A couple of photos from around Dundee Law:
looking south across the River Tay
The radio transmitter on top of the Law:
Looking west over Lochee, with the Menzieshill Water Tower and Camperdown Jute Mill across to Perthshire hills in the distance:
Sony NEX-7, 2-stop circular polarizer filter, HDR +/-1 EV.
A few photos from a walk around Portpatrick on a sunny evening, starting with the Royal Navy helicopter practising for Lifeboat Week, taking in some favoured old haunts and seascapes.
Video:
A few weeks ago I ordered a pair of extension tubes for the Sony NEX-7; today I got around to experimenting with them for the first time. It’s quite scary seeing so much dust on the live-view LCD panel and realising it’s actually on the front of the lens.
Two tangerines and an apple.
Three Balls – two tangerines and an apple
Fisherman’s Barometer, St Andrews
The fisherman’s barometer, corner of North Castle and North Streets, St Andrews.
A little experimentation in The Gimp, to create a synthetic “scratches” texture layer – using plasma clouds, old-photo simulation, distortions and other trickery.
Colourful kite against white clouds and a blue sky
I can think of much worse ways to spend a sunny Sunday afternoon than flying a kite with friends.
No doubt this is one of the oldest conundrums, generally long-since answered. The conventional approach is that black&white is meant to be an end in itself (a choice made at the time of shooting rather than an option or fallback in processing), in order that the eye be drawn to forms and shapes and textures, appreciated for their own sake without the distractions of realistic colour. As such, you’d expect most images to work either as black&white or as colour; it can also be somewhat annoying when one sees an image presented in more than one way as though the photographer couldn’t decide. It’s even more irksome when you are that photographer. Today I reprocessed an image taken a couple of months ago, and was struck by how it looked in the intermediate colour form before applying the intended toning.
Shapes in the Dark – colour
Shapes in the Dark – black and white
In this case, I contend the two images both stand alone independently well, and they convey different things; further, the the colour gives a means of distinguishing the silhouetted trees from the surrounding foliage that the black&white image does not, making it look moodier.
A hedgehog living in the parents’ garden – a delightful honour to see the wee thing strolling around of an evening, chomping on the crunchy food left out.
Yay hedgie!!
White clouds in blue skies; grass blowing around in warm sunlight; horses that amble across their field to come and say hello as one passes by the roadside.
Appreciating the aesthetics of brokenness and decay in suburban Yorkshire.
Decrepit Warburton’s lorry
Flaking paint textures
Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept, an appreciation of beauty in imperfection, seen for example in reconstructing tea cups from broken crockery fragments, contrasting with Western ideals of unblemished perfection.
Sometimes, one’s photography takes quite a turn.
A few years ago, I was all interested in large-format landscape work, when a fellow member of the photo-club inadvertently threw the spanner in the works by saying his particular approach gave results that represented how he felt at a given scene. Hang around: how come every LF landscapie I know feels exactly the same way then, if that way is defined by 5×4 format, tripod low on the ground, golden-hours (normally morning, strangely), portrait orientation, near-mid-far, Fuji Velvia film, grad-ND sky and rear-tilt perspective, amongst other things? Having seen that as a clique fashion rather than individual expression, I rejected it and promptly went digital, making a photo a day using overcast dull light to show the shapes of trees in the local woodland realistically.
Last Saturday marked something of a milestone: 4 years of posting a daily photo on Blipfoto. Over time, the idea of forcing a photo a day (especially one as considered and well-processed as I strived to achieve) has become artistically unhealthy and my enthusiasm for the site has waned considerably, so I called it a day.
In some ways, the future looks to be a return to landscape; certainly I intend shooting a lot more of it than I have previously, but I’m intending letting the inspiration drive matters not forcing it by the calendar. I’m hoping to post more often on this blog as well, but using the real camera as well as the mobile, so there’s been a bit of re-branding happening too…
So it was, on Sunday afternoon, with head slightly reeling from the decision, I set off with Dog for an afternoon stroll, with no idea how far or where we’d go except that I wanted it to be a long walk. And it was the longest we’ve been on since moving here, I think – left Portpatrick and walked past the golf course to Port Mora where I usually turn inland and walk through the Dunskey Glen, but this time I continued past Port Kale and the transmission huts (where cables came ashore for monitoring communication during the Troubles in Northern Ireland)…
Transmission huts in Port Kale, outside Portpatrick
…and with a bit of determined plodding along the Southern Upland Way, the next thing we saw was Kilantringan Lighthouse in the distance.
Kilantringan Lighthouse along the Southern Upland Way, black and white with my favoured platinum toning
It took 2.5 hours, so probably 8 miles or thereabouts, given very few photo-stops and some leisurely steep bits.
All in all, an excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Detail of raindrops on a collection of sweet pea flower petals.
Some of the first apples beginning to form on a tree in the garden.
…grey submarine. First time I’ve spotted a submarine out in the wild, so to speak. This one was lurking somewhere between Portpatrick and Northern Ireland yesterday lunchtime.
Last Thursday tea-time, the Queen’s Baton came to Stranraer as part of the run-up to the Commonwealth Games. It was quite fun to watch the crowds milling around in anticipation – arguably made for more interesting street-photos than the baton itself.
Noctilucent (“night-shining”) clouds are a rare phenomenon: the highest clouds in the atmosphere, at altitudes between 47-53 miles, consisting of tiny crystals of water ice about 100nm in diameter and requiring very cold temperatures to form. Not fully understood, they are a recently discovered meterological phenomenon with no record of their observation before 1885.
They also make a beautiful display of pale bright fibrous blue against the cobalt velvet of night…
Two views, part of a stitched panorama.