The last in a small series of photos from Birnam Hill near Dunkeld.
As far as I can tell, the first two photos are taken more or less on the Highland Boundary Fault – a line runs from Stare Dam past Rohallion lodge, up through one quarry and across the A9 through another slate quarry.
Test shots from a favourite walk, playing with the new mobile – DNG RAW files processed in Darktable.
A selection of photos, using a walk around Birnam Hill to test the new mobile and its camera.
Things one finds in woodland: details of a feather; broken fences; abandoned jackets (don’t ask!) and chunky rocks (semi-pelite, near the Highland Boundary Fault).
For the second time, I was lucky enough to see the aurora from Perth, last night. It was quite an impressive display; by the time I got out to darker skies it was quite low above the horizon, but the greens were strong to the naked eye and some strong rays came and went over time.
I still need to work on a good viewing location, but out beyond Rhynd is a good start.
A slight reversion to type, here. In previous lives I used to enjoy taking photos of closeup parts of trees, a study in shapes and forms.
Combined with one of my new favourite walk routes, up Birnam Hill near Dunkeld, and we have a lot of larch buds…
Testing the new mobile camera – this one shoots RAW DNG files, processed here in Darktable.
A small collection of things seen in the course of one day strolling around Perth: the classic view of St Leonard’s church with its spire across the South Inch; sun setting on the Craigie golf course; a chestnut tree. Well, why not 🙂
To celebrate my increasing antiquity at the end of August, I spent a happy few days in the Lake District with Mum & Dad.
We stayed in a hotel around Borrowdale, with access to Derwentwater, close to Ashness Bridge. On the second morning there was wonderful mist in the valleys obscuring the view up the lake with just the top of Skiddaw showing.
We spent a happy morning clambering up the Lodore Falls – a steep hillside climb through heather and pine trees.
We visited the Solway Aviation Museum at Carlisle airport, home to an English Electric Lightning (I used to see them flying over Lincolnshire in my very early years), a Phantom and – joy of joys – a Vulcan bomber, XJ823, inside which one could see the cockpit and sit in some of the metal chairs.
And I went flying! Most unexpected – I’d been hoping for a scenic tour but instead got an hour’s flying lesson. As the instructor said, “push the left pedal to turn left”. And the rest was pretty plain sailing – as responsive as a car on a road with perfect camber, crossed with turbulence akin to sailing a boat. We cruised at 2500-3000 feet, skimming along just below the cumulus clouds, from Carlisle across to Bassenthwaite and down Derwentwater to Borrowdale, up over Watendlath Tarn and back around Thirlmere to Carlisle again. A most excellent experience. (Photos by Dad stuck in the back seat – I think he did a good job!)
On the Monday, Dad and I drove around some of our favourite mountain passes and landscape locations in the Lakes: Wastwater with the classic view of Great Gable at the end, round to Hardknott Pass – stop at the Roman Fort of Mediobogdum, admire Eskdale – then carry on up and over Wrynose. The weather was just right – not too much cloud, just cloud shadows on sunny landscape – and my favourite conditions, bright foreground with filthy dark stormy rainclouds in the distance. It was allowed to rain after that.
On the last morning I called in at Mum’s favourite spot on the planet, Friar’s Crag at the end of the road past the jetties out of Keswick.
That was some (long) weekend!
Today was the airshow in Ayr, marking the last Scottish flight of the Avro Vulcan XH558.
Last weekend I saw inside its sister plane, down in Carlisle. This week, I enjoyed watching it fly – and what a beautiful bird it was. So elegant – when cruising around slowly it was as though she was toying with the audience. And when they opened the throttle to accelerate or head upwards…. wow. What an engine roar.
The Red Arrows were also there – an impressive display of several fly-pasts ludicrously close and at high speed.
I’ve also made a little video of the Vulcan:
Glen Turret is an obvious glacial valley. At the north end of the loch the land is covered with undulating mounds – morraine, formed by the receding glacier.
