I spent a happy afternoon and evening watching light turn to dusk over Edinburgh city centre from Blackford Hill.
Monthly Archives: December 2016
Wet Reflections
Just a couple of photos from a stroll beside a burn down the bottom end of town today at lunchtime – not great light, in fact it was beginning to rain. But if looking up doesn’t work, look down and take abstract photos of trees reflected in the burn instead…
November Sunset
November: season of dreich grey rainy wet horrible days, punctuated by sunsets like this.
Mill Glen, Tillicoultry
I hadn’t intended to go around the Mill Glen… but with a choice of three Hill-foot villages, I said Tillicoultry when it should’ve been Alva. Never mind. At least this Mill Glen has a tolerable view of distant refineries off the top.
West Woods of Ethie
My friend Tom and I went for a stroll in the West Woods of Ethie in Angus. Not a woodland I’d encountered before, but it was quite magical in some ways – quite conscious of lurching from one clearing to another, surrounded by the characteristic shapes of beech trees in their green and yellow-orange autumn plumage.
For a slightly more immersive view of the woods… click this and wait a while 🙂
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A bit of a hardware upgrade
Four and a half years ago I bought basalt,. a Lenovo Thinkpad W520 notebook.
Named for being black and geometrically regular, he was not cheap, but then the hardware was chosen for longevity. He did everything – mostly sitting on the desk being a workstation, for both photo-processing and work, with added portability. And he was fast… very fast.
He’s done sterling service, but the time has come for a bit of an upgrade. Since I haven’t done so for a few years now, I built the replacement workstation by hand.
So, after much shopping (mostly on Amazon with a couple of trips to the local Maplin’s), meet rhyolite – named because the red fan LEDs in the case remind me of the pink granite rock in Glen Etive.
| basalt | rhyolite | |
| RAM | Â 16G | 64G |
| CPU | Â i7-2720QM @ 2.20GHz | i7-6800KÂ @ 3.40GHz |
| HD | 1TB 2.5″ | 2*2T SATA, 64GB SSD, 240GB SSD |
| Display | 15″ 1080p | 24″ 4K |
| Time to process one Olympus Pen-F hi-res ORF file from RAW to TIFF | 5min50s | 1min6s |
| Time to rebuild Apache Spark from git source | 28min15s | 6min28s |
It’s funny how oblivious we can be of machines slowing down and software bloating over time, rather like the proverbial boiling lobster and then when I look up, things can be done 4-5x as fast.
It’s really funny when you copy your entire home directory across wholesale and see what used to be a full-screen maximized Firefox window now occupying barely a quarter of the new display.
How many photo thumbnails can you fit in a 4K display?
There’s only one downside: sometimes I miss having a trackpad in the middle of the keyboard area…
The Least Amount of Landscape
Just to disprove the idea of deterministic landscape photography, as I was driving back from Acharn through Grandtully along Strathtay, the sky took on a most beautiful glowing cobalt-blue colour of dusk combined with the icy diamond clarity of sub-zero late autumn temperatures in the Highlands.
One of those scenes where it took a little work to convert the camera’s recordings back to something resembling what I saw: after dark fell I couldn’t make out what was in the fields beyond the car headlights; there was nothing but horizon and the glow… and one tiny fragment of wispy cloud.
It doesn’t get much more minimalist than this…
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:
