I hadn’t intended to go around the Mill Glen… but with a choice of three Hill-foot villages, I said Tillicoultry when it should’ve been Alva. Never mind. At least this Mill Glen has a tolerable view of distant refineries off the top.
West Woods of Ethie
My friend Tom and I went for a stroll in the West Woods of Ethie in Angus. Not a woodland I’d encountered before, but it was quite magical in some ways – quite conscious of lurching from one clearing to another, surrounded by the characteristic shapes of beech trees in their green and yellow-orange autumn plumage.
For a slightly more immersive view of the woods… click this and wait a while 🙂
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A bit of a hardware upgrade
Four and a half years ago I bought basalt,. a Lenovo Thinkpad W520 notebook.
Named for being black and geometrically regular, he was not cheap, but then the hardware was chosen for longevity. He did everything – mostly sitting on the desk being a workstation, for both photo-processing and work, with added portability. And he was fast… very fast.
He’s done sterling service, but the time has come for a bit of an upgrade. Since I haven’t done so for a few years now, I built the replacement workstation by hand.
So, after much shopping (mostly on Amazon with a couple of trips to the local Maplin’s), meet rhyolite – named because the red fan LEDs in the case remind me of the pink granite rock in Glen Etive.
| basalt | rhyolite | |
| RAM | Â 16G | 64G |
| CPU | Â i7-2720QM @ 2.20GHz | i7-6800KÂ @ 3.40GHz |
| HD | 1TB 2.5″ | 2*2T SATA, 64GB SSD, 240GB SSD |
| Display | 15″ 1080p | 24″ 4K |
| Time to process one Olympus Pen-F hi-res ORF file from RAW to TIFF | 5min50s | 1min6s |
| Time to rebuild Apache Spark from git source | 28min15s | 6min28s |
It’s funny how oblivious we can be of machines slowing down and software bloating over time, rather like the proverbial boiling lobster and then when I look up, things can be done 4-5x as fast.
It’s really funny when you copy your entire home directory across wholesale and see what used to be a full-screen maximized Firefox window now occupying barely a quarter of the new display.
How many photo thumbnails can you fit in a 4K display?
There’s only one downside: sometimes I miss having a trackpad in the middle of the keyboard area…
The Least Amount of Landscape
Just to disprove the idea of deterministic landscape photography, as I was driving back from Acharn through Grandtully along Strathtay, the sky took on a most beautiful glowing cobalt-blue colour of dusk combined with the icy diamond clarity of sub-zero late autumn temperatures in the Highlands.
One of those scenes where it took a little work to convert the camera’s recordings back to something resembling what I saw: after dark fell I couldn’t make out what was in the fields beyond the car headlights; there was nothing but horizon and the glow… and one tiny fragment of wispy cloud.
It doesn’t get much more minimalist than this…
The Falls of Acharn
Today’s random philosophical question: is landscape photography actually deterministic?
Research maps. Check weather forecast. Think about time and location and the maximization of opportunity. Take camera and go. Point it at things. Come back, process to some degree of satisfaction.
The process is certainly repeatable and it takes an incredible amount of luck to sway the results.
A couple of weeks ago, having passed by the village a couple of times this year on other travels, I set out for Acharn on the south side of Loch Tay with intention of using camera and tripod. They were duly deployed. And here are the results…
I was particularly pleased with the last pair, longish-distance zooms across the gorge to the water cascading over some very silvery-grey rock with two tree branches aligned like chopsticks beside the splash-down.
Finally, just for a sense of context, a making-of snap from the phone – this is how the last two were made:
Loch Lomond: At Inversnaid
There’s a couple of picturesque views to be had just below the hotel at Inversnaid harbour – the waterfall cascading down amongst the rocks one way, and opposite, a line of boulders leading toward the Arrochar Alps across Loch Lomond. Can’t complain.
I don’t often use the Pattanaik algorithm in LuminanceHDR, especially for colour results, but it seemed to work really well with the waterfall, nicely balancing low-key levels and saturation.
Loch Chon Reflections
I’ve had it in mind to visit Loch Chon in the Trossachs for a little while now, to see if I could find similar views to other photos of the area.
It didn’t disappoint – there were some wonderful reflections of colourful trees to be enjoying.
On the Way to St Fillan’s
A few months ago now, I spent a happy Saturday afternoon driving around the countryside – visited some old haunts and refreshed memories. I had it in mind to spend some time shooting the well-known statue Still by Rob Mulholland in Loch Earn at St Fillan’s, but was more taken by the landscape en route – a little mist rising off a forest, clouds so low they obscure the outlines of the mountains.
So the majority of these photos were actually taken whilst parked in a layby off the A85. But I couldn’t possibly admit to that. 😉
Around Here
A couple of views whilst out walking the dog – golden-hour sunlight on Ben Ledi and Ben Vorlich over by Callander, taken from Auchterarder.
Olympus Pen-F, 75-300mm lens, RawTherapee, 5-frame HDRs blended with enfuse and toned in darktable.
The colour photos are for sale on EyeEm: Ben Ledi and Ben Vorlich; sunset tree silhouette.
Around Ardkinglas
Driving home form the Argyll Photo-Walk, along the shores of Loch Fyne, I couldn’t help but stop to appreciate the golden evening light on the mountains surrounding Glenkinglas.
The Olympus Pen-F has a hi-res mode, which is a bit of a mixed blessing for use in the landscape. On the one hand, it constructs an 80-megapixel image never requiring more than 20 megapixels resolution from the lens. However, it does it by interleaving with sub-pixel super-resolution, for a total of 8 source frames per image, which results in dithering patterns around moving subjects. In the case of water, this can be mitigated by using a long exposure; in the case of clouds, much longer. For the photo showing Ardkinglas house across the water, I had an ND8 filter to make it a 1-second exposure. Unfortunately this introduced some serious colour-casts – so new filters have been ordered!
PhotoWalk 2016: Dubh Loch
There’s something distinctive about the light in Argyll, even at the early end of Autumn; the gold as it touches the mountains is exquisite.
As part of the photo-walk we strolled around part of Dubh Loch just outside Inverary; the light up the end of the loch was beautiful, the rainbows gorgeous, the water reflections perfect.
Couldn’t ask for a nicer afternoon, rain notwithstanding.
Argyll PhotoWalk 2016: Around Inverary
I was a bit late joining the photo-walk this year, but caught up with the small crowd of folks in Inverary prior to walking around the town with a camera in tow.
The views from the front, looking up lochs Shira and Fyne to sunlit mountains surrounding Glenkinglas, were stunning.
We also went around the Jail, where one of the guides pretended to have been naughty…
Glen Lednock: Trees
More experiments with the Olympus 7-14mm lens: a study in trees around Glen Lednock.
Glen Lednock: Water
I thought I’d not experimented with the 7-14mm lens much, so set sail for one of my favourite haunts – the Wee Cauldron in Glen Lednock just outside Comrie.
Around the Hermitage
The Hermitage, by Dunkeld, has a very attractive woodland walk by the River Braan. At one time it used to boast the tallest tree in the Britain, although that honour has since moved to other forests. The Black Linn waterfall and gorge are most impressive.