Around Bangour

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Situated outside Livingston, the psychiatric hospital at Bangour Village was founded in 1906 as Edinburgh District Asylum – one of the first in Scotland to be modelled on a village. In 1918 it housed up to 3000 patients. During the second World War, patients were transferred temporarily to Hartwoodhill Hospital. Around 1924-1930 it gained a multi-denominational church in the centre of the village.

These days the site consists of several listed buildings, most in increasing states of decay – ideal territory for urban exploration.

A few views from ground level:

And a handful of photos made with the drone:

Also see an aerial 360º drone panorama of Bangour I made using Hangar360.

 

The final ward closed in 2004 – worryingly one of those “in my lifetime” things…

Around Rosal

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This was a strange place of varying thoughtfulness. Having previously visited Aoineadh Mor and found its handful of ruined crofts more thought-provoking, this was rather the opposite experience: having far more settlements dating back thousands of years including cairns, a souterrain and remains of crofts, with a history of particularly brutal evictions, there’s no real viewpoint from which one can see the extent of the clearing and experience all the time or place at once, so it lacks a certain atmosphere.

One thought, however. The Highland Clearances were mostly for the purposes of replacing crofting (seen as not cost-effective) with sheep farming (supposedly profitable). In practice, it’s a story about commercial failure: the sheep did not prove profitable, rendering the grassland barren; the monoculture spruce woodlands being farmed as the latest cash-crop are also barren, failing to nourish the land; the eviction of folks living a subsistence existence (which increasingly feels the innocent honest approach) was an offence against humanity – and yet the blasted sheep still remain.

The state of the Forestry Commission’s tourist information boards also being cast down on the ground, however, did provoke thought – is that sheer vandalism, an artistic statement about care and decay of property, or super-artistic irony that preservation itself should go the same way of all things?

 

The landscape did provide a few moments of beautiful contrast, illuminating the foreground trees against the shadowy dark might of Ben Loyal, however:

Ben Loyal from Rosal Clearance village

Ben Loyal from Rosal Clearance village

Around Altnaharra

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Then came the churches, then came the schools
Then came the lawyers, then came the rules
Then came the trains and the trucks with their loads
And the dirty old track was the telegraph road
Then came the mines, then came the ore
Then there was the hard times, then there was a war
Telegraph sang a song about the world outside
Telegraph road got so deep and so wide
Like a rolling river
– Dire Straits, Telegraph Road

I’ve known of Altnaharra for many years, gradually accumulating little facts about the area. Situated in the middle of the far northern Highlands, it doesn’t get much more remote. Jointly with Braemar, it holds the record for the coldest recorded temperature in the UK – at -27.2ºC I’m glad I wasn’t there at the time.
However, last November on holiday – gravitated north as always – I found myself with a not-completely-planned day where the best weather indicated a visit was indeed possible.
As habitations go, it doesn’t occupy much space in the landscape.The high street (there is none other) is the A836, a single-lane road with passing places. Within about a 200m radius it boasts a handful of houses, an outsized hotel, couple of petrol pumps and a primary school. The village centre is barely a bend in the road with a pleasant Scots Pine tree and the Allt na h’Aire burn from which the place takes its name. I do love the little epiphanies when one makes the connection between the Gaelic names and their anglicised equivalents – in this case I was wondering if the burn in a photo had a name, looked it up, saw the gaelic and the pronunciation dawned on me: “that IS Altnaharra”.

 

Of course it is also very much Runrig territory; sitting at the end of Strathnaver, it suffered in the Clearances – I wonder what size of catchment area is required to keep that primary school active.

Autumn Holiday Day 2: Assynt: Rainbows, Rocks and Stories

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The first day of the holiday was spent in Glen Affric and working my way up to Rogart; on day 2, the weather looked best to the north-west so I drove over to my favourite Assynt for the day.

Assynt: Land of Rainbows

Even before I’d got in the car, I saw the first rainbow of many across the glen:

A sign of things to come: before leaving the lodge for the day, a nice rainbow appeared along the glen.

The road was every bit as narrow-veering-nonexistent as I remembered – always makes journeys feel that much longer than the mere count of miles covered – and increasingly the previous night’s snow-fall intruded onto the edges of the tarmac. Good challenging fun.

I only stopped once to make a photo of Ben More Assynt from across the landscape:

The first snow of late autumn covering Beinn Mor Assynt, illuminated in a nice pattern of dappled morning sunlight.

As I passed Inchnadamph heading toward Loch Assynt, the weather turned very mixed – phases of sunshine and hail alternating every couple of minutes – with some fantastic rainbows. It didn’t take long waiting in a layby before another one illuminated Ardvreck Castle – drive around the corner of the loch and walk down the castle and in next to no time, behold another rainbow. You certainly learn to read the signs pretty quickly – as soon as a bow appears, put your jacket hood up as the rain will be along shortly.

I also took a couple of photos of the Inchnadamph Caves, a distinctive rock formation on the Moine Thrust zone, in which bones of Eurasian lynx, Arctic fox, reindeer (dating back 47,000 years), polar bears (the only evidence of their presence in Scotland) and humans (back to 3000BCE) have been found:

Continuing north up the B894 a little way, even in dull cloudy light the surrounding mountains were beautiful, sprinkled with a heavy dusting of snow. I stopped at Loch na Gainmhich and explored around the frozen peat-bog by the roadside a bit:

Sky above
The bulk of Glas Bheinn across
Loch na Gainmhich filling the corrie
Peat bog covered in heather
Frozen puddle
And it wasn’t even winter yet – just the first snows of the season giving a thick dusting coat over the mountains. With the sun hiding behind clouds, the light was a beautiful dull grey.

Turn around and what do you know, but there’s another vibrant double rainbow seemingly making its way over the landscape as well:

I stood beside at the top of the hill beside Loch Gainmhich looking over the undulating landscape to Loch nan Eun, watching the rainbow and its secondary bow evolve.

Assynt: Moody Wailing Widows

Having seen photos online of the Wailing Widow waterfall very near to the road, as the Allt Chranaidh leaves Loch na Gainmhich, I spent hiked over to the edge of the loch and, faced with a stiff wind and slippery frozen peat-bog underfoot, decided it wiser to approach the falls from the bottom of the 30m gorge instead. Not the easiest terrain either way – many large boulders, some slipped down from the sides of the gorge, requiring scrambling to cross with tripod and camera gear. From the little carpark barely off the road, there’s just a moderate river running away:

I’ve visited Assynt several times over the years but was quite surprised to discover a “new” waterfall via various online contacts, and one right by the roadside at that.
There is a track to the top from round the corner in the road, but a hike across frozen peat-bog in high wind was not the safest so we approached from the bottom of the gorge instead.

The first sight of the falls is quite starkly atmospheric:

I made it quite close to the splash-down, where it was tricky taking photos for all the spray covering the filter:

In Assynt, you can’t even sit down in the driver’s seat without admiring the landscape – in this case, as the clouds passed overhead a small gap let a little light illuminate the flanks of Quineag, grey rock dusted with snow:

A view from the car window, of all places – just as I was preparing to drive off, this little patch of light on the great snow-covered grey sides of Quineag caught my eye.

 

From Unapool I drove back along Loch Assynt and out into the Stoer / Clachtoll peninsula, some of my favourite rugged landscape.

Assynt: Land of Heritage

The area around the B869 fairly reeks of history. Starting way back, the geology is awesome: gneiss bedrock (two kinds – Lewisian and Scourie group) interspersed with several minor fault-lines and the Scourie dyke swarm (metamicrogabbro).

This makes for a lumpy cnoc and lochan landform characterized by many rock hillocks interspersed with lochs and lochans in between.

Some of my favourite landscape, absolutely typical of the north-west coast of Scotland: Gneiss, in this case from the Scourian group dating anywhere from 2.5 to 4 billion years old; originally igneous but also subject to later metamorphism.
This whole part of the Assynt peninsula, enjoyed by the “loop” road B869, is a large swarm of metamicrogabbro and amphibolite dykes (formed 1.6 to 2.5 billion years ago).

On a sunny day, the blue sky reflects beautifully in the lochs by the roadside; however, this was not to be this time. Behind the above photo, the road continues wending its way around sharp corners and up and over a rise to one of the most awesome viewpoints I know, with five mountains of Assynt spanning the field of view along the horizon. The weather was not the greatest – rather than a clear vista, there were clouds rolling across the landscape from behind, intersecting with mist rising off Suilven.

Spending a couple of hours standing watching the scenery (and occasionally getting rained-on in the process) afforded me time to ponder the road in front. Travelling up the B869 there are a couple of tracks to either side with entrances blocked by boulders. Obviously there used to be an old route – very narrow at barely a car’s width, with a couple of sharp S-bends, tarmac degrading and obscured by heather/bracken/undergrowth – and the new tarmac has been laid in a much straighter line, with the viewpoint carpark repurposing some of the old route. It makes me wonder what the place would have been like one or two centuries ago, how the road might have evolved from a drovers’ track or similar.

Suila Bheinn

I walked along as much of the old road as I could find, conscious of a sense of heritage and change in land usage.

There’s a shrine on an Assynt hillside
Made of earth and salt and rain
Now you walk out in the morning
With your sacrifice of change

– Runrig, Saints of the Soil

Assynt: Tasty Colour

Having heard about the beach nearby I left Rhicarn and explored a different road, to Achmelvich.

On the way, the sunset was stunning. A brilliant red-orange ball floating above the horizon, offset against the cold slate-grey clouds and paler blue water of Loch Roe. Even partially obscured by cloud, the colour contrast was awesome – and with a whiff of sea-salt on the breeze, put me in mind of a west-coast single malt whisky…

Driving the last stretch of the road to Achmelvich, the sun set right in front of me, a large orange-red ball above the water. The combination of colours, cold blue slate grey sky and warm yellow-orange heather, coupled with the sea breeze put me in mind of a fine west-coast single malt whisky…

The only real downside of the day was Achmelvich itself. The beach at the end of the road is very pretty, clear pale sand, the water beneath the waves’ foam having a beautiful clear blue-green colour. However, the beach is surrounded by a ghastly caravan park which in itself suffices to detract from the scenery. The place is littered with anti-dog signage – at one point I counted no fewer than 6 signs in visible sight with a picture of a dog saying the animal “doesn’t know better” concerning handling of litter, followed by several “dogs on leads” and “no dogs beyond this point”. I found the attitude quite aggressively hateful and will not certainly not patronize the caravan park because of it.

Still.

The light of the world keeps shining
Bright in the primal glow
Bridging the living dust to dust
Such a long long way to go
– Runrig, Saints of the Soil

Assynt: By Night

Having finished with the southern half of the Stoer/Clachtoll peninsula, I made my way back to Rogart for the night, but passing along Loch Assynt in the dark I had to stop and take a photo of a cluster of Pine trees near the shore. With a sufficient and necessarily long exposure (2 minutes!) to register anything, I like how the trees look almost stuck onto a smooth silver surface.

My fondness for the area – its geology, its weather (however extreme it felt!), its light and its rugged landscape remains unabated.

Above the Highland Boundary Fault

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About 3-4 years ago, I first visited Birnam Hill. Made it around Duncan’s Hill to the south and through the woods… As I walked a path between old and new forestry, I wondered why there was a sharp drop down almost a metre to the level of the new trees.

Over subsequent visits I took a few photos, came back and took geotagged photos, all around the same area, went to the BGS, imported bedrock data via KML into Google Earth, correlated with the photos… After a couple of years I’m confident that the dip in the landscape is evidence of the Highland Boundary Fault – a line that runs all the way from Arran and Comrie to the south-west, through Stare Dam and Rohallion Loch and lodge, up along this dip between the trees and away to the east before heading off north-east to near Stonehaven. From a suitable angle it looks like someone’s taken a bicycle tyre and run it over the landscape, causing an impression relative to the surrounding hills and mountains.

Apart from that, the scene from Stair Bridge Viewpoint is highly photogenic and while I’ve made several photos of the view south and east since, I’ve always wanted to fly a drone along the line of the fault.

A few days ago, the dream came true: a perfect clear dry bright sunny winter’s day, snow lying on the ground, low sun illuminating the ground, all quiet and calm.

A clear winter’s day:

You have to be standing all-but on the HBF to take this:

A selfie, of sorts: straight down landing on Stair Bridge:

I managed a couple of runs from near Rohallion Lodge up toward the A9 with the drone, spliced them together into a fly-by to give an impression of the topology.

And a still photo (I still shoot them! – but mostly HDR panoramas…) looking east from above the cusp of the saddle landform between old and new forests:


To wrap up the afternoon, there was some lovely light on an avenue of beech trees, walking back to the main road:

Bucket-list Item: CHECKED!

Autumn Holiday Day 1: The Nice Place

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There’s no better place to start a holiday than the Nice Place(TM), even if it does involve getting up and on the road at 4am for a 165-mile drive up north.

The sun rose over Loch Beinn a Mheadhoin as I approached:

The Caledonian Forest at Glen Affric was its usual beautiful self – still not cold enough for morning mist in the trees, but brilliant morning sunlight and heavy rain caused a wonderful vibrant double rainbow while I was down by the river.

For a change, I took a long walk a couple of miles along the side of Loch Beinn a Mheadhoin, to be rewarded with a gorgeous view of Sgurr na Lapaich covered in pure white snow, across the water.

Other views from the morning:

How Many Megapixels?

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There are several cliches in the field of megapixel-count and resolution required for acceptable photographic prints.

In no particular order:

  • 300dpi is “fine art”
  • you don’t need as many dpi for larger prints because typically they’re viewed further away
  • my printer claims to do 360dpi or 1440dpi or …
  • 24 megapixels is more than enough for anything
  • “for a 5″ print you need 300-800pixels, for medium to large calendars 800-1600 pixels, for A4 900-1600px, for an A3 poster 1200 to 2000px, for an A2 poster 1500 to 2400px, …” (taken from a well-known photo-prints website guidelines)
  • it’s not about the megapixels it’s about the dynamic range

There are probably more set arguments in the field, but all are vague, arising from idle pontificating and anecdote over the last couple of centuries.

Here’s a key question: in a list of required image resolutions by print size, why does the number of dpi required drop-off with print size? What is the driving factor and might there be an upper bound on the number of megapixels required to make a print of any size?

We can flip this around and say that if prints are expected to be viewed at a distance related to their size, then it is no longer a matter of absolute measurements in various dimensions but rather about how much field of view they cover. This makes it not about the print at all, but about the human eye, its field of view and angular acuity – and the numbers are remarkably simple.

From wikipedia, the human eye’s field of view is 180-200 degrees horizontally by 135 degrees vertically (ie somewhere between 4:3 and 3:2 aspect-ratios).  Its angular acuity is between 0.02 to 0.03 deg.

If we simply divide these numbers we end up with a number of pixels that the eye could resolve.

At one end of the range,

 180*135 /0.03 / 0.03 / 1024 / 1024 = 25.75 (6000 x 4500)

and at the other:

200*135 / 0.02 / 0.02 / 1024 / 1024 = 64.37 (10,000 x 6750)

In the middle,

180*135 / 0.025 / 0.025 / 1024 / 1024 = 37.1 (7200 x  5400)

Significant points:

  • this is no longer about absolute print sizes; it’s simply about being able to view a print without one’s eye perceiving pixellation
  • the numbers correlate reassuringly with numbers of megapixels seen in real-world dSLR sensors today
  • you can reasonably say that if you have 64 Megapixels then you can make a print of any size from it
  • you can make an image with more than 64 megapixels if you want to, but the reasons for doing so are not directly to do with resolution – they might be
    in order that you can  crop it – either to physically crop the image in post-processing or to view it from a closer distance than that required merely to fill your eyes’ field of view
    or maybe for pixel-binning to reduce noise, give smoother tonality, etc
  • 24 megapixels is not enough for much; rather it’s is a turning-point: the bare minimum number of pixels for a person of limited acuity to resolve assuming they slightly less than fill their field of view with the print. 36MPel is more usable and 64 will keep you in business selling fine quality wall art.

Now we know how many megapixels are required for various real-world purposes, all that matters is making them good megapixels. Physics to the rescue.

 

Morvern 3/4: In Search of Purity

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Time to explain the motivation for this excursion to the Morvern peninsula.

A few months ago, I was exploring what Google Earth had to show for the West coast of Scotland. A lot of photographers gravitate toward the north-west, around Sutherland, and rightly so – the geography up there is impressive. However, coming a little south past Ardnamurchan, there is also epic geology – evidence of volcanoes, beautiful mountains, the works. And so I stumbled across this glen past Loch Arienas and Loch Doire nam Mart, thinking there might be a view to enjoy part-way along the glen up one of the mountains to the left, perhaps.

On a little research, I saw the OS map of the area showed Aoineadh Mor, a former township dissolved in the Highland Clearances. Interesting history. So I drove – about 4.5 hours from Perthshire out through Fort William around Loch Eil and down at some length on wiggly single-lane 60-limit roads – and arrived at the small roadside carpark about 4.30pm.

The walk through the woods was beautiful: birches and oak trees catching the low sunlight.

Now it gets real. On emerging from the woods, the first evidence of habitation one sees is this broken dry-stone wall:

The Perimeter is Breached

which shouts the beginning of the story loud and clear: a township left to ruin, increasingly taken over by nature.

From what I gather, up to the 18th Century, Aoineadh Mor [approximately pronounced, and sometimes spelled, Inniemore, although the Gaelic ao vowel sound is inimitable in English] was a thriving crofting community on the slopes of Sithean na Raplaich where the burn (Allt Aoineadh Mor) flows down to the lochs.

It is a wonderfully beautiful setting – the Allt Aoineadh Mor burn burbling down the hillside, through the former township of the same name.

In 1824, Christina Stewart, newly owner of the Glenmorvern estate, forcibly ejected the crofters in order to farm sheep on the land for supposed greater profit, as happened in many places during the Highland Clearances.

The names of two of the last crofters to leave, James and Mary, have been given to two paths through the surrounding forestry.

By 1930 the sheep were also no longer profitable and the area was planted with trees as the cash-crop of the time. After 60 years, in 1994, the Forestry Commission uncovered the township.

And so my history intersects with the place in 2017.
It is both quieting and disquieting simultaneously: quiet in that there is an open space, there are trees, light, water, all the elements of landscape we photographers like; yet disquieting in that the area is not really pure – on scratching beneath the surface, there seems to be a greater innocence in the subsistence existence of crofting, with subsequent industries of sheep farming and forestry tainted by crass desire for profit to varying extent. And so the hillside is not really wild but barren; the land not just beautiful but exploited.

Dust kicked-up by a passing logging lorry travelling a path through Forestry Commission conifer woods, taken from the former township of Aoineadh Mor.
http://scotland.forestry.gov.uk/activities/heritage/historic-townships/aoineadh-mor-inniemore/marys-story

These conflicting forces of land, money and habitation are summarized in this photo, where we have nature’s pine tree felled in the foreground, a generation of mankind’s ruined croft superseded by the unnatural choice of conifers blown in as seed on the wind, leading to blue skies beyond.

This used to be the township of Aoineadh Mor, a scattering of stone crofts on the braes beside a beautiful river surrounded by forest. 
Now the Forestry Commission has taken over, with several monoculture forests on the surrounding mountains, even wild-seeding into the former township.

For what it’s worth, a few more photos all taken around the township:

References:

As I walk along these shores
I am the history within
As I climb the mountainside
Breaking Eden again – Runrig, Proterra

Lady Mary’s Walk, Crieff

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Only catching up on photos taken at the end of April…

Lady Mary’s Walk runs West from Crieff along the side of the River Earn, mostly on the flat until one reaches the foot of Laggan Hill after a mile or so, where it forms a circular route back to MacRosty Park.

At the end of April I went for a stroll to hunt bluebells.

The path was particularly pleasant – quiet, leading on through the woods.

 
 
 

As an aside, I’m sure there never used to be such a profusion of wild garlic on these Perthshire woodland nature trails 10 years ago – I only first encountered the stuff whilst out in Galloway.

I was a bit early for optimum bluebell season, but did find a few areas of good blue ground coverage:

And at the western extremity of the route there is a ruined house – it could be quite eerie given the right lighting.

The Return of Serif

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It feels funny to think that back in the early 1990s Serif was known for PagePlus, in the days when such things were known as desktop publishing or DTP applications.

Recently, however, they’ve produced Affinity Photo for Mac, Windows and iPad. After one or two folks recommended it, I thought it was time to add another trick to the photo-publishing workflow and have a play. After all, if nothing else, having an iPad would solve my doubts with colour-management issues on Linux, wouldn’t it?

So I’ve spent a few weeks driving around hunting scenery and taking photos of it and gradually evolving a few routines: photos are still shot on the Pentax K-1; processed (variously pixel-shift or HDR) using dcraw on Linux, where I also run them through darktable for a lot of toning work; the results are then copied to an ownCloud folder which synchronizes automagically with the iPad; a bit of juggling with share-to-Affinity and share-to-Photos and share-to-ownCloud later and the results are copied back to the workstation for final organization, checks and publication.

Within Affinity, my workflow is to import an image and ensure it’s converted to 16-bit P3 colour-space – this is a bit wider than sRGB and native to the iPad’s display. I then run the Develop module which tweaks exposure, brightness and contrast, clarity, detail, colour-balance (not so much), lens distortions, etc. After that, I use layers to remove sensor-dust and other undesirable feature. Top tip, use a new pixel layer for the in-painting tool set to “this layer and below”; then all the in-paintings can be toggled on and off to see the effect; also use a brightness+contrast adjustment layer above that while you work, so the corrections will be even less visible when the contrast is reduced back to normal. If the image requires it, I’ll add one or two fill layers for gradients – better to use an elliptical gradient that can be moved around the scene than a vignette that only applies in the corners. Finally, I merge all the layers to a visible sum-of-all-below pixel layer,on which I run the Tonemapping persona; ignoring all the standard presets (which are awful), I have a couple of my own that make black-and-white in low- and high-key targets, in which I can balance local versus global contrast. If I produce a black&white image, it probably arises from this layer directly; sometimes, dropping the post-tonemapped layer into the luminosity channel makes for a better colour image as well (subject to opacity tweaking).

So, some results. It produces colour:

It produces black and white:

One final thing: I used to hate the process of adding metadata – titles and descriptions, slogging through all my tags for the most pertinent ones, etc. Because the ownCloud layer is so slow and clunky, it makes more sense to be more selective, choose fewer photos to go through it; if I also add metadata at this stage, I can concentrate on processing each image with particular goals in mind, knowing that all future versions will be annotated correctly in advance. Freedom!

Landscape, Photography and Land Management

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This is going to be a long post, drawing on several disparate areas of experience and interest. Welcome to my mind…

Photographic Influence

Cirrus clouds above a line of old beech trees, Portpatrick

Nice beech and hawthorn trees – shame they aren’t there any more

The Highlands are not like 18th-century Venice. On driving around – which you can do around here – the landscape is raw, rugged, elemental, positively harsh on a cold day. We do not sit around in powdered wigs playing the harpsichord of an evening.

It is my opinion that landscape photography exists not to make merely aesthetically pleasant images, not even to convey a “feeling” from the photographer’s mind in the name of art, but rather to show and tell forth something of the landscape.

It is all too easy to go for a stroll, to get out into “nature” seeking photographs, to see only the shapes and forms of the land, hopefully cover it in contrasty dappled light; but if that is all that is seen in a photograph then it is the most absurd way to trivialize larger forces at work.

Worse still, it’s even easier to get into a mentality of visiting only known-good photo locations. “Saturday afternoon, Falls of Bruar” – nothing against the Falls, far from it, but it becomes a photographic rut devoid of sense of exploration.

I used to have a motto: “no landscape photos without saying something about the rocks you stand on”. It’s still a good thought, but even though the geology might date back 3.5 billion years, that is only one aspect of pertinent story, perhaps even the cheap and comforting option – looking straight to Old, bypassing the anthropocene; it reduces taking a principled stand to throwing out bland “statement”s or little stories and/or personal feelings, offensive in their inoffensiveness.

The PSNS Experience

A couple of months ago I attended a lecture at the Perthshire Society of Natural Science (PSNS), part of the “Curious Minds” series; the presenter worked for SEPA at Stirling University, and he spoke about Sustainability. Being brutally honest, it was not the most approachable of talks: a business person speaking from a mind of systems-thinking about corporate matters, with that peculiar management tendency to present a metaphorical briefcase of ideas supposed to be complete but leaving one wondering what nuance is missing – that’s not likely to engage the common individual who only wants to know how best to run their own house. I couldn’t help thinking of the only two occasions I’ve had any dealings with SEPA – first to ask how to dispose of film-processing chemicals and second for maps to avoid flood areas when buying a house; if SEPA are to offer the public a service, they have a PR hurdle to overcome…

However, I came away with the seeds of several thoughts that have since germinated.

The lecturer explained how SEPA sees companies on a spectrum from “climate criminals” (knowingly damaging the environment) through careless to compliant to champions. A lot of words containing “C” and “A” and a nice gradation from red to green, but that illustrates the systems-think.

More usefully, SEPA has expanded their remit so they now see Scotland from three points of view: there’s the environment which they still protect for its own sake; there’s social (concerning wellbeing when people go for a walk in the forests); and there’s an economic aspect.

Experiences of Farming

For lack of reason to the contrary, I’ve always kept an open mind opinion about livestock farming. As a confirmed carnivore, living somewhere between town and country, it’s not easy to see bucolic bliss as harm. However, in the past five years there have been three experiences that sounded warning bells.

First: in Galloway, I spent 7 months living in a run-down farmhouse in the middle of a livestock farm on a nondescript C road. If we left the gate open, sheep would come and mow the lawn and cows walk past the study window and fertilize said lawn on their travels. It’s all very well feeling close to “nature” when the sun shines, but when it rains and the slurry runs 4 inches deep corroding your boots whilst walking the dog, it is far from pleasant. It also “never snows in Galloway”, which doesn’t explain the 3′-deep snow that winter, requiring the farmer’s assistance to dig out the surrounding roads – which were made impassable by his own tractors bouncing along compacting the snow into undulating waves of ice in the first place.

Second: also in Galloway, when I spent 15 months living next to a different farm: there was a beautiful line of old beech and hawthorn trees running up a small hill, just round the corner from where we lived; the farmer chopped them all down to make way for root crops to feed his sheep.

Third: two years ago, I went for a walk along a glen and found a particularly pleasant viewpoint, a U-shaped glacial valley with corrie lochan and lonely pine tree in the basin.

The light and landscape that provoked further exploration

 

Seeking to revisit and explore further, I researched the area on Google Earth and figured, with a choice of two, the better track would be one running up the south/”left” side of the glen to reach further into the mountains. So a month ago I set forth, with young dog on a lead beside me, to explore.

About 300 yards from the carpark, we rounded a corner and saw a herd of Highland cows and calves. By chance, the farmer came by in his Landrover at exactly the same moment and said not to take my dog any further. Fair enough – answered my dithering wonderings on the matter pretty quickly – and the exchange was pleasant enough.

However, that does not explain why, having driven off ahead of me, he promptly shut and padlocked a 6-foot-tall gate across the path, leaving me and my dog on the wrong side with the cows.

Inconsiderate farmer shut this gate right across the path, blocking my escape with a young dog.

With no way through or around the gate, I had to persuade my dog to climb precariously over that ladder, knowing that if one paw slipped he could be seriously injured.

