stacking, pixel-shift or panorama, the more data captured at source, the better an image can be produced and the more future-proof it is against further revisiting, potentially years down the line.

Given that I do a lot of my photography during weekend hikes around the countryside, in any given day I’m likely switching between these drive modes on a regular basis as I react to what’s in front of me.

This is where the Canon R5 falls down. For all that the specs suggest it might be a “perfect” camera for landscape, in reality it’s anything but. I found are three areas of major fault that nobody in any “review” seems to have noticed:

  1. The electronic shutter is arbitrarily limited to no longer than 0.5s shutter speed. This renders it impossible to make a focus-stack where the individual frames are any longer than that – so loch-shore landscapes are out. I contacted Canon Support about this and they said they had no plans to fix it.
  2. The 14-bit read-out is only available in burst modes slower than H+; in that mode it drops to 13-bit, potentially making images noisier.
  3. Switching between focus-stacking and exposure-bracketing is a massive pain in the backside. I had to use the My Menu to bring the two drive-modes closer; even so, switching between the two requires entering whichever is enabled, disabling it, going into the other, enabling it and checking the parameters. You can’t store either of these drive modes as an aspect of a custom user mode. If nothing else, it slows me down in the field.
  4. Canon’s attitude – corporate “Big Photo”(TM) – where the EF lens mount is well established, the RF mount is relatively immature and they used patents to stop third-party manufacturers producing RF lenses to protect their profits. Legally fine, but doesn’t sit well with me as playing nice.

I got a few good photos out of it, but the above loomed too large, destroyed my enthusiasm for it – big regret.

So I sold it after only a few months.

Fuji brought out the X-H2 while I wasn’t looking and it is far better suited to my taste.

  1. I know Fuji users tend to like the rangefinder-style exposure controls, but this has sensible PASM controls that allow storing actually useful combinations of settings in my 7 custom modes. (C1 = walk-around aperture-priority starting from f/5.6, auto ISO, colour, AEB; C2 = serious tripod-using landscape in manual mode, base ISO, 1s for long exposures, b&w preview, pixel-shift, …)
  2. 40MP is a major leap forward in APS-C sensors. It goes without saying that it’s 14-bit in any drive mode.
  3. In a first for Fuji, it supports pixel-shift
  4. The drive-modes are a button-push away – all of them including in-camera HDR, bracketing, focus-stacking and pixel-shift – and can be saved as part of a custom user mode.
  5. Long exposures are timed up to 15 minutes! No need for Bulb mode!
  6. The more I use the camera, the more I appreciate little things that show how well thought-out it is – memorably, where other cameras – Sony! – have a USB-C slot for power, transfer and remote control, the Fuji X-H2 has the USB-C slot for the first two but remote cable release is a micro-jack socket on the other side of the camera. So for astrophotography on a star-tracker, it’s an absolute beast – external powerbank coming in, shutter triggering automatically and pixel-shift as a form of dithering on 1-minute sub-exposures, it doesn’t get any better.

I don’t normally much care for brand allegiance – I’ll shift from Olympus to Pentax to Fuji to Sony to Fuji to Canon to Fuji if I think they suit me best at a given moment (over many years, I might add!) – but I can’t help notice this is now the third time I’ve come round to Fuji… it’s almost a habit.

Around Comrie

A few years ago I discovered a pleasant gentle walk route around the Water of Ruchill outside Comrie. Almost entirely flat, it follows a loop from the village centre through scrub woodland (ideal shade on a sunny day!) along the side of the river past fields formerly occupied by a Roman fort, down to Cultybraggan PoW camp and back along the main B-road for a bit before taking a detour along a path from a standing stone over fields into the southern end of Dalginross and back along the streets to where it started.

In the town centre, the White Kirk stands out for its architecture with prominent tower and spire. Formerly the parish church, it is now home to a community centre.

Finally, a drone overview of the whole town – to the north, Dalginross, Comrie, Melville’s Monument and Glen Lednock; to the south, the Highland Boundary Fault runs from Glen Artney in the west right along the field across the road from Cultybraggan through Cowden Loch, Mill of Fortune and Newburgh Wood.

A map of the area, courtesy of the BGS Geoindex:

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.

Mallaig Circular and Loch an Nostarie

On a whim, I spent my August bank holiday out and about exploring a new location: on the far west coast, Mallaig is home to the ferry port connecting to Skye.

Just to the south of the town lies Loch an Nostaire – a lovely shallow loch of clear pure water and indeterminate name etymology: the current spelling is clearly anglicised, although there are no mentions of the more obvious Gaelic Nostaraidh, but rather variations include “Nosaraidh” and “Nossery” according to the 1852 Admiralty Charts. One option is for the name to date back to Old Norse naust, a ship; an alternative derivation might be via Gaelic nòsar, juicy, sappy, white. This would be cognate with nòs, cow’s milk, which sits well with one of the tributary burns being called the Allt a’ Bhainne.

The Mallaig Circular walk leads from Glasnacardoch just off the Rathad nan Eilean inland to the loch, then up between the hills Creag a’Chait and Cruach Mhalaig before descending to Mallaig.

The view down the loch, especially from higher up, is beautiful: to the east the hills of Cruach Clachach and Cruach Bhuidhe are quartzite outcrops forming a backdrop behind an unnamed island on the loch covered with native Scots Pine trees; along the opposite side of the loch runs a prominent ridge where Morar schist pelite changes to psammite.

[sphere url=”http://soc.sty.nu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PANO0001-PANO0026-0-0005.jpg” title=”%title%” navbar=”yes”]

[sphere url=”http://soc.sty.nu/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/PANO0001-PANO0026-v3-0-0011.jpg” title=”%title%” navbar=”yes”]

Dunning Glen

One of my favoured local woodlands, just a few minutes’ drive from home, is Dunning Glen. Starting from the village, stroll up the road, round the corner and through the small doorway into the woods where trees and rivers play.

There are some steep bits, but plenty of the oak trees in particular have a gnarly character.

Herewith, some photos:

My favourite from this particular afternoon was this oak – some of its branches having rotted and fallen off:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

The latter is available as prints, cards, masks and other products, via my main website: there is a pleasure in the pathless woods.

Early Autumn at Glen Affric

A year without a trip to my Nice Place™ just wouldn’t be a year. It had to be done – in a moment between lockdown and further covid-19 restrictions, I nipped up to Glen Affric for a few hours.

Some intimate landscape views:

I also flew the drone around a bit. Lovely light, getting a better overview of the extent and distribution of the Caledonian Forest, river, mountains and haze into the distance.

Some years ago, I had visited the glen in the middle of winter, with temperatures a degree either side of freezing, thawing slightly as the morning progressed. I was struck by a pattern of foam flecks on the water – particularly with a fine layer of ice just millimeters below the surface, over which the foam flowed. It moved so slowly, an abstract pattern messing with my eyes trying to work out how it moved. And I was surprised, because a couple of hundred yards upstream, the river had just travelled over a couple of waterfall cascades – so where did all the energy go? With a little thought, the river changes from wide yet rapid to deep and slower, with a yet deeper central channel in a V-shape.

This time, I flew the drone over the same mouth of the river, looking straight down onto the surface. This perspective makes the patterns of the foam all the more apparent – not just a difference between the central streak flowing faster, but a semi-regular pattern in the pattern against the far bank – indicating submerged boulders.

Foam on the River Affric outflow into Loch Beinn a’Mheadhoin

Unlike previous years’ visits, where I gravitate toward early mornings, this time I had arrived late in the afternoon, with just enough time to fit in a stroll before the light faded.

The light faded.

My favourite trees looked really rather pleasant in softer light, part-silhouetted against the sunset:

Beautiful soft and gentle light – my two most-favourite trees standing on a small rise of glacial moraine, silhouetted against a grey-blue sky.

Then, in conventional fashion, night fell. I’d never been up at the Nice Place to watch that happen before, but it was magical. I stood at the famous viewpoint near the memorial, watching the clouds skimming overhead from the north as the moon rose – with Jupiter and Saturn nearby, and noticed a moon-dog aka paraselene – the first time I’ve seen such a thing, an analogue with a sun-dog during the day.

Moon-dog (paraselene), Saturn and Jupiter

Finally, with night thoroughly underway, I made a photo of the well-known view looking along the length of Loch Affric toward the mountains of Kintail in the west – the landscape bathed in moonlight, all cool blue with the barest hints of structure and even less colour in the otherwise reddy bracken.

