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.
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.
It’s no secret that Glen Affric is my favourite place on the planet. We’ll come to why, later. Meanwhile, the first in a short series of posts studying the more characterful shapes of trees at the glen.
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.
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.
Two scenes caught my eye on a stroll around the town. First, leaves basking in the proper sunlight of a fresh spring are always pleasant to behold. Second, I always think the new black buds of an ash tree look like pads on a paw – so, gimme three!
Part two of a lunchtime stroll around Perth – floral closeups, a study in sprays of lines filling the frame.
I have no idea how the dog’s ball toy got stuck in that tree.
When in doubt, grab one old manual prime lens, stick it on the camera and go for a stroll around the South Inch in Perth. This is the first of a small handful of posts of things that caught my eye one lunchtime, starting with the obvious view of St Leonard’s in the Fields Church of Scotland across the playing fields.