The First Morning of Winter

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I spent the morning of Dec 22 – the first day of winter – up Kinnoull Hill. There was beautiful mist rising from the River Tay as it meanders through the Carse of Gowrie.

I experimented with a few new compositions too: semi-abstract views of the hills of north Fife, the motorway/A90 junction and the river north of Perth as well.

My favourite two images were the fairly conventional view from above the cliffs, looking past the folly along the Carse of Gowrie. It’s not that comfortable a location to shoot – to get a clear view of the tower, one has to stand in a gorse bush…

Above Kinnoull Hill

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I’ve discovered DJI GS (“groundstation”) Pro, which allows me to plot-out routes in advance with waypoints and control what happens at them, long before arriving at a location.

Well, currently we’re at the stage of wondering why the camera’s pointing back the way we came when it should be looking exactly the opposite direction.

Still, there’s a lot of nice views to be had above Kinnoull Hill.

 

And the finished video:

Sunrise at Kinnoull Hill

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Early one morning in August I set off up Kinnoull Hill in Perth; a 40-minute stroll through the woods and I arrived at the top just in time for sunrise.

There are a couple of classic viewpoints, although juggling foreground foliage is not the easiest. This is the view closer to the tower with a hint of sunlight behind the hill, a line of light streaking round to illuminate some of the yellow trees below:

Sunrise behind Kinnoull Hill, with the River Tay running along the Carse of Gowrie into the distance

And this is a little further back, the sun having risen illuminating the whole Carse of Gowrie and River Tay, sky still shades of yellow and pink:

A classic view of the tower and River Tay from Kinnoull Hill, Perth

Walking back through the woods was rather pleasant too – lots of dappled sunlight on the trees.

This was one of the first photo-sets I processed using Affinity Photo Pro on the iPad. Loving the colour and tone already!

Aurora!

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For the second time, I was lucky enough to see the aurora from Perth, last night. It was quite an impressive display; by the time I got out to darker skies it was quite low above the horizon, but the greens were strong to the naked eye and some strong rays came and went over time.

I still need to work on a good viewing location, but out beyond Rhynd is a good start.

Sun behind clouds

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Helios 58mm f/2 lens wide open but with a pinhole drilled in the lens-cap, giving an effective aperture of about f/30 (almost two stops narrower than the lens’s own aperture scale). This was just slow enough to allow a reasonable hand-held exposure of the sun behind iridescent clouds, although it still took a lot of care to retrieve detail in the highlights.

Sun behind clouds

Perth close-ups: floral colour

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The last in a short series of photos from a stroll around Perth.

These are all processed slightly differently from my usual workflow – instead of darktable, I used RawTherapee with a film emulation (allegedly Fuji Provia). As with the others in this series, all images were made on a Helios 58mm f/2 prime lens, pretty wide open.

Around a Graveyard

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A small set of photos made in Kinnoull Graveyard, Perth.

A friend from the photo-society had posted a handful of photos of this graveyard on facebook a few days previously, so I had a few ideas for scenes to shoot when we went there last November.

In particular, the obvious manipulated moody photo is an example of bokeh-panorama aka Brenzer technique – using a comparatively long focal length lens at wide aperture to narrow the depth of field and stitching a panorama to restore the field of view angle. In this case, it was a Zeiss 50mm f/2.8 lens, but the resultant shot would require a lens of 13mm f/0.85 to achieve in a single exposure.

Up Kinnoull Hill: classic landscape

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It has to be done – the view from Kinnoull Hill, past the folly looking along the River Tay wending its way through the Carse of Gowrie.

I made this photo partly because some scenes have to be done, and partly to test a new Carl Zeiss 50mm Tessar f/2.8 lens acquired for surprisingly-cheap on eBay. The wide-angle field of view comes from this being a panorama of 11 frames stitched together; at over 56 megapixels, there’s enough detail to easily resolve roof-tiles in the houses at the foot of the hill, or road-signs across the A90.