The mountains of Kintail from Glen Affric by moonlight

Prints, masks, cards and other products based on images above and others, are available from my ShinyPhoto website: Glen Affric.

In Inverary

This past Saturday was the Word-wide Photo Walk; as has become an occasional habit, I attended the Inverary walk.

There was a trip around the Inverary Jail:

and around the town front and Castle:

and early-autumn scenery around Dubh Loch:

Some of these are available as prints over on ShinyPhoto.

Lunan Bay

In general, lacking high pointy mountains, Angus always strikes me as one of the less dramatic parts of the country. However, I’ve visited the Lunan Bay area a few times and it makes a good escape for an afternoon.

There’s quite a nice beach…

and the ruins of Red Castle stand out stark sandstone against blue skies – ideal with high-flying cirrus cloud in the background.

It also looks quite good from the air.

And finally, I’m experimenting with a different art form – composite overlays, controlling visual information by selectively retaining structures. Essence of Lunan in one.

Composite: various aspects of an afternoon spent at Lunan Bay blended together.

Assynt, Day 2: Solus Na Madainn

For the second day of my holiday last Autumn, I got up – again! – at a ludicrously early hour and drove from Tongue round to the Assynt peninsula, to my favourite viewpoint for sunrise.

It was some drive.

All the way from Tongue to Loch Assynt without seeing another car. Bliss.

Take the A838 road (abused as part of the ghastly NC500 coastal route) via Durness at 5am in the pitch black, the wind blowing a gale, rain + windscreen wipers on full speed.

Picture avoiding a herd cows intruding across the road. Avoiding more than 10 deer.

At that surreal pre-caffeinated hour of the morning, seeing a signpost advertising “serving local seafood” makes me picture a restaurant waiter taking a scallop’s order at table.
The music of choice was Arcade Fire Mountains beyond Mountains – a song bemoaning city life with its world so small – a mental image contrasting with my surroundings, passing rural Scourie, pop 132 – the sort of place that takes longer to say the name than drive through.

And so I arrived at Rhicarn – the landscape black, clouds a grey plasma, just a little bit windy…

And the sun rose. Quite spectacularly, casting brilliant crepuscular rays from the horizon and underside edges of clouds.

Throughout the sunrise, the light was spectacular – brightly illuminating colourful clouds.

Simple abstract patterns: bright early morning sunlight illuminating clouds a warm yellow/orange.

…and casting a subtle hazy glow over the morning fog across Little Assynt, outlines of hills receding into the mist

Perhaps my favourite image from the morning has to be Suilven, the unmistakable mountain on the horizon, catching a subtle patch of oblique sunlight on a flank.

The unmistakable shape of Suilven (Sùilebheinn) catching an oblique beam of warm early morning sunlight.

Once the sun rose, I explored the Falls of Kirkaig outside Inverkirkaig. A nice long walk through lumpy landscape, to a large thundering waterfall.

Returning to above Rhicarn, clouds had flowed in obscuring the mountains on the horizon, so I experimented flying the drone to admire the surrounding landscape.

There’s something about finding a thin strip of old tarmac that obviously used to be a road – it makes a connection with the story and heritage of a location. From researching on Pastmap, it appears there was not much road here at all throughout the 19th century – presumably a cattle drovers’ track or similar. Then the old tarmac was laid, following a circuitous path around the gneiss rock hills. Finally, some time after the 1960s, a new road, now the B869, was laid through it in a boring straight line, the old route relegated to a carpark yet visible and walkable either side of the road.

I suspect at one stage this might have been nothing more than a cattle drover’s track down to the lowlands, maybe up until the early 1900s; up to 1960 the road was just a thin narrow track of tarmac with a couple of moderately sharp twisty turns in. Since then the B869 has been rerouted into a simple and less inspiring straight line and the old road relegated to a path, some of it widened to form a carpark beside the new. The bedrock is mostly Scourian gneiss, metamorphic, formed 2500-4000 million years ago (and therefore amongst the oldest rock to be found on the planet); down the centre of this view is a line of Lewisian metagabbro, gneissose, also metamorphic, formed 541-4000 million years ago. I’m not sure what the large central depression might be – it looks rather like a quarry, although there’s no evidence of anything on the maps.

Behind this scene, on the way to Clachtoll, lies some beautiful Karst landscape (cnoc’n’lochan or knock-and-lochan), formed by underground erosion of softer rock, leading to a classic pattern of rocky knolls interspersed (almost 50-50 by area) with lochs.

