Noctilucent Clouds

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Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds are a rare phenomenon: the highest clouds in the atmosphere, at altitudes between 47-53 miles, consisting of tiny crystals of water ice about 100nm in diameter and requiring very cold temperatures to form. Not fully understood, they are a recently discovered meterological phenomenon with no record of their observation before 1885.

They also make a beautiful display of pale bright fibrous blue against the cobalt velvet of night…

Noctilucent Clouds Noctilucent Clouds

Two views, part of a stitched panorama.

A View Down a Hole

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My most popular photo on flickr, Raw, is a view taken an increasing number of years ago, as the light faded, looking down a big hole in the ground – the gorge below the lower bridge at the Falls of Bruar.

Today, whilst strolling along with Dog, I looked over some railings in the village carpark to another small gorge, and saw the cloud iridescence above me, reflected in a pool, the surrounding rocks draped with slimy green moss. How elegant…

Shades of pastel colours

Shades of pastel colours

A Bit Spooky

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I’ve taken a few photos of these small waterfalls since the start of the year. This time, I went for the context of the surrounding caves as well, and just for a change, shot it using the new mobile phone camera before processing as an HDR panorama.
Port Mora, along the Southern Upland Way from Portpatrick.

Waterfall and Caves

Wee Waterfall

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I’ve made a few photos of this waterfall since the start of the year: it might only be small, located a long walk away from home in the corner of Port Mora bay beside a cave, but being my own discovery makes it more favourite than some of the other waterfalls in Galloway.

SRB ND1000 filter, two frames at 30s each; experimenting with a fairly thick-black tonality and the 6×7 portrait aspect-ratio.

Wee Waterfall

Wee Waterfall

Beyond these Shores

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A simple comparison today, the same scene seen two ways.

First, colour. The camera chose a fairly cool whitebalance, which lends itself to a purply-blue tint reminiscent of certain slide films of old:

Sunlight on water

And this is what can be made of it – a much shinier, silvery monochrome rendition, the punchy contrast emphasizing the foreground rock shapes:

Sunlight on water

Both have their merits – you can favour whichever you wish!

Technical details:
Sony NEX-7;
an HDR of 3 frames: ISO 100, f/10, for 1/125, 1/250, 1/60s exposure times;
processed in RawTherapee, blended in enfuse, manipulated in darktable.

Deep

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Deep

Deep

No more sun, no more wind.
Only a strange feeling
leaving without moving
I’ll try another world
and the sky slowly fades in my mind
just like a memory.
– Eric Serra, My Lady Blue, from The Big Blue.

Misty Morning

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I think this is the best misty morning I’ve seen in nearly a year of living around Portpatrick – the fog’s not lifted all day. Naturally it made for some great photo opportunities this morning too.

Landscape: the approachable end of Photography

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Perhaps a bit controversially, I have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the landscape photography genre.

A few years ago now, another member in the photo-club and I were chatting about landscape. He said that he made his images using a large-format 5×4 camera and Velvia film because it “conveyed what it felt like to be there”. It set me thinking: how come I can name a large handful of photographers who all approach landscape the same way: large-format, portrait orientation, Velvia film, tripod low to the ground, rear-tilt for the perspective of a large looming foreground, grad-ND for the sky? Whatever the philosophy behind the approach – and plenty of books have been written about the philosohpy of landscape – it seemed unlikely that such a common approach actually represents an individual feeling. Seeing through the fluff, there was a trend at work, a locus of mutually derivative work – for example, there was rarely any presentation of other films, such as Provia; surely someone out there would have found that a better representation of their feeling, at least once?

My collocutor moved away from the area and left the club shortly after that; I rebelled against landscape and for a while shunned all the conventional advice of the genre: no shiny contrasty light, no wide-angle vistas, no colour, but rather, a “no-light” project, studies of the intrinsic shapes and forms of trees in the woods of Inverawe. After about 18 months, landscape began to resurface – at first, at weekends and other times when I was away from the forest. “Only on my own terms”, however.

A couple of years after the fateful conversation, the ex-member was passing by and visited the club one evening. The discussions were most illuminating: he also had abandoned the whole landscape-by-film scene, and was last heard of favouring digital sports work around the Cairngorms instead. It was satisfying to have caught up and closed the loop.

 

Fast-forward to now. There are phases of conformance in landscape; ignoring distasteful badly tonemapped tripe with excessive local contrast, some sites (notably 500px) feature a lot of over-bright over-saturated images. The past year or so has seen a notable rise in long-exposure work – especially in black and white, some with artistic vision, some perhaps less so. Some of my photographer contacts are now suggesting the time of the Big Stopper filter has passed as well.

Some questions to ponder:

Can one take a camera, follow a handful of guidelines and more or less guarantee coming up with a good result on any random day? (There is no one such magic guideline, but you could assign a score based on the number of things a photograph has in its favour according to a set of rules.)

If so, is landscape photography merely a programmatic sport, a way of passing the time with clearly defined start (Friday nights examining the OS map and weather forecast) and end (JPEG by Sunday night), and how does one express any originality within its scope at all?

On another hand, is landscape something that people should go out and seek to achieve, or is it that what one shoots happens to be landscape?

Relatedly, is a photograph good because you stumbled across it, or because you set out to make it, or because it exhibits a strong contrived personal style?

However it arises, when one’s photography spans several genres – both vista and intimate landscape, other nature closeups and art – it seems that viewers respond the most to landscape. It’s rather like the ITV3 or Channel 4 of photography – “human interest”, where all objects presented are approachable by virtue of being human scale, from boulders half a metre in size to buildings and hillsides that a human can at least radically alter with a suitably large digger. And that brings with it an offputting whiff of mundanity.

