Sometimes you just have to head up the road to catch the sun rising over the horizon at a favoured castle ruin.
I have photos for sale of Dunnottar Castle over on shiny.photo.
Sunrise at Dunnottar
Category Archives: art
vdB14 and vdB15, Camelopardalis
Partly due to the weather, mostly due to recognising foibles and problems in my gear, it’s been ages since I made an astro image worth publishing.
I shot in OSC (one-shot colour) using the QHY 268C camera, using two filters (a Neodymium light-pollution filter and IDAS NBZ dual-narrowband) for a total of over 30 hours’ data over the course of 3 nights in the past fortnight, of which I kept 20.9 hours.
Prints, cards, masks, clocks and other products featuring this image are available via my ShinyPhoto website: vdB14 + vdB15, Camelopardalis.
A full write-up detailing all the data captured and how it was processed can be seen over at my Telescopius page: vdB14 + vdB15, Camelopardalis
This one feels rather good 🙂
Chanonry Point Lighthouse
Last weekend it was ludicrously hot around home – 25ºC after lunchtime – so we drove all the way up north to the Black Isle for a stroll around Fortrose and neighbouring areas. We started with a stroll down to Chanonry Point where the lighthouse looked good in black & white.
Around St Fillan’s
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve driven through St Fillan’s over the years, always en route to somewhere else the other end of the A85, barely stopping a handful of times to take the obvious photo the length of Loch Earn. Even the couple of craggy rocky outcrops on the way into the village were much admired from the road but I think I stopped once to shoot them for their own sake.
So last Sunday afternoon I rectified matters, slowed down and parked in the usual layby and walked back through the village, over the road, around the golf course and up St Fillan’s Chair, admiring the mountains behind a little closer.
A day of symmetry – on the way out I noticed a view up the path to a small Church of Scotland kirk was particularly appealing; on return, the view along the loch was pure calm still reflection in the water.
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Pure simple symmetry – the water reflecting the cool tones of blue hour on a grey day. Beautiful. 
Pure simple symmetry – the water reflecting the cool tones of blue hour on a grey day. Beautiful. 
A gull admiring the scenery – pure simple symmetry – the water reflecting the cool tones of blue hour on a grey day. Beautiful. 
A gull admiring the scenery – pure simple symmetry – the water reflecting the cool tones of blue hour on a grey day. Beautiful. 
For years I’ve admired these mountains from the A85 driving into St Fillan’s; this past weekend I finally stopped, parked up and explored them directly in person. The weather wasn’t the greatest, but it was good to clamber up to St Fillan’s Hill / Dundurn and view the landscape from a little higher up. 
Prints and things are available from my main ShinyPhoto website: Loch Earn.
Early Autumn at Glen Affric
A year without a trip to my Nice Place™ just wouldn’t be a year. It had to be done – in a moment between lockdown and further covid-19 restrictions, I nipped up to Glen Affric for a few hours.
Some intimate landscape views:
Vibrant colours in the soft light, days shortening at the start of autumn, Glen Affric. 
Vibrant colours in the soft light, days shortening at the start of autumn, Glen Affric. 
Vibrant colours in the soft light, days shortening at the start of autumn, Glen Affric. 
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the water levels so low as this in the famous waterfalls on the River Affric
I also flew the drone around a bit. Lovely light, getting a better overview of the extent and distribution of the Caledonian Forest, river, mountains and haze into the distance.
Some of my favourite trees – Scots Pines in the Caledonian Forest reserve at Glen Affric, with Loch Affric and Sgurr na Lapaich in the distance. 
Some of my favourite trees – Scots Pines in the Caledonian Forest reserve at Glen Affric, with Loch Affric and Sgurr na Lapaich in the distance. 
Some years ago, I had visited the glen in the middle of winter, with temperatures a degree either side of freezing, thawing slightly as the morning progressed. I was struck by a pattern of foam flecks on the water – particularly with a fine layer of ice just millimeters below the surface, over which the foam flowed. It moved so slowly, an abstract pattern messing with my eyes trying to work out how it moved. And I was surprised, because a couple of hundred yards upstream, the river had just travelled over a couple of waterfall cascades – so where did all the energy go? With a little thought, the river changes from wide yet rapid to deep and slower, with a yet deeper central channel in a V-shape.
This time, I flew the drone over the same mouth of the river, looking straight down onto the surface. This perspective makes the patterns of the foam all the more apparent – not just a difference between the central streak flowing faster, but a semi-regular pattern in the pattern against the far bank – indicating submerged boulders.
