Two of my twitter friends have developed particular styles – extreme dark low-key black+white rendition and negative inversion, respectively. It’s intriguing how scenes come out – a very different mapping from the usual realism.
Category Archives: nature
Glen Turret: Wet Stuff
A short study in water – taken on a stroll along the side of Loch Turret.
Portknockie (3/3): Bow-Fiddle
I’ve left the usual photos to last, seeing as how everyone else has shot this scene before.
It wasn’t particularly easy; the tripod was struggling to stay steady in the breeze and the course of a few seconds between adjusting the camera, leaving it to stop vibrating and pushing the shutter remote release, the light was changing radically from dull shade to bright sunlight on the foreground rocks. Still, a moderately long exposure worked, eventually.
Herewith, four different ways of processing the same images.
Portknockie (2/3): colourful rocks
The coast at Portknockie features an intermingling of Cullen quartzite (dating from Lower Dalradian times, 650 million years ago during which time they’ve transformed from sedimentary sandstone through partial volcanic metamorphosis) and the usual Highland psammite and semi-pelite.
The colours in these photos are more or less natural; it was totally stunning to be in the shady cave with the daylight behind and beyond, with these huge colourful boulders to play with.
For a sense of scale: the photos featuring a distant patch of light playing on the sandy pebble floor, well that gap is large enough to walk right through. A veritable cathedral of colour.
Portknockie (1/3): an unusual view
This is by way of a little tease. The Interwebs are full of photos of this lump of rock taken from a few yards to the right; I thought it would be more interesting to see it through the mouth of an adjacent cave instead.
Fields
Fields run deep in golden swards
Hot summer winds blow through the corn
Ripening corn/barley, Auchterarder.
Dunnottar Castle
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.
Moody Eclipse Photos
I was up early on the morning of March 20th to get to Stonehaven on the coast in time for the solar eclipse.
It’s funny how there was so much discussion as to what filters one should use when shooting the sun: on the one hand, a direct view of the sun’s disc requires special Baader solar filter (approx 23 stops’ filtration); however, when I arrived to see the extent of the clouds, only conventional photographic filters were needed (a mixture of ND1000 and circular polarizer 2-stop filters). And I think the results were all the more dramatic for it, too.
The first of these photos was made using a Centon 500mm mirror lens over 20 years old – from when I bought my first film SLR (a Canon EOS500n – that dates it) It even shows sunspot N 2303 pretty clearly.
The others are with the Sony 55-210mm lens at full stretch instead.
Each image is an HDR of 3 source frames bracketed +/-1EV, converted in photivo, blended in enfuse and worked in darktable.
Glen Clunie: Landscape Vistas
I must admit to not having found the landscape in Glen Clunie particularly inspiring – good for covering distance whilst hiking but not many trees to catch one’s interest. However, the resultant photos have some merit – hopefully the convey a sense of the expansive topography of the post-glacial floodplain through which the Baddoch Burn runs.
The particularly dark photo is an experiment inspired by my twitter friend Neil Mansfield‘s work with Dark Landscapes.
As I was returning back along the glen, three dogs in the garden of the stone house started shouting and running around me; the owners invited me in and plied me with tea. Next thing you know there’s three dogs all clambering over my knee on the sofa. Highland hospitality at its best.
Glen Clunie: Landscape Details
Three photos from a pleasant afternoon’s stroll along the Baddoch Burn in Glen Clunie, just up the road from Glenshee.
Rocks can be so colourful at times, can’t they? 🙂
Around Birnam Hill
A handful of photos from a stroll up Birnam Hill near Dunkeld. It makes a great weekend afternoon stroll – past a wonderful little waterfall with views looking out over the Highland Boundary Fault.
In the Woods
It’s been a while since I made photos of closeups in the woods – and for the most part, last time around I avoided contrasty light for the purpose too. Last night, I took a single prime lens (my favourite Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 of old) and one of my favoured strolls over Craigie Hill around the golf course, seeing what there was to be seen under the trees…
Falls of Bruar: Flow
One Saturday lunchtime several years ago, I spent a happy hour bugging the assistants in my local favourite camera shop, trying to find the ideal tripod.
Having visited the Falls of Bruar the weekend previously, I had a particular photo of the waterfalls flowing around the rocks in mind.
As usual, Manfrotto was the most recommended make. I tried to believe in them, honestly, but with no combination of legs, invertible centre-column and 3-dimensional head being sturdy enough for the camera of the time, I emerged with a Slik. (This process has been repeated with the same outcome a few times since.)
That afternoon, I went back to Bruar with my new tripod and totally failed to get the photo I wanted, but by dint of pointing the camera the other way staring down the gorge after sunset had happened and the light was fading – what’s come to be known as the blue hour – I wound up with a photo that would be my No.1 most-popular on Flickr for about 5 years.
That was “Raw“.
The first of these is “Flow”, the photo I intended to make in the first place.
Water close-ups
A small series of closeup studies in flowing water, taken on a stroll around the Falls of Bruar.
I’ve admired the striation lines in the psammite riverbed below the lower bridge at the Falls many times – yet every visit they’re still fascinating every time.
Noctilucent Clouds, Perth, 20150623
A classic location for long-exposure night-time photography: standing on the bridge over the M90 at Rhynd, with the road snaking away into the distance… and a clear display of noctilucent clouds above Kinnoull Hill.
From wikipedia:
Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the “ragged edge” of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. Noctilucent roughly means night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can be observed only when the Sun is below the horizon.
They are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth’s shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885.