I can’t claim to be happy with the answers to all the above; you can’t have it all 3 ways at once.

Approach Routes

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Time for something a little different.

With the previous camera, I was particularly fond of an old Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 prime lens; an awful lot of my photos were made using that, especially for closeups and even some landscapes. On the Lumix GH2, with its 2x crop-factor, this was the equivalent of shooting at 100mm-e all the time, and I was very familiar with the field of view that entailed.

Now I’ve switched to the Sony NEX-7, I’m experimenting more with wide-angle field of view. It feels completely different, as though the eye is latching-on to features of a scene I would not previously have considered using, especially the idea of perspective and lines leading into the distance.

Yesterday’s photo of the day was taken in the Fairy Glen in Portpatrick:

Between Realities

Between Realities – in the Fairy Glen, Portpatrick

and today I dug out an old Peleng 8mm fisheye lens, spent a while tweaking the screws in the M42->E-mount adapter to make it focus at all, and made this image of the approach to the harbour – a 170-degree field of view:

Approach Routes

Approach Routes

Coincidentally, both images have also been processed using LuminanceHDR for tonemapping.

Transitions

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Panasonic Lumix GH2Nearly 3 years ago I spent the best part of 2 hours one afternoon in PCWorld, looking to kick the Canon habit and vacillating between a Nikon (as I recall, the D3100) and the Panasonic Lumix GH2.

On the one hand, the Nikon had excellent image-quality, but its usability was let-down drastically by the lack of a dedicated ISO button (you could pretend, by reassigning the one “custom” button – so why bother with either?) and it had what I felt was a patronizing user-interface, showing a graphic of a closing lens iris every time one changed the aperture (as though I hadn’t learned anything in the last 10 years spent working on my photography).

On the other hand, the Lumix GH2 had less than stellar image-quality, but the user-interface won me over.

Over the last 2 years, the ergonomics fitted my style like a glove: coming from film, including medium-format with waist-level finders, I find it most natural to operate looking down at the articulated LCD panel in live-view mode. I had sufficient custom presets for two aperture-priority-mode variations of black and white (one square, one 3:2, both with exposure-bracketing set to 3 frames +/-1EV) and a third, a particular colour “film emulation” and manual mode at ISO160 for long exposures, with bracketing set to 5 frames for more extreme HDR. With those 3 modes, I could cover 95% of my subject-matter from woodland closeup to long-exposure seascape and back, at the flip of a dial.

I learned to appreciate its choice of exposure parameters (normally well-considered), and to overcome the sensor’s foibles – it made an excellent test-case for understanding both high-ISO and long-exposure sensor noise and its limited dynamic range increased my familiarity with HDR, panoramas and other multi-exposure-blending techniques (all hail enfuse!). Coupled with the Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 lens, it made for some excellent closeup photos. As a measure of how workable the kit is, I once took every camera I then possessed – including medium- and large-format film – to Arran for a photo-holiday, and never used anything apart from the GH2 for the whole week.

If this all sounds like it’s leading up to something, it is. There is a long-established idea in photographer circles that gear-acquisition-syndrome (GAS), or the buying of new equipment for the sake of it or in order that it might somehow help one take better photos, is delusional. To some extent that’s right, but the flip-side is that any one camera will impose limitations on the shots that can be achieved. So I’ve established the principle that, if one can explain 3 things a camera can allow you to do better, the acquisition is justifiable.

And so I’ve switched. The new camera is a Sony NEX7[Amazon]; even though the model is barely younger than the GH2, it still has a vastly superior sensor that will give me larger images, better dynamic range and narrower depth-of-field. Indeed, at two years old, it’s still punching above its weight despite the pressure from some of the larger dSLRs to have come out since.Wee Waterfall (2)

One of the things I learned from the GH2 is that it always pays to understand one’s equipment. For this reason, the first 100 frames shot on the NEX-7 fell into 4 kinds:

  1. studying noise with varying ISO in a comparatively low-light real-world scene (stuff on bookshelves in the study – good to know how noise and sharpness interplay in both the darkest shadows and midtones)
  2. building a library of dark-frame images at various ISO and shutter-speed combinations (taken with the lens-cap on, for a theoretically black shot – any non-zero pixels are sensor noise)
  3. building a library of lens correction profiles – taking images of a uniform out-of-focus plain wall to compare vignetting at various apertures and focal-lengths on both kit lenses
  4. studying kit-lens sharpness as a function of aperture – discussed previously.

Impressively, I could just load all these images into RawTherapee and easily move them into relevant directories in a couple of right-clicks, and from there I spent the rest of the evening deriving profiles for ISO noise and sharpness with automatic dark-frame-reduction and actually measured vignetting correction – because I know very well how much time it will save me in the future.

Despite having played with film cameras, I’m quite acutely aware of the change in sensor format this time: in moving from prolonged use of micro-4/3rds to APS-C, I can no longer assume that setting the lens to f/8 will give me everything in focus at the lens’s sweetspot, but have to stop-down to f/11 or even further. The tripod has already come into its own…

So there we go.

Oh, and the complete GH2 kit is for sale on ebay, if anyone wants to buy it!
Update 2014-02-02: the complete kit sold on eBay for a very reasonable sum!

 

Storm Surge

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Apparently there’s “exceptional weather” doing the rounds at the moment. From last night until midday the wind speed has been around 40mph gusting to 63mph. On hearing mid-morning of a storm surge coinciding with high tide around lunch-time, Dog and I set out to see what it looked like.

The waves were impressive – the highest I’ve seen around the harbour. The coast-guard were doing an admirable job of directing such little traffic as dared or needed to get close; a small crowd gathered to watch the waves.

I made a small video of the goings-on as well: