Above Comrie

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A selection of photos taken around Glen Lednock, mostly up the Melville Monument overlooking Comrie.

This is Highland Boundary Fault territory; the fault itself runs up Glen Artney from the south-west straight through Cultybraggan PoW Camp, on through Comrie and across the A85 to the east.

I was also struck by how vintage Comrie itself looks from afar – a nice ratio of buildings interspersed by trees, with such a low vehicular traffic flow (even on a Saturday afternoon) that one could almost imagine the cars being replaced by carriages.

And no visit to Glen Lednock could be complete without the obvious long-exposure photo of the Wee Cauldron waterfall, of course!

Around Birnam Hill: landscape old and new

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The last in a small series of photos from Birnam Hill near Dunkeld.

As far as I can tell, the first two photos are taken more or less on the Highland Boundary Fault – a line runs from Stare Dam past Rohallion lodge, up through one quarry and across the A9 through another slate quarry.

Test shots from a favourite walk, playing with the new mobile – DNG RAW files processed in Darktable.

Dunnottar Castle

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Dunnottar Castle is a ruined medieval fortress located upon a rocky headland on the north-east coast of Scotland, about 2 miles south of Stonehaven. The current ruins date from the 15th and 16th centuries, but there is believed to have been fortification on the site since the Early Middle Ages.

The ruins of the castle are surrounded by steep cliffs that drop to the North Sea, 50 metres (160 ft) below. A narrow strip of land joins the headland to the mainland, with a steep path leading up to the gatehouse.

I made these photos over the course of a couple of hours after the eclipse in March, partly because I know the place well, partly because I was reminded of it by a photo in the local photo-club, and partly because I wanted to reshoot it at greater quality with newer processing techniques. It’s a pity the path down to the shore is so muddy – perhaps I should revisit either in winter or early spring instead.

For the record, the workflow for these is:

  • tripod, SRB ND1000 filter, multiple frames around 8s shutter-speed at source
  • RAW conversion in Photivo
  • HDR panorama in Hugin + enfuse
  • tonemapping in LuminanceHDR
  • post-processing in darktable
  • further post-processing in Gimp:
    • colour toning
    • film emulation (vintage, Ilford Pan-F or Rollei black and white film emulation)
    • wavelet sharpening
  • organization (tagging + metadata) in digiKam
  • bulk resizing with ImageMagick.

St Ninian’s Scottish Episcopal Church, Portpatrick

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St Ninian's Scottish Episcopal Church, Portpatrick

The building’s diminutive size lends a certain quaint charm to the idea of people coming here to worship, hence the vintage style processing on the photo.
Unfortunately, it also means the maximum seating capacity is only about 30.
The folks were pleasantly welcoming, but services are either Matins or stuck in the 1929 liturgy for some inexplicable reason – even worse than the 1970 version.
The most offputting thing is the fuss made (both written in the pew-sheets and announced) that there will be a `gathering note’ at the start of the hymns. What they actually mean is the building is too small for any kind of instrument of its own and the bought-in CD was made by a company that didn’t understand how to correctly accompany hymn-singing (with a proper introduction and consistent tempo, no such note is required). The resultant boom-box karaoke cacophany is just ghastly.
The church is part of a trio of charges around Wigtownshire. Services are Sundays at 10.30am if anyone’s interested.