Unlike previous years’ visits, where I gravitate toward early mornings, this time I had arrived late in the afternoon, with just enough time to fit in a stroll before the light faded.
The light faded.
My favourite trees looked really rather pleasant in softer light, part-silhouetted against the sunset:
Then, in conventional fashion, night fell. I’d never been up at the Nice Place to watch that happen before, but it was magical. I stood at the famous viewpoint near the memorial, watching the clouds skimming overhead from the north as the moon rose – with Jupiter and Saturn nearby, and noticed a moon-dog aka paraselene – the first time I’ve seen such a thing, an analogue with a sun-dog during the day.
Finally, with night thoroughly underway, I made a photo of the well-known view looking along the length of Loch Affric toward the mountains of Kintail in the west – the landscape bathed in moonlight, all cool blue with the barest hints of structure and even less colour in the otherwise reddy bracken.
Prints, masks, cards and other products based on images above and others, are available from my ShinyPhoto website: Glen Affric.
A Geek in Lockdown
I’m comparatively fortunate that the coronavirus and covid-19 have not affected me or anyone I know directly. Having spent the last 15 years working from home, life has not changed as significantly as it has for others.
So, apart from staying home and doing nothing much, what’s a geek to do to contribute back?
First, contribute data. As often as I remember, I update the KCL/Zoe app to say I’m still alive.
Second, grid computing projects.
There’s a significant amount of computer power available and machines would otherwise spend their time idle. A couple of months before the coronavirus became known, I had already installed BOINC, perhaps the oldest and best-known grid-computing system. As the scale of the Covid-19 problem became more apparent, I discovered the Rosetta@Home project which has been working to predict structure of proteins involved in the disease.
For mobile devices, there is Vodafone’s DreamLab project which similarly uses one’s iphone/ipad/tablet’s downtime to perform computations hopefully to identify drugs to fight Covid-19.
Third, art.
This took a bit of thought, but recently RedBubble who I use for selling my photography added the option of selling masks alongside the usual prints, mugs, etc.
I wasn’t at all sure what to make of it. The idea of profiting off others’ health and necessity jarred with the idea of art being a luxury item. However, a friend pointed out that if face-masks are to become normalized in society, having interesting art designs on could make them more approachable. There’s also the bit where Redbubble match each mask bought with a donation to an appropriate charity. So, a net good thing then.
Inspiration struck and I spent much of the weekend designing an image to represent the coronavirus (using a fragment of its gene sequence as a background, naturally) and even rendering a little video from it, both using Povray, my favoured ray-tracing software from the late 1990s(!). Naturally I made the scene description and other sources available as open-source: the-lurgy (on github).
The “lurgy” design and a selection of other landscape images are available on redbubble as face-masks with a profit margin set to 0.
And of course work continues, producing more photos to go on my website, ShinyPhoto…
Assynt, Day 2: Solus Na Madainn
For the second day of my holiday last Autumn, I got up – again! – at a ludicrously early hour and drove from Tongue round to the Assynt peninsula, to my favourite viewpoint for sunrise.
It was some drive.
All the way from Tongue to Loch Assynt without seeing another car. Bliss.
Take the A838 road (abused as part of the ghastly NC500 coastal route) via Durness at 5am in the pitch black, the wind blowing a gale, rain + windscreen wipers on full speed.
Picture avoiding a herd cows intruding across the road. Avoiding more than 10 deer.
At that surreal pre-caffeinated hour of the morning, seeing a signpost advertising “serving local seafood” makes me picture a restaurant waiter taking a scallop’s order at table.
The music of choice was Arcade Fire Mountains beyond Mountains – a song bemoaning city life with its world so small – a mental image contrasting with my surroundings, passing rural Scourie, pop 132 – the sort of place that takes longer to say the name than drive through.
And so I arrived at Rhicarn – the landscape black, clouds a grey plasma, just a little bit windy…
And the sun rose. Quite spectacularly, casting brilliant crepuscular rays from the horizon and underside edges of clouds.
A brilliant display of crepuscular rays, shadows coming from the edge of a cloud as the sun rose beside Canisp. 
Beautiful morning light: crepuscular rays streaming from a cloud edge, illuminating the sides of Suilven and Canisp and the Manse Loch in the foreground. 
