when a landscape location goes sour

Posted on by

I don’t know how to tag some of these photos: on the one hand, a place that’s been a good walk in the trees for over a decade, but on the other, one that’s now showing the tarnish of human influence. Landscape photographer’s idyll or sad anger?

The Falls of Bruar present several well-known scenes. My own story is of having bought a tripod to do justice to a particular view and then using it to shoot a “hole in the ground in failed light” instead, thus getting one of my most-popular photos on flickr. I’ve been back probably 10 times over more years and enjoyed the stroll up the side of the gorge, admired the rocks, watched the three waterfalls doing their thing.

First there’s the regular cliché photo approaching the lower bridge – everyone gets the view from the top of the gorge opposite the lower bridge; I flew the drone down into the gorge and shot it from more on a level with the natural arch:

Nice rocks – psammite and semi-pelite as most of the Highlands, with the shear strata arising from the end of the Loch Tay fault-line.

Around the corner, there’s a viewpoint amongst the rocks of the second waterfall above the lower bridge:

Rising above the gorge one can see the pine trees lining the Bruar Water – it also shows how the middle cascades extend much further upstream than might be expected from the compressed perspective of ground level:

Abstract view of the lower Falls of Bruar

However, this visit was far from happy. Apart from some offensive uncouth ned muttering “hope you lose your drone” as he passed by, and the hordes of random unwelcome people thinking they were entitled to pester the dog, there are massive botanical problems: the two bridges have been closed so the path up the right side of the gorge is inaccessible due to tree works – possibly because of disease although I’m unconvinced this is the whole reason.

Bridge closed

Walking up the left side of the gorge instead, the area is infested with non-native invasive rhododendron bushes; the Forestry on the adjacent hillsides has been harvested leaving a horrendous unsightly barren landscape; the burns and tributaries beside the path are in a dire state of disrepair also.

Who wants to walk along here?

This is the trouble with well-known landscape locations; as photographers we like the illusion of wilderness, or at least that places are natural. Bruar has become no more than an ill-kempt garden with a water-feature running through the rockery. The light and shade and calming deep greens are no more to be seen.

I’m giving it a decade to recover before revisiting.

Sma’ Glen: liminal landscape

Posted on by

Many years ago, as I was buying my first ever house in Perth, I remember the solicitor advocating the Sma’ Glen as a landscape to explore and photograph. He wasn’t wrong, but it’s taken over a decade to really start to explore it properly.

First there’s the natural appreciation of the place – light and landscape.

Taken right above the Highland Boundary Fault line looking north to the Sma’ Glen, Dallick House and plantation on the right and Roman Signal Station just visible as concentric rings in the bracken above a small burn.

Then comes the realization, due to geology, that the incredibly lumpy landscape is actually due to the Highland Boundary Fault running right through it – here, from left to right, along the line of the base of the hills and mountains. Lowlands beneath and behind, Highlands beyond to the north.

The second realization, due to heritage, is that the Romans had a series of “glen-blocker” forts along the Gask Ridge, of which one was situated here, at Fendoch. They even had a Signal Station across the road(!) – more accurately, across the fault line too – to alert the fort to incoming invasion from the north.

These days the fort itself is no great shakes – a few stone walls remaining and some faint outlines of rectangular structures beyond – and the Signal Station is a couple of concentric rings and a hint of more structure in the bracken.

Of course the final realization is thanks to the drone: rather that just the “intimate landscape” features within a few meters of one’s nose, one becomes aware of the landscape on a different scale of multiple miles and the way it’s divided up by roads and habitations (and how those have changed over the millenia).

Roads slicing up the landscape: taken above the Roman Signal Station at the foot of the Sma’ Glen, looking south-east over the Highland Boundary Fault to Fendoch Roman Fort (between the pylons and Stroness hill in the distance) and thence along Glen Almond.

Around Strathnaver

Posted on by

Strathnaver is a beautiful area – rural life, peaceful and quiet, where the only traffic jam is a herd of sheep trundling along the road beside the loch. Simple and elemental, a play of sky and land, light and limited human influence.

Outside Altnaharra:

Beside Loch Naver:

Around Auchterarder 2

Posted on by

The results of the second day’s lunchtime hunt for photos without meaning or purpose. I switched to my 28-105mm lens, again using only 28mm and f/3.5, now in aperture-priority mode with -1/3EV compensation, still in daylight whitebalance and with the same processing and toning profiles in RawTherapee.

Around town:

And in the surrounding countryside:

Trying something a little different

Posted on by

For years now, my photo-processing workflow has been 100% open-source. However, in the interests of greater portability – hack on photos whilst on the go – and partly gratuitously for the sake of variety, I recently acquired an iPad Pro 10.5″ and installed the Affinity Photo app.

As a user experience goes, it’s really quite pleasant. The best way to synchronise files around the LAN seems to be Seafile, which is open-source and available for Linux, iOS and android. My Linux-based workflow regularly produces 64-megapixel images, working on multiple intermediate TIFF files, 16-bit ProPhotoRGB-linear; somewhat surprisingly, seafile, the iPad and Affinity Photo seem able to handle files around 450MiB in size. There are a few small gotchas – I had to import a few ICC colour profiles by hand and as yet, there doesn’t seem to be a way to customise export options (so you have to select JPEG 99% sRGB lanczos yourself afresh every time); I’m sure these things will come in time however.

So here’s a shot from last Sunday afternoon. As I was heading out of Muthill I saw this characterful old tree in a field; on the return journey a few hours later, not only was it still there but the clouds were darker in the background and the golden sunlight caught the bare branches. A very quick bit of parking and even quicker sprint back to the optimum viewpoint and it looked stunning. So I processed it a little further, realising an intention for how it should look that was apparent from the start.

Sunlit tree

Glen Lyon

Posted on by

In the middle of January, I went for a drive around Glen Lyon. There was enough snow lying that the road was slippy on corners, so I didn’t get anywhere near as far in as I would have liked, but still, the light was a special kind of low cool glow.

Just a few twists along the road into Glen Lyon from Fortingall – we’re going that way into the glowing light, folks.

Trees draped like a fuzzy fir coat over a snowy mountain

 

This is a pretty commonly shot view from a small layby – but beautiful in the cold winter light, showing the shapes of craggy mountains:

A beautiful view – rugged crags descending to a smooth glacial U-shaped glen

And that was as far as I dared go for the snow. Turning back, I stopped by the roadside to check out a particularly photogenic little lochan lurking on the edge of the forestry:

Snow resting on a frozen lochan, Glen Lyon – I loved the way it sits on the edge of the forestry.

And I just had to take a photo of the beloved Doglet while I was there 😉

The one and only…. 🙂

By the side of the river, dusk was long gone and the blue hour had well and truly set in.

Snow lying on craggy hillsides beside the River Lyon

 

Ordinary Landscape

Posted on by

The other day, we had a proponent of “creative landscape photography” presenting at the photographic society. His results were outstanding. I even approved of some of his philosophy, which is saying something.

But … some of his decisions in the execution of that philosophy seemed off.

It’s great to hear someone ignoring the maxim “get it right in camera”, espousing instead the idea of “getting good data at the scene” and affirming the role of post-processing to polish the result instead. I believe strongly in the very same thing myself.

It seems strange that such a philosophy would lead to rejoicing in a camera’s dynamic range – no matter claiming to have recovered 4 stops from the shadows, it would still have been done better by HDR at the scene – where the data comes from photons working in the hardware’s optimum performance zone.

It seems strange that one would criticize such a camera for “not seeing the same way we do”, and go on to say that we need to enhance the impression of depth by using lower contrast in the distance.
The sensor’s response curve is smooth; it will accurately reflect the relative contrast in areas by distance. The only way it would not is if one’s processing were to actively include tonemapping with localized contrast equalization. Left to its own devices, the result will accurately reflect what it was like to be there – one of the greater compliments a landscape photographer could receive.

The problem is not with the landscape; it’s with the way that photography should aspire to relate to the landscape. “Creative” seems to be a euphemism for multiplying and enhancing every aspect, be it strong foreground (make it a yet stronger perspective with a tilt lens), contrasty light (more contrast slider), colour (still more saturation and vibrace to breaking point) and so on. The results create impact but without story or message; visual salt without an underpinning of a particular taste.

Of course we know that “realism” is a phantom. It’s true that no camera will capture quite the same as anyone sees. However, let me introduce a new word: believability, precisely the quality that one could have been there at the same time. That seems like a valid goal.

Have some believable landscape images – they mean a little to me; that suffices.

Around Mull

Posted on by

A small selection of photos from a weekend trip to Mull last September – a couple of views around Lochdon, Duart Castle from the ferry and Lismore Lighthouse basking in the sunlight  on the way back.

A Tree

Posted on by

Time for something a little different, and back in the original spirit of this blog as a source for mobile photos, as well.

I spotted this tree in the middle of Craigie in Perth – perhaps an unexpected location for so elegant a life-form, and testament to the selectivity of photography. Camera never lies? If I’d framed this any lower, there would have been a fence and bunch of buildings and take-away shops in the way.

A birch tree in the middle of Craigie, Perth

A birch tree in the middle of Craigie, Perth

Some experimental post-processing using the GIMP with the `Beautify’ plugin, amongst other things.

Trees

Posted on by

Pine forests: what’s not to like? Scots Pine trees stand tall and proud, burnished orange-gold catching the sun; birch trees get a bit old and develop gnarly character.

These are from a stroll in the Black Woods of Rannoch, on the south shore of Loch Rannoch.

I noticed Gunnar’s Tree, named for Gunnar Godwin, a chap whose fondness for these woods led him to manage them and agitate for them to be designated a Caledonian Forest Reserve.