As for outdoor access code – “right to roam” – it would have been more considerate if they had erected some sign warning of impaired access nearer the carpark…

With three strikes against livestock-farming kind, it’s time to start formulating an opinion.

Connected Thinking

So after a bit of a delay we rejoin the walk along the glen, this time going down the right side of the river instead.

Realisation dawned.

The first realisation was that the view I had seen a couple of years previously relied on a trick of perspective – the grassland appears continuous over distance while actually the river lurks below the level.

As I reached the furthest point of my walk a few miles into the glen, turning back, I observed how the river had cut straight vertically down a metre or two, exposing dead tree roots in the bank.

Half-way back, I noticed dead trees all along the river bank, and just off to the side of the path I found a large expanse of land full of the bleached white remains of pine tree roots and it hit me that this was a peat bog – a genuine example of the kind of thing one reads about in “the Highlands”, as though that were some far-off place – well here we are, soil/mud/peat at our very feet.

Genuine peat bog, full of bleached white roots and remains of pine trees

And so I looked at it through SEPA’s eyes. Environment + Social + Economy <= Sustainability.

Following research, peat is deposited at a rate of about 1mm per year, so the 1.5-2m depth of peat beside the river corresponds to 1500-2000 years’ accumulation.

What we have here is not the wilderness beloved of landscape photographers, it is barren.

The interplay of light and shape and form of the landscape is utterly irrelevant while the natural pine trees that should be here lie dead in a large carbon sink, their place taken by monoculture fenced-off in enclosures for commercial gain. The parts of the glen that are not directly peat bog are bare through grazing of livestock whose methane and CO2 emissions are a major contributor to global warming. In the words of Henning Steinfeld, Chief of FAO’s Livestock Information and Policy Branch: “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation“.

This is not wilderness, it is barren. It is not a wonder of nature, but artificial. It is not contributing to society’s welfare but its unsustainability harms the planet.

Sometimes, one has to remove the rose-tinted sunglasses and see how one glen encompasses in every aspect a microcosm of all kinds of problems. Just because it’s a sunny day does not make it a happy story.

What Next?

I’m still thinking about it. I’ve spent long enough wondering if certain environmental charities are “a bit hippy”, but the facts are irrefutable: that glen stands for the worst combination of (un)sustainability factors. Peat bog itself is a valuable ecosystem, but given the choice I would far rather have the pine trees back that belonged there in the first place. The idea of rewilding meets with favour. While I would not want to join or recommend any “-ism” (vegetarianism or veganism being defined in terms of negative ideologies), I am also in favour of taxing the supply of meat and other livestock products to better reflect the true costs, including environmental factors.

Chilling with the trees

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On the third day of my holiday last year, the weather took a turn for the worse and my chosen route for the day was closed until Spring, so I went for a walk around the Reelig Glen just outside Inverness.

To be more accurate, the first walk around the glen was favourably interrupted by a very friendly wee collie dog, so I did the whole route a second time with the camera…

It was beautifully relaxing, good for the soul. A place of shapes and light and more shapes and green and autumnal orange colour.

About half-way around the route, just round from crossing the bridge, is Dughall Mor – a Douglas Fir tree that at one time was the tallest in Britain. They do not put any signage by it, except for a very tiny mark on the bark, but I know which it is.

One of these trees used to be the tallest in Britain.
(I know which – they don’t advertise it for safety reasons, save for a very small mark.)

About six years ago, on my first visit to the glen, I also met a small dog and attendant human; the conversation has stuck in my mind, partly for the subject-matter but mostly because of its gentle and slightly surreal nature. A person who knows there’s nothing better to do than to sit on a bench watching the old dog play in the burn. At the time, I wrote about the encounter thus:

The Shadows of Importance

As I came nearer, crossed over a small bridge over a burn, I saw an elderly Westie playing, slowly investigating all around… with his also-eldery designated human sitting on this bench.
And we conversed.
About the important things.
Dogs, trees, and somewhere waaayy down the line, people.
We walked through the woods and he showed me a tree that once was tallest in Britain.
The world of bright city lights was gone, a garish cheapness for and of strangers, long forgotten, as though it never was.
And there was complete serenity.
Some days I’d post an admiration of the forest. Today you get the waypoint where Hamish played and Geoff sat.
Or maybe it’s still an admiration of the forest anyway…

Scene of an encounter

This time of making the circuit around the Reelig Glen, there was no sign of Geoff or Hamish – but I remembered them, and was grateful for all the dogs who love me.

[sphere 2998]

The light, when the clouds permitted, was glorious – illuminating the foliage beautifully.

eBay + PayPal: Considered Harmful

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I forget exactly when I made my first purchase from eBay, but given how my PayPal account was registered in 2005, my usage of both sites certainly dates back over 10 years.

Most of my transactions were simple purchases – old-fashioned (M42-fit) lenses for various cameras, although there were a few sales (again, mostly old camera gear for which I had no use).

Over that time, as a humble consumer, I accumulated a 100% positive feedback score of 92.

Now this is the part where the story turns sad.

Offending lens

Last year, thinking to experiment with what it might do for my photography, I bought a 25mm f/0.95 lens. It arrived, perfectly functional; it was just that we didn’t really get along. The lens wasn’t particularly sharp – had glowing edge halos wide-open – and not even f/0.95 gives sufficiently narrow DoF to be interesting in the landscape – it just makes the whole thing look soft.

So I put the lens back on eBay. It sold first time, for a significant proportion of the initial cost. Bingo, I thought, wrapped it up and posted it off using eBay’s global shipping programme on its way to Germany.

Nearly a month later, however, the buyer opened a request to return the lens, claiming it was broken.

Well it wasn’t, when it left here, of that I’m certain; I just don’t have a photo to prove it, unfortunately. Either it was broken in transit or the buyer was clumsy with it himself.

Here’s where the problems start. eBay’s website is old and clunky. Every single email they sent with links to “see more details” were links to ebay.de, their German site, requiring me to enter my eBay login details on a page written in German. (“Einloggen!”) Pretty obviously, this was not going to happen – in equal parts, it looks like a phishing scam and I wouldn’t have the German with which to follow through even if I did log in.

Coupled with this, the buyer’s return request did not appear in eBay’s regular messaging system – it’s a semi-related sub-system of its own.

I requested what support I could find on eBay; a lady called me back within a couple of minutes and said it was up to me to try and sort matters directly with the buyer and then I wouldn’t be able to do anything for a fortnight when I could raise a case. I mentioned the language barrier, but subsequent emails persisted in sending me to ebay.de.

I never did get the chance to raise a case; with their language barriers, clunky old-fashioned website and “support” system that goes to extreme lengths to keep users locked in reading FAQs instead of establishing contact with a human, to all intents and purposes eBay denied me any right to reply.

During this time, Paypal adjusted the balance on my account – set it to -£286 when it had been at zero previously, citing the ongoing ebay dispute. I emphasize that this was before eBay had stated any resolution on the matter; they simply adjusted the balance out of the blue. During this time the website would not let me make any amendments to the account; given how this happened before resolution on eBay, I limited potential damages by pulling Paypal’s direct-debit mandates with my banks.

The buyer sent me a rude message demanding to know “what was wrong with me” that I would not reply to the return request. He then opened a case himself. Again, I had no right of reply due to the same language barriers.

After a mere 48 hours more, eBay claimed to have “made a final decision” and found in the buyer’s favour. At that point I managed to see the details of the case the buyer had raised; he had included a photo of the lens showing distorted shutter blades and a note from a local shop certifying it was broken. Of course that doesn’t prove anything; it just confirms it was broken and from what I can make out of the serial number, eliminates the chance of it being a scam to replace the lens.

Paypal claim to have “buyer protection” but say nothing about protecting sellers. There was nothing I could do apart from send Paypal a cheque for the outstanding amount and terminate both accounts as soon as possible.

Today I noticed eBay had allowed the buyer to leave me negative feedback – the first and only such event in over 11 years’ dealing with the site – while still denying me the opportunity to respond, only presenting the options to leave him positive feedback or “leave feedback later”.

Having trouble logging in? Not really, any more; no.

Unsurprisingly, I find this all horrendously unjust.

Closing both accounts has resulted in a veritable flurry of emails (19 today alone, at the last count) confirming removal of various bank accounts, credit cards and the termination of ongoing payment arrangements (Skype, two streaming music services, a grocery delivery company, two DNS registrars, Yahoo, Facebook and a few more).

I never made a profit selling goods on eBay – at best swapped objects for a fair consideration and often took a slight hit using better postage than required.

So what’s to be learned from the experience?

First, as a geek by trade, I look back a few years to a time when we were talking about Web-2.0 versus Web-1.0. eBay’s website is clearly a product of the Web-1.0 era, and not just with its layout: it uses whole-page impressions where AJAX would be more appropriate; with sub-systems for “returns” bolted-on to, yet incompatible with, the existing “messaging” system; with no single sign-on and nationality-specific sub-sites. It is an ghastly accident of feature-creep instead of design.

Second, as a human being, I’m deeply concerned by the faceless bureaucracy and lack of control. We get accustomed to “just stick it on eBay”, reliant on there always being someone who wants stuff. Contrarily, there are also local shops with whom one can come to part-exchange arrangements.

eBay and PayPal represent the first and largest and best-known steps towards a digital economy. It is easy to be suckered into thinking it necessary to have accounts with them for ease of shopping and transferring money around the place. However, when I see how unjust the systems are, stacked against honest sellers, I can have no further dealings with either site.

 

And the process of rejecting them both, of realising that my ebay feedback score is not a significant measure of life, is wonderfully liberating.

 

Update 2017-01-18: forgot to say that, on the original auction, I had checked the box saying my policy is “no returns”. Why do eBay allow that if they proceed to completely ignore it based on the buyer’s say-so?

Olympus Pen-F: analysis and hands-on

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Mine, my only, my preciousss!

Mine, my only, my preciousss!

There’s only one camera shop left in Perth and yesterday I was their first customer to buy the Olympus Pen-F. It’s not released on Amazon until Monday…

So it’s been the talk of the web. It’s undeniably a beautiful camera, with a rangefinder design reminiscent of its film camera predecessor of the same name. I’ve spent much of the last couple of days putting it through its paces.

I’m pleased to report it has a reasonable sturdy weight to it thanks to the aluminium/magnesium alloy shell. It feels just great in one’s hands. Well, my hands, anyway.

How does it perform?

First, software: it’ll be a little while before Adobe support it, but for us open-source fans, RawTherapee already supports the new .ORF RAW images in both 20-megapixel and hi-resolution 80-megapixel modes. (It seems to be the only open-source raw-converter to do so, at the time of writing.)