A thick cloud obscured the freshly risen sun – its edges casting crepuscular rays over the hazy landscape. Autumn at my favoured viewpoint, Rhicarn in Assynt. 
A thick cloud obscured the freshly risen sun – its edges casting crepuscular rays over the hazy landscape. Autumn at my favoured viewpoint, Rhicarn in Assynt. 
Loch Uidh a’Chliabhain and the Manse Loch in the foreground; beautiful receding layers of mountains in the middle; a stunning dramatic display of crepuscular rays as a cloud obscured the rising sun in the distance. Projection: Rectilinear (0) FOV: 23 x 16 Ev: 11.38 
Loch Uidh a’Chliabhain and the Manse Loch in the foreground; beautiful receding layers of mountains in the middle; a stunning dramatic display of crepuscular rays as a cloud obscured the rising sun in the distance. Projection: Rectilinear (0) FOV: 23 x 16 Ev: 11.38
Throughout the sunrise, the light was spectacular – brightly illuminating colourful clouds.
…and casting a subtle hazy glow over the morning fog across Little Assynt, outlines of hills receding into the mist
As the sun rose, the ground heated just enough for the overnight dew to evaporate into a thick fog, filling the landscape enough to obscure the receding lines of hills into nothing but a bright haze beside the sun. Manse Loch / Loch Uidh a’Chliabhain remains clear, a mile into the foreground. 
Iconic Scottish landscape: the Manse Loch and layers of hills and mountains receding into the hazy distance
Perhaps my favourite image from the morning has to be Suilven, the unmistakable mountain on the horizon, catching a subtle patch of oblique sunlight on a flank.
Once the sun rose, I explored the Falls of Kirkaig outside Inverkirkaig. A nice long walk through lumpy landscape, to a large thundering waterfall.
Undulating landscape; gneiss outcrops amongst the grass and heather beside the path above the River Kirkaig gorge. 
An impressive waterfall – 60ft tall and flowing deep and fast into its splash-pool below. It’s also one of the scariest places I’ve been in a landscape; this view is from a small platform area, a steep descent down the left face of the gorge. With my own dog for company there was limited space even to turn around and plant the tripod and camera bag. 
As if the river Kirkaig wasn’t full and fast enough in the bottom of the gorge, walking back along the top the clouds were pretty dramatic, the light behind coming through as crepuscular rays above the silhouetted hills.
Returning to above Rhicarn, clouds had flowed in obscuring the mountains on the horizon, so I experimented flying the drone to admire the surrounding landscape.
There’s something about finding a thin strip of old tarmac that obviously used to be a road – it makes a connection with the story and heritage of a location. From researching on Pastmap, it appears there was not much road here at all throughout the 19th century – presumably a cattle drovers’ track or similar. Then the old tarmac was laid, following a circuitous path around the gneiss rock hills. Finally, some time after the 1960s, a new road, now the B869, was laid through it in a boring straight line, the old route relegated to a carpark yet visible and walkable either side of the road.
Behind this scene, on the way to Clachtoll, lies some beautiful Karst landscape (cnoc’n’lochan or knock-and-lochan), formed by underground erosion of softer rock, leading to a classic pattern of rocky knolls interspersed (almost 50-50 by area) with lochs.
The joys of knock-and-lochan Karst landscape: it’s almost all equal parts gneiss rocky outcrops and lochs with roads wending their way through the shapely landscape. 
Further along the road lies the Maiden Loch, of which I’ve been very fond since first catching sight of it years ago. That first view was on a sunny afternoon, the sky blue reflecting in the water. I flew the drone over it, to admire the gneiss landscape all the more…
Some of the above photos are available on my photo gallery website: ShinyPhoto: Assynt
Concerning Rocks
Some years ago I had a passing interest in the abstract shapes and forms rocks can take.Â
Recently I was out on the Aberdeenshire coast hunting photos with a friend, who, being impressed with the rocky coastline, wondered exactly where the Highland Boundary Fault emerged at its most north-eastern extremity.
After a bit of research (particularly exploring using the BGS‘s iGeology app), I tracked it to a small headland, Garron Point, beside the golf club outside Stonehaven.
From the outside it doesn’t look like much, but on closer inspection it is awesome.
There are actually two faults – a small one at the north-eastern end of Craigeven Bay corner with Garron Point, forming a small spur off the Highland Boundary Fault which clips the coastline from the town out to sea.
