In the evening of Feb 7 2015, I was driving back along the A90 from Dundee to Perth, right into this sunset. It lasted a while, so I pulled over beside the road in the Carse of Gowrie to shoot it, including a reflection in the car roof (as one does!).
Stunning light.
Photos from around the Highland Boundary Fault: the first psammite / semi-pelite rocks beside the path, a valley through which the fault runs, and a feather. Don’t ask how long it took to photograph the feather.
A couple of views of a small part of a favoured waterfall on my walk up Birnam Hill.
Around January I discovered a new walk near Dunkeld that quickly became a favourite way to spend a weekend afternoon. Starting from the Pass of Birnam, head up the track from Bee Cottage and turn left to go around the south side of Duncan’s Hill then rejoin the path up to Stair Bridge Viewpoint and the top of Birnam Hill.
As routes go, it gives a mixture of sheltered woodland tracks and sweeping landscape views, complete with my favourite feature – you can watch the rocks changing from till to slate to psammite and semi-pelite as you cross the Highland Boundary Fault. Small wonder I’ve done it half a dozen times dragging various folks along with me, gradually exploring further each time as the winter receded.
These photos are from an experiment with a Prakticar 24mm lens (M42 fit) – acquired for cheap from ebay and stuck on a wonky adapter which might explain some focussing issues. Several of them depict the line of the HBF through the landscape, with hills on one side in the Highlands and on the other in the Lowlands.
A few photos from the start of January – experimenting with a road I’ve not often travelled, up from the A9 to approach from the south. It was a stunning morning – swathes of cloud-shadow flying across the landscape such that the mountains north of Comrie were alternately visible or obscured behind passing snow/hail clouds.
Herewith, a selection of snaps from a New Year’s Day stroll along the beach in Brighton and Hove.
Thought for the day: art is what you make of it, not the subject-matter to hand.
A day out, today, with the Focus on Photography Perth meetup group. We parked in the MacRosty park carpark in Crieff and strolled along Lady Mary’s Walk, a dismantled railway line on the north side of the River Earn to the Trowan woods.
Many photos were taken. I was feeling a bit experimentalist, so deployed a couple of tricks:
Herewith:
Two final landscape scenes to close this series. It was a long morning spent watching the sun rise, walking around the River Walk and along the side of Loch Affric past An Tudair, before returning to the River Walk a second time and clambering up the opposite hill to the memorial to capture the passing light on pine-covered mountains above the loch.
From wikipedia:
The Caledonian Forest is the name given to the former (ancient old-growth) temperate rainforest of Scotland. The known extent of the Roman occupation suggests that it was north of the Clyde and west of the Tay.
The Scots pines of the Caledonian Forest are directly descended from the first pines to arrive in Scotland following the ice-age; arriving about 7,000 BC. The forest reached its maximum extent about 5,000 BC after which the Scottish climate became wetter and windier. This changed climate reduced the extent of the forest significantly by 2,000 BC. From that date, human actions (including the grazing effects of sheep and deer) reduced it to its current extent.
Today, that forest exist as 35 remnants covering about 180 square kilometres (44,000 acres). The Scots pines of these remnants are, by definition, directly descended from the first pines to arrive in Scotland following the ice-age. These remnants have adapted genetically to different Scottish environments, and as such, are globally unique; their ecological characteristics form an unbroken, 9,000-year chain of natural evolution with a distinct variety of soils, vegetation, and animals.
To a great extent the remnants survived on land that was either too steep, too rocky, or too remote to be agriculturally useful. The largest remnants are in Strathspey and Strath Dee on highly acidic freely drained glacial deposits that are of little value for cultivation and domestic stock.
It’s also amazingly beautiful. I can happily drag myself out of bed at 3am and drive several hours north to arrive at the forest in time to watch the sun rise: with its ancient history, the scent of the heather, watching mist flowing around the old pine tree-tops catching the morning light, there’s nowhere more gorgeous on Earth.
There’s an impressive outcrop of rocks (psammite and semi-pelite, looking rather like limestone) near the waterfalls in the River Affric. Some kindly soul had balanced these pebbles on a boulder on their way past previously.
Sadly, it’s not all good news at the glen – a few years ago, the Forestry Commission installed two paths, one wending its way between the trees like a play-park and the other using non-native sandstone paving flags to enlarge the walk beside the river – in the process, cementing its way through the pine trees’ roots. I am not impressed.
The other two photos in this set are a bit strange by my standards, too: shooting directly into the sun with only a few seconds to capture a crepuscular ray, I extended my usual HDR bracketing from 1EV to 2 stops either side; it’s taken me the last 6 months and no fewer than 10 re-processing iterations to make the best I can of that scene and the results are necessarily unrealistic in order to capture detail in both foreground and sky. The scene is from the path along the south side of Loch Affric to Kintail, beside Loch Salach a’Ghiubhais (“dirty loch of the pines”) – I have no idea what they did to merit such a title, as it seems a pretty gorgeous place to me.
Lots of Scots Pine trees around Glen Affric.
Favourite Trees can be seen from near the carpark above the River Walk around the glen – these are the same pines that appear in Heather and Trees.
Gnarly struck me as a pleasant old character, enjoying the morning sun, on the way up the side of Coille na Feithe Buidhe to the memorial.
The trees is Pinus sylvestris are to be found along the south side of Loch Affric, on the path that ultimately brings you out in Kintail near Skye.
There’s an art to this kind of abstract – seeing, reducing the scene to an interplay of lines and shapes and seeking a kind of balanced visual weight across the frame. Hence, spatial distribution – nothing so crass as having one subject on which the eye can focus, but a pleasing arrangement nonetheless.
Further studies in the shapes of characterful trees, Glen Affric: this time, in black and white.