Second, I’ve been keeping dark-frame reference images for a few cameras, so I can compare its noise levels against predecessors and competitors. (Method: put the lens-cap on, place camera upside-down on desk, and then at every ISO from 6400 to 100 and below, at various shutter-speeds from 1/250s to 30s, take a couple of photos. A quick Python script reads the images, converts to greyscale and outputs various properties including the average lightness value per pixel.) Results aggregated by camera model and ISO with median-average.)

log-log plot of luminosity noise for various camera models by ISO

log-log plot of luminosity noise for various camera models by ISO

The graph shows 3 things, none surprising but pleasant to see confirmation:

  1. The Lumix GH2 really was awful for sensor quality. Its ISO160 is the Sony NEX-7’s ISO 800.
  2. There is a reasonable progression from Lumix GH2 to Sony NEX-7 to Olympus E-M1 and Pen-F; at native resolution, the E-M1 and Pen-F are much of a muchness for L-channel noise.
  3. The real game-changer is the high-resolution mode on the Pen-F – good, since this is one of the main reasons I bought the camera. This is to be expected: it uses the in-body stabilization to blend 8 images, four of them offset by 1 pixel (so it has full chroma bit-depth at every pixel) and four offset by half a pixel (so it has double the linear luminosity resolution). The result is about 1.5 stops better noise-performance.

Hi-res mode comes with a few limitations: the maximum ISO is 1600; aperture only goes down to f/8; shutter speeds only as long as 8s. You can enable picture modes such as natural, vivid, monochrome etc; however it does not work with bracketing or HDR mode: for HDR, it’s best to work manually.

One interesting point in favour of high-resolution mode: it does not stress the lens’s performance; at no point does it take an image of more than the native resolution, so if the MTF curves of contrast vs spatial frequency are adequate for 20 megapixels, the lens is also good enough for 50-80 (more later).

Hands-on: what’s it like in the field?

I took both current cameras out for a drive around the Highlands of Perthshire this afternoon, the NEX-7 with its kit 18-55mm lens and the Pen-F attached to a new 17mm f/1.8 prime.

Here’s a quick overview of four images: one from the NEX-7, two straight from the Pen-F’s own JPEGs out of camera (just downsized for presentation here) and one converted in RawTherapee:

My first real image from the Pen-F: Amulree and Strathbraan Parish Church at the end of Glen Quaich.

The Olympus images all have the same white-balance; I set the ORF and NEF files to the same whitebalance as the Pen-F chose automatically. It’s interesting that the sky is a proper shade of blue in the converted RAW; this might be a difference of profile between RawTherapee and the camera’s own internal JPEG engine. (Fine by me – I much prefer solid blue skies to cyan ones.)

What about the details?

Now this is a hard question. No doubt the resolution suffers and 80MPel is rather optimistic. Here we compare the NEX-7 against the 20MPel and 80MPel RAW files with no sharpening or detail controls enabled at all:

Obviously the 80MPel image is going to take a lot ofsharpening to bring it up to scratch.

My preferred sharpening algorithm with the NEX-7 has long been deconvolution. However, despite tweaking the radius, strength, dampening and iterations controls a lot, RawTherapee doesn’t seem to have the strength to sharpen the 80MPel hi-res RAW.

The out-of-camera JPEG appears to have a cruder sharpening algorithm with a lot of local contrast, so I switched to unsharp mask. At 80MPel, with enough USM to render the individual stones in the dry stone wall adequately sharp, this reveals serious anti-aliassing issues around straight-line edges:

Pen-F edge-aliassing artifacts

Pen-F edge-aliassing artifacts

These artefacts disappear when downsized to 50MPel in camera. Then again, the in-camera JPEG conversion is very contrasty and over-sharpened, so there’s room for improvement all-round:

In-camera JPEG conversion (20MPel) vs RawTherapee downscaled from 80MPel RAW

In-camera JPEG conversion (20MPel) vs RawTherapee downscaled from 80MPel RAW

Update: by adjusting the USM parameters, I’ve removed much of the artifacts around edges. There are still problems where blades of grass have moved between source frames, but static objects with strong outlines no longer cause such problems.

disable edge-only and halo-detection, just use less USM to start with

disable edge-only and halo-detection, just use less USM to start with

There are other demosaicing algorithms in RawTherapee and other ways of sharpening (newly added wavelet support). Plenty of scope for experimenting to get the best out of this thing.

What’s the verdict?

I absolutely love using it. Where other cameras drive the megapixel race by giving increasingly large images for everything (40MPel+), this camera ticks along at a more than adequate native 20 megapixels for most purposes with the option of taking one’s time to crank out the tripod to make absolutely huge images. This suits me fine – I’ve spent so long doing similar image-stacking/super-resolution trickery as part of the post-processing workflow, it’s great to have the camera do it instead.

The in-body stabilization is excellent. I managed to hand-hold 10 frames at 1/10s at the Falls of Dochart, twice, without a single blurry image.

There are lots of other features to look forward to – I’ve never had the patience to try focus-stacking, but moving it in-camera is very appealing.

With a subtle adjustment to the brighter blues to cater for skies, I could probably live off the camera’s own JPEGs for many purposes.

New lenses and filter adapter rings have been ordered…

Gratuitous sample images

As if the above weren’t nice enough, here are three more images from this afternoon.

Now with added solar panels

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The first thing I did on buying a new house in November was to have solar panels installed. Like, within 24hrs of having keys in hand I’d had two companies round to try and sell me their wares and made a decision.

The installation was not the easiest, as December 4 coincided with Storm Desmond and the house gets fairly battered by the wind at the best of times. That, and it’s taken another week to get everything wired-up and configured.

It’s also not been the best of weather – cloud, foggy, rainy and windy – for the past week as well. So today has been the first real day of generating electricity – with actual data-logging of some sort.

I’m well happy to have seen a clear couple of hours around lunchtime in which generation peaked at just over 200W.

Solar Panel output, first day

Solar Panel output, first day

Bring it on! 🙂