On the lowland side the bedrock is metabasalt, psammite and pelite (North Esk formation) – metamorphic bedrock formed around 461-485MYa in the Ordovician period. On the highland side is gritty psammite (Glen Lethnot grit formation) – around 541-1000MYa.
The fault itself can be tracked to a matter of a few feet – a view from beside one of the golf greens shows the junction of both faults, with a strip of incredibly deformed grey rock leading away some meters rather like a line of chewing-gum.
Prior to metamorphosis, this used to be sandstone. Now it forms a medium/coarse-grained rock, pale blue-green in colour, along the line of the Highland Boundary Fault. 
This boulder marks the intersection of two fault lines; a small one, running diagonally from top-right to bottom-left, and the Highland Boundary Fault, running front to back. The zoom lens has compressed perspective, but for a sense of scale, the foreground rock in the right is maybe 15-20′ away.
My favourite image is an abstract closeup – purply-red microbasalt meeting gritty blue-green psammite in a spray of cracks and marbling lines.
Prints are available on my ShinyPhoto photo gallery: Under Pressure
Partial Lunar Eclipse 20190716
A year or so ago there had been a drone pilots’ meet-up on the shores of Loch Leven in Kinross. Late Tuesday afternoon showed indications from TPE3D and Windy suggesting the light would be pleasant, clipping the surrounding hills around sunset. Further alerts from Twitter reminded me of a partial lunar eclipse, with optimum effect around 2235hrs; again, checking TPE3D I saw the moon would rise in the ESE beside / over Benarty Hill across Loch Leven.Â
Arriving a little early, I hunted a composition: the obvious jetties by the carpark at the end of the road have locked gates, as does a track along the shore; walking further round, it’s obvious there’s scenery to be had but the path is surrounded by a 5′ hence making it incredibly frustrating to find a composition. In the end I settled for a “layby” with three concrete plinth benches, just tall enough to see over the hedge and just wide enough for the tripod legs.Â
With half an hour to kill before the lighting and lunar eclipse kicked-in, IÂ flew the drone to survey the surroundings.
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Loch Leven Castle remains and Bishop’s Hill in Fife from Kinross 
Kinross House – symmetrical formal gardens, how ghastly.
Around 10pm the moon sneaked out from behind a cloud-bank over Benarty Hill, a perfect orange-red half-jaffa-cake in the Earth’s Shadow.
The last photo of the evening is still my favourite: can’t beat a few hazy clouds diffusing the glow of the still-red moon.
Loch Rannoch Sunset
A few photos from Sunday afternoon’s explorations around Loch Rannoch.
We walked through the Black Woods; whilst flying the drone near Camghouran I discovered remains of a building – a pile of stones and hints of mounds in the earth possibly in the shape of a former but’n’ben croft? – in a clearing in the forest.
Walking along the path through the woods, one comes across this clearing just off to the south; quite photogenic from ground level, it becomes even more interesting from 100m up in the air as the beautiful pale tree is apparently stuck on the end of a pile of stome rubble, the remains of some kind of building. 
The impressively tall fir trees of Camghouran / Croiscraig from above the Black Woods of Rannoch 
Sunset on the shore was beautiful; contrasting deep blue ominous dark blue clouds and vibrant orange sunset across the water.
Beautiful glowing colours: warm yellow, orange and red sunset light contrasting with the thick passing clouds near Camghouran, Loch Rannoch 
Beautiful glowing sunset gold and blue colours, near Camghouran, Loch Rannoch 
Beautiful glowing sunset gold and blue colours, near Camghouran, Loch Rannoch 
Beautiful glowing colours: warm yellow, orange and red sunset light contrasting with the thick passing clouds near Camghouran, Loch Rannoch 
Beautiful glowing sunset gold and blue colours, near Camghouran, Loch Rannoch
Prints of some of these photos will be available through my ShinyPhoto website: photos around Loch Rannoch.
First Munro
I’ve been over 3000′ twice before now – but for one I stopped short of the summit, and for the other we took the ski-lift up, so neither really counts as Munro-bagging.
In the Christmas/New-Year holiday week, friends and I spent a happy day climbing Schiehallion – a mountain we’ve known and photographed for a long time, but actually climbing it was a first, at least for some of us.
We couldn’t have asked for better conditions: fresh but basically dry, all the way up with mist blowing around the summit.
The top third is a tricky scramble over large boulders, but the view was totally worth it – my first Munro, my first glory and Brocken Spectre all in one.