Two of my twitter friends have developed particular styles – extreme dark low-key black+white rendition and negative inversion, respectively. It’s intriguing how scenes come out – a very different mapping from the usual realism.
A short study in water – taken on a stroll along the side of Loch Turret.
On a whim, I spent the evening in Edinburgh at a meetup presentation/meeting concerning Big Data, the talk given by a “Big Data hero” (IBM’s term), employed by a huge multinational corporation with a lot of fingers in a lot of pies (including the UK Welfare system).
I think I was supposed to be awed by the scale of data under discussion, but mostly what I heard was all immodest massive business-speak and buzzwords and acronyms. A few scattered examples to claim “we did that”, “look at the size of our supercomputer”, but the only technical word he uttered all evening was “Hadoop”.
In the absence of a clear directed message, I’ve come away with my own thoughts instead.
So the idea of Big Data is altogether a source of disappointment and concern.
There seems to be a discrepancy: on the one hand, one’s fitbit and phone are rich sources of data; the thought of analyzing it all thoroughly sets my data-geek senses twitching in excitement. However, the Internet of Things experience relies on huge companies doing the analysis – outsourced to the cloud – which forms a disjoint as they proceed to do inter-company business based on one’s personal data (read: sell it, however aggregated it might be – the presenter this evening scoffed at the idea of “anonymized”), above one’s head and outwith one’s control. The power flows upwards.
To people such as this evening’s speaker, privacy and ethics are just more buzzwords to bolt on to a “data value pipeline” to tout the profit optimizations of “data-driven companies”. So are the terms data, information, knowledge and even wisdom.
But I think he’s lost direction in the process. We’ve come a long way from sitting on the sofa making choices how to spend the evening pushing buttons on the mobile.
And that is where I break contact with The Matrix.
I believe in appreciating the value of little things. In people, humanity and compassion more than companies. In substance. In the genuine kind of Quality sought by Pirsig, not as “defined” by ISO code 9000. Value may arise from people taking care in their craft: one might put a price on a carved wooden bowl in order to sell it, but the brain that contains the skill required to make it is precious beyond the scope of the dollar.
Data is data and insights are a way to lead to knowledge, but real wisdom is not just knowing how to guide analysis – it’s understanding that human intervention is sometimes required, and knowing when to deploy it, awareness, critical thinking to see and choose.
The story goes that a salesman once approached a pianist, offering a new keyboard “with eight nuances”. The response came back: “but my playing requires nine”.
I’ve left the usual photos to last, seeing as how everyone else has shot this scene before.
It wasn’t particularly easy; the tripod was struggling to stay steady in the breeze and the course of a few seconds between adjusting the camera, leaving it to stop vibrating and pushing the shutter remote release, the light was changing radically from dull shade to bright sunlight on the foreground rocks. Still, a moderately long exposure worked, eventually.
Herewith, four different ways of processing the same images.
I spent much of this afternoon at the Perth Highland Games held on the North Inch. Amongst other things, there were many stalls selling leather and jewellery products, cyclists, heavy-weight sports including the shot-put and hammer, lots of pipe & drum bands (including St Andrew’s Pipe Band from Brisbane, Australia) and several cuddly dogs (never met a Pharoah Hound before!).
The coast at Portknockie features an intermingling of Cullen quartzite (dating from Lower Dalradian times, 650 million years ago during which time they’ve transformed from sedimentary sandstone through partial volcanic metamorphosis) and the usual Highland psammite and semi-pelite.
The colours in these photos are more or less natural; it was totally stunning to be in the shady cave with the daylight behind and beyond, with these huge colourful boulders to play with.
For a sense of scale: the photos featuring a distant patch of light playing on the sandy pebble floor, well that gap is large enough to walk right through. A veritable cathedral of colour.
This is by way of a little tease. The Interwebs are full of photos of this lump of rock taken from a few yards to the right; I thought it would be more interesting to see it through the mouth of an adjacent cave instead.