Further along the road lies the Maiden Loch, of which I’ve been very fond since first catching sight of it years ago. That first view was on a sunny afternoon, the sky blue reflecting in the water. I flew the drone over it, to admire the gneiss landscape all the more…

Fantastic scenery: Assynt at its very best. A very windy moment flying the drone above one of my favourite lochs, the Maiden Loch near Clachtoll. The landscape is typical knock-and-lochan Karst formation: shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, small undulating gneiss hillocks emerge amongst the lochs. In the hazy distance, Suilven cuts its familiar outline on the far horizon.

Some of the above photos are available on my photo gallery website: ShinyPhoto: Assynt

Smirisary

Can’t beat Scotland’s West Coast in summer. Saturday was spent exploring a new place to me, Smirisary in Glenuig, Lochaber.

A beach of large psammite outcrops with lyprophyre dykes

Signs of habitation – old (but possibly still in use) croft/houses just above the shore in amongst the caves

Beautiful landscapes – wide vistas via light on the sea out to the islands of Eigg and Rùm on the horizon

And on the way back home we called in at Loch Eilt by the roadside – partly to wash the salt water out of the dog, but also to admire the symmetrical reflections. The midges were out in force, pesky and biting as ever, but the photos were worth it…

Concerning Rocks

Some years ago I had a passing interest in the abstract shapes and forms rocks can take. 

Recently I was out on the Aberdeenshire coast hunting photos with a friend, who, being impressed with the rocky coastline, wondered exactly where the Highland Boundary Fault emerged at its most north-eastern extremity.

After a bit of research (particularly exploring using the BGS‘s iGeology app), I tracked it to a small headland, Garron Point, beside the golf club outside Stonehaven.

From the outside it doesn’t look like much, but on closer inspection it is awesome.

There are actually two faults – a small one at the north-eastern end of Craigeven Bay corner with Garron Point, forming a small spur off the Highland Boundary Fault which clips the coastline from the town out to sea.

On the lowland side the bedrock is metabasalt, psammite and pelite (North Esk formation) – metamorphic bedrock formed around 461-485MYa in the Ordovician period. On the highland side is gritty psammite (Glen Lethnot grit formation) – around 541-1000MYa.

The fault itself can be tracked to a matter of a few feet – a view from beside one of the golf greens shows the junction of both faults, with a strip of incredibly deformed grey rock leading away some meters rather like a line of chewing-gum.

Some of the most impressive rock outcrops I know. Toward the top-right of the frame – those cliffs are tall, especially from below! – a small fault runs diagonally down to the spray of water and out the left side; from front to back, a line of deformed pale grey rock only a foot or two wide, twisted like chewing gum, marks the Highland Boundary Fault at its most narrow only metres away from its most north-eastern extremity on land, at Garron Point headland near Stonehaven. The gnarly shapes of psammite (metamorphosed medium-grained grey former sandstone) and micro-basalt are awesome.

My favourite image is an abstract closeup – purply-red microbasalt meeting gritty blue-green psammite in a spray of cracks and marbling lines.

Prints are available on my ShinyPhoto photo gallery: Under Pressure

Perhaps the clearest view into the workings of the Highland Boundary Fault I can think of. On the left, red-purple microbasalt (its fine cuboidal structure putting me in mind of streaky thick bacon); elsewhere the blue-green-grey of psammite and pelite, medium- to fine-grained metamorphosed former sandstones. All jumbled together with fine cracks and lines of marble hinting at the pressures involved.

Summer Evenings

Two photos from a stroll down the road on a warm summer evening

Prints of The Leader are available from my photography website, ShinyPhoto.

Loch Rannoch Sunset

A few photos from Sunday afternoon’s explorations around Loch Rannoch.

We walked through the Black Woods; whilst flying the drone near Camghouran I discovered remains of a building – a pile of stones and hints of mounds in the earth possibly in the shape of a former but’n’ben croft? – in a clearing in the forest.

[sphere img=http://soc.sty.nu/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/IMG_5574-360-fixed.jpg” ]

Sunset on the shore was beautiful; contrasting deep blue ominous dark blue clouds and vibrant orange sunset across the water.

Prints of some of these photos will be available through my ShinyPhoto website: photos around Loch Rannoch.