Edinburgh Fog

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On Sunday, on a whim, I went down to Edinburgh. As always, the city was fairly heaving but I revisited one of my favourite locations – the Radical Road along the Salisbury Crags, which affords an excellent view from Blackford Hill round to the Parliament buildings.

So I tested the Pen-F’s timelapse video ability for the first time. The camera makes it a breeze: set up the scene (lots of filters to cope with the lighting), set it in aperture-priority mode, 300 frames at 5s intervals, push the button and off it goes. And nature provided! – simply point the camera at the city and watch the sea haar roll in, great low clouds of misty fog, obscuring the castle within minutes.

First time I’ve made a 4K video… unfortunately the results from the camera weren’t quite up to the quality I expected, so I reprocessed all the RAW ORF files on the notebook in bulk (using RawTherapee) and rendered the official video myself with ffmpeg.

I also made a wide panorama – 5 frames each in 80-megapixel high resolution mode; lots of image data, nicely stitched in Hugin as usual.

Birnam Hill

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I’m losing count of how many times I’ve been up Birnam Hill near Dunkeld, which is no bad thing.

My favourite waterfall is still running and the scenery from Stair Bridge viewpoint, overlooking the line of the Highland Boundary Fault running past Rohallion Lodge is still beautiful.

Herewith, a comparison of colour vs black-and-white renditions.

Gardening is People

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Some decades ago, my folks were planning their garden; a friend of the family who happened to be an old gardener recommended two things: a mahonia bush and a snake-bark maple. The latter is gone but the mahonia remains, decades on.

Everywhere I consider home has had at least one mahonia – it’s a measure of garden completeness. Today I planted one in the back mud-patch and thought of Tom of old.

Neighbours from Argyll days once recommended an Osmanthus. Today I planted one and thought of them.

The willow tree came directly from friends in Argyll as well and was planted a few months ago. (I’m not convinced it’s thriving, however!)

It wouldn’t be the first place I’ve lived to have had hebes in the borders either.

So. That’s the heart of a gardener, is other people remembered.

Around Glen Etive

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For the first time in several years I spent a very happy afternoon wandering around Glen Coe / mostly Glen Etive, revisiting well-known sites – Buachaille Etive Mor from the River Coupall, the head of Loch Etive and the viewpoint above Loch Tulla – the light was stunning, a good test of the Olympus Pen-F camera. I also experimented with the 7-14mm ultrawide lens – it seems the best thing to do is point it straight at the sun and enjoy the flare; composition becomes a matter of seeking strong foregrounds.

Monadhliath Memories

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A long time ago I was privileged to own a small bolthole property with an IV2 postcode – my own little patch of the proper Highlands. I visited it every fortnight, tended it well, and eventually couldn’t spare the time to keep it up as base moved beyond a reasonable commute distance.

A couple of weekends ago I revisited the area for the first time in years.

Some things have changed: a little traffic-light-controlled bridge is no longer there as the B851 has been slightly widened in parts; some of the surrouding hillsides have been clear-felled of their trees. But otherwise the lie of the land remains largely mercifully untouched. Strathnairn, with its rocky crags and landscapes of naught but light and water, still exudes a permeating emptiness – a present absence – that turns the role of viewer on its head, asking you “so what do you stand for?”.

Of course, my other favourite afternoon escape route was a few miles up the road to the comparative civilisation of Dores. That hasn’t changed much either. The view down Loch Ness is just as impressive, and the solar halo just hanging in the sky was both awe-inspiring and uplifting.

There’s a chain, that binds us all in lives of wonder
There’s a chain, hold it closely as you go
Let this name be your family and your shelter
Take this chain all your days, don’t let go.

Buchanty Spout

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Sedimentary conglomerate rocks, a bend in the River Almond and some nice late afternoon light.

I’ve never explored this area particularly, but on a whim having passed through the hamlet of Buchanty the previous day, with a day to spare and remembering someone in the local photographic society having posted a nice photo of the Spout, I thought I’d have a look.

Even on an average day the flow was quite awesome – a small gorge, but deep water flowing fast along its way like a bubbling jacuzzi.

Olympus Pen-F in high-resolution mode; circular polarizer, an ND8 and grad-ND4 filters and HDR bracketing to control the lighting.