On the way down we paused to admire the surroundings – an interplay of light, mist, undulating lochs and landscape and more mountains.
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight. 
Hints of misty cloud blowing gently away across the landscape. 
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight. 
Sunlit Rockery 
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight. 
Views found whilst descending Schiehallion: abstract patterns of large white fluffy clouds catching the sunlight.
Bring on the mountains – I have climbing to be doing 🙂
Winter around Rannoch
We made it up to the Rannoch area mid-afternoon in time to admire the pure calm stillness and misty distant mountain reflections on Loch Rannoch.
(Obligatory plug – the above image is now uploaded to my main fine-art / landscape website: Blue Stillness, Loch Rannoch.)
Drone photos also happened – flying around inversion layers over the Black Woods of Rannoch.
Patches of mist above Loch Rannoch near Croiscraig / Camghouran. 
..then we went for a stroll underneath all that mist, too.
And the forest was its usual welcoming self, albeit in subdued winter mode:
Black Woods of Rannoch late in the day – hints of mist rising in the distance, colours turned cool. It’s interesting how this end of the Black Woods is so much more densely planted – even though the Scots Pine is a native species, it’s still not naturally evolved. Indeed the history of the Black Woods includes attempts to log the forest – one can only presume this was an attempt to replant, with native species, but still with some potential degree of profit in mind. 
Black Woods of Rannoch
Birnam Hill: Winter
A couple of weeks ago in the middle of December, we were treated to a quick overnight blast of snow. It remains my favourite season for photography, so I staggered up Birnam Hill to fly in the late afternoon light.
Landscapes:
Snow-capped hills either side of the Highland Boundary Fault line – catching the last warm rays of sunset in the distance. 
Snow-capped hills either side of the Highland Boundary Fault line – catching the last warm rays of sunset in the distance.
Straight-down abstracts – trees and outlines of the Birnam Burn flowing through the snow:
Wiggly shapes – the Birnam Burn running down past Stare Bridge viewpoint. 
Wiggly shapes – the Birnam Burn running down past Stare Bridge viewpoint.
Ground-level tree abstracts:
Detail of tree twigs and filigree – lichen-covered branches silhouetted against the low winter sun. 
Detail of tree twigs and filigree – lichen-covered branches silhouetted against the low winter sun.
As an experiment to help learn my way around the Shotcut video editor, I made a short video of the area too:
ShinyPhoto: New Website
The old ShinyPhoto website was getting a bit long in the tooth. It saw several versions of Python come and go and increasingly suffered from bitrot. (Notably, a mutual incompatibility in the CGI module between python versions; it ran for so long the backend storage engine I used became deprecated with no easy way out but to revert to one I wrote myself – not a good reason to rely on third-party libraries!)
So, for the past couple of months I’ve been learning my way around Javascript and node.js and have replaced the site with a new gallery to show-off my photos.
Being me, it’s a bit geeky. With web-design there are so many angles to consider, but here are a few aspects that stick in the mind:
Technical: no XSLT; this is the first time in nearly 20 years where I’ve used a different templating language – in this case, Mustache since it does need to be able to produce non-HTML data as well.
Learning: there’s a whole ecosystem of node.js packages (NPMs) that have come in handy, from the Express webserver to image-resizing utilities (some of which are faster than others!).
Data: in my more professional work capacity I deal with data-storage on a daily basis, so it has some passing interest. One of the problems with the old site was its inability to extract metadata from images; because this instance’s primary focus is the organization and display of photos, I decided that the JPEG should contain all the data displayed – title, description, geotagging, keywords all extracted from one upload and the less manual editing effort required, the better. Essentially, digiKam is both organizer and implicit website editor on my desktop.
Database: with the unit of data being the JPEG, presented as a page per photo, that maps well into a document-oriented model such as one of the NoSQL JSON-based databases. Unfortunately MongoDB disgraced themselves by choosing a non-open-source licence recently, so I was pleased to discover CouchDB – a modular system sharing protocols (JSON-over-HTTP(S)) and query language (MangoDB) across different storage backends with the advantage that I can start from the PouchDB pure node.js implementation but switch to an external version of the same with a quick data-replication later if need be. So far, it’s coping fine with 1.1GB of JPEG data (stored internally as attachments) and 70MB of log data.
Configurability: several aspects of the site are configurable, from the internal and external navigation menus to the cache-validity/timeout on images.
