Falls of Bruar Revisited

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With a couple of hours to spare on Sunday afternoon, I revisited the Falls of Bruar. Even  on a grotty wet day there were plenty of opportunities, around the lower bridge.

It’s at least the 8th time I’ve been there – but the geology is impressive as always with the natural arch formed by the river eroding the local rock (mostly psammite, as with much of the Highlands).

Some experiments with Live Composite mode on the Olympus Pen-F, as well as the usual (for me) high-resolution mode; everything taken using a circular polariser and ND4 filter for longer exposure times. Having made initial RAW conversions using RawTherapee, everything has been passed through LuminanceHDR to even-out the white-balance and tonemap for better image tone. (In cases where there’s only a small area of light in the frame, such as these flowing waterfalls, the Pattanaik algorithm can give interesting high-contrast results – set the gamma to about 0.3 and the frame turns mostly black with just the highlights remaining.)

Around Here

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It’s been a lousy grey and wet day – definitely dreich – here, so here are a few photos of a walk I took down the road one evening a few weeks ago, on a lovely sunny day.

Graveyards? Not exactly my usual photographic cup of tea, but OK then…

Landscape is a bit more my scene, however. There’s some lovely undulating pastoral scenery around here, with views across to the distinctive shape of Ben Effray.

All photos made using the Olympus Pen-F and the four-thirds 12-60mm f/2.8 lens using 5-shot handheld HDR technique.

Edinburgh Fog

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On Sunday, on a whim, I went down to Edinburgh. As always, the city was fairly heaving but I revisited one of my favourite locations – the Radical Road along the Salisbury Crags, which affords an excellent view from Blackford Hill round to the Parliament buildings.

So I tested the Pen-F’s timelapse video ability for the first time. The camera makes it a breeze: set up the scene (lots of filters to cope with the lighting), set it in aperture-priority mode, 300 frames at 5s intervals, push the button and off it goes. And nature provided! – simply point the camera at the city and watch the sea haar roll in, great low clouds of misty fog, obscuring the castle within minutes.

First time I’ve made a 4K video… unfortunately the results from the camera weren’t quite up to the quality I expected, so I reprocessed all the RAW ORF files on the notebook in bulk (using RawTherapee) and rendered the official video myself with ffmpeg.

I also made a wide panorama – 5 frames each in 80-megapixel high resolution mode; lots of image data, nicely stitched in Hugin as usual.