In the Woods

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The Black Woods of Rannoch are a particularly favourite stroll. One of the Caledonian Forest reserves (the only one I know in Perthshire), they boast many native and rare flora species – Scots Pine, birch, rowans, alder, willow and juniper and lichens and fungi – as well as being home to wild deer (as I discovered when a stag suddenly trundled right across the path barely 20yd in front of me).

Interaction with mankind is a different matter. There’s something about the flow and depth of river water in the weir that creeps me out, but the text on the last sign-post says:

The Black Wood of Rannoch Canals

Before you you can see a ditch cut through the heather. This dates from around 1800 and once formed part of a York Building Company scheme to remove timber from the Black Wood of Rannoch. In order to extract the logs they devised a system of canals (the ditch before you was the lowest of the three canals).

The scheme provided a great deal of work and employed most of the men and women of the district. Over four miles of canals had to be dug using picks and shovels. The trees then had to be felled before being floated along the canals and then down a chute to Loch Rannoch. The logs were tied together in rafts for the journy down the loch to Kinloch Rannoch, then sent singly down the Rivers Tummel and Tay to their final destination at Perth and Dundee.

If the project had been a success, the Black Wood of Rannoch would have ben completely destroyed. In the event, the plan to float the logs down the rivers did not work. The scheme was abandoned, and the wood saved.

Employment just does justify desecration. The woods are too special.

Olympus Pen-F: first excursion photos

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I’ve not wasted time before getting out and about with the new camera. I saw a photo on flickr of the sea stack at Muchalls on the Aberdeenshire coast, near Stonehaven, which prompted a visit to explore the area and drive through lots of scenery. Unfortunately the path down to the beach was too slippy and muddy, so I settled for a higher vantage-point overlooking the rocky beach.

This was taken using an Olympus 12-60mm f/2.8-f/4 four-thirds lens with adapter, circular polariser, ND4 and grad-ND4 filters.

Rocky coastline and small sea-stacks at Muchalls, Aberdeenshire

Rocky coastline and small sea-stacks at Muchalls, Aberdeenshire

I continued to drive all around the A93 loop from near Stonehaven to Banchory and Ballater – the road lined with favourable Scots pine trees. The sun set as I was passing the Muir of Dinnet. This sunset silhouette was made using my old Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 lens:

The real delight of the day’s drive was rattling down Glenshee in the dusk. It was -2C outside; with the light having faded, the sky was a beautiful shade of cobalt blue, against which the silvery white of the pure snow capping the mountains was simply breathtaking.

Sirius Rising over Leacann Dubh and Creag Leacach – I know it was Sirius because by the end of the combined 64-second exposure, Orion was well visible to its right.

It feels so good to be back enjoying the landscape again.

Birnam Hill: Details

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A handful more photos from an afternoon stroll around Birnam Hill – little things that caught my eye. There was a small burn flowing down one of the paths, mostly covered in amazing semi-fractured ice crystals; patterns abound.

Snowy Strathearn

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The view driving south-west along the A9 just above Forteviot is quite a treat – an open expanse of Strathearn with the river and road flowing through the landscape, bounded on the south by the Ochil hills.

On a snowy winter’s day with passing sunlight, even better!

Herewith, a few photos taken in the course of a few minutes as a filthy dark cloud rolled in.

Nacreous Clouds

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It was a pretty decent red sunset but seeing polar stratospheric (nacreous) clouds for the first time is the icing on the cake. Awesomely beautiful.

According to wikipedia, polar stratospheric clouds are clouds in the winter polar stratosphere at altitudes of 15,000–25,000 meters (49,000–82,000 ft). They are best observed during civil twilight when the sun is between 1 and 6 degrees below the horizon. They are implicated in the formation of ozone holes. The effects on ozone depletion arise because they support chemical reactions that produce active chlorine which catalyzes ozone destruction, and also because they remove gaseous nitric acid, perturbing nitrogen and chlorine cycles in a way which increases ozone destruction.

Hunting Kelpies

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Situated right beside the M9, the Kelpies are a bit of a tourist trap, but it had to be done…

Rather stupidly, I set out with intentions of making long exposure photos of the kelpies – and then found after a few miles down the road that I’d left all my filters in the other camera bag. So, f/22 was deployed, along with a lot of stacking for synthetic long exposures. In one case it took over 60 images median-blended to eliminate the humans milling around. Still, it’s probably better that way – I’m always happier when image data arises from photons than algorithms or localized manipulation.

And some of my favourite shots are from the boardwalk through the marshes on the way back to the carpark.