Scalable: my initial thought was to keep image-resizing pure-javascript and rely on nginx caching for speed; however, that would lose the ability to count JPEG impressions (especially thumbnails), so I switched to a mixed JS/C NPM and now resizing is sufficiently fast to run live. The actual node.js code itself also runs cleanly – feels very snappy in the browser after the old python implementation.
Metadata/SEO: the change of templating engine has meant specific templates can be applied to specific kinds of pages, rather than imposing one structure across the whole site; different OpenGraph and Twitter-Card metadata applies on the homepage, gallery and individual photo pages.
Statistics: lots of statistics. There are at least three aspects where statistics rule:
- the usual analytics; it’s always handy to keep an eye on the most-popular images, external referrers, etc. The site uses its own application-level logging to register events on the page-impression scale, so the log data is queryable without having to dig through CLF webserver logs.
- how should a photo gallery be sorted? By popularity, by date? Do thumbnails count? What about click-through rate? The new site combines all three metrics to devise its own score-function which is recalculated across all images nightly and forms the basis of a display order. (It surprises me that there are photo-galleries that expect people to choose the sort order by hand, or even present no obvious order at all.)
- how should a photo-gallery be organized? My work is very varied, from bright colour to black and white, from sky to tree to mountain and water, from fast to long exposure, from one corner of the country to another, as the landscape leads; I did not want to impose a structure only to have to maintain it down the line. Accordingly, the new ShinyPhoto is self-organizing: within any slice through the gallery, a set of navigation tags is chosen that splits the images closest to half. Relatedly, the images on the homepage used to be a static selection, manually edited; now they are chosen dynamically by aspect-ratio and score.
- Marketing: some aspects of the layout now enjoy a/b testing – no cookies required, but another hash function determines the site appearance and I can check which work best over time.
So far, it’s proving pleasantly easy to live with; apart from the continual debugging and adding of new features – fortunately now slowing down – I’m adding photos at a rate of a handful a day both to the site and to a new RedBubble account in case anyone wants to buy them, one way or another.
So apparently I now like the whole node.js ecosystem. It’s blown away the cobwebs of running – or more accurately not-running – a legacy website, whilst retaining full control of the appearance and structure of the site not handing that over to some third-party site designer.
A good way to start a new year, methinks.
Craig Varr: Misty Landscape
Saturday was one of those strange days where the weather forecast changed, leaving me not particularly inspired where to go take the camera. But I carried on regardless up to Kinloch Rannoch and climbed Craig Varr. The views on the way up were pleasant: nice trees silhouetted against the sky, views along Loch Rannoch; as I reached the top of the crag, however, the mist came down reducing visibility to barely 100yd with low cloud flowing over the trees in front.
Descending, below the cloud level, I could see clouds zipping along above Loch Rannoch like a steam-train, the mountains opposite appearing and receding in the mist.
Sparse trees on Creag an Fhithirich, better known as the Sleeping Giant: a beautiful lumpy shapely crag in the foreground before Meall Dearg across the valley from Craig Varr. 
Simple things: abstract shapes of tree branches and twigs forming a fine filigree silhouetted against the sky beyond. 
Some of my favourite landscape elements: a contrasty plasma-cloud sky and overlaping layers of mountains receding into the distance, the other side of the Black Woods of Rannoch. 
Shape and solitude: a much-windswept lone tree battling the elements at the top of Craig Varr. 
Shape and solitude: a much-windswept lone tree battling the elements at the top of Craig Varr. 
On previous visits to the location I’ve tried to replicate another photographer’s work, getting the Sleeping Giant a mile away across the river in the corner of the photo; this time, however, thick mist at the top of the crag put paid to that idea, completely eliminating anything in the distance with a visibility of about 50yd. 
On previous visits to the location I’ve tried to replicate another photographer’s work, getting the Sleeping Giant a mile away across the river in the corner of the photo; this time, however, thick mist at the top of the crag put paid to that idea, completely eliminating anything in the distance with a visibility of about 50yd. 
An energetic climb up Craig Varr outside Kinloch Rannoch as the mist flowed over the mountains, followed by a quick descent to return to civilisation. This was taken from the way back down, as I paused to admire the clouds flowing fast along Loch Rannoch like steam trains. 
An energetic climb up Craig Varr outside Kinloch Rannoch as the mist flowed over the mountains, followed by a quick descent to return to civilisation. This was taken from the way back down, as I paused to admire the clouds flowing fast along Loch Rannoch like steam trains.