A few photos from the start of January – experimenting with a road I’ve not often travelled, up from the A9 to approach from the south. It was a stunning morning – swathes of cloud-shadow flying across the landscape such that the mountains north of Comrie were alternately visible or obscured behind passing snow/hail clouds.
Corpus Christi at the Cathedral
Yesterday was Corpus Christi, a joyous celebration of the institution of the Eucharist – a service I’ve only previously heard of.
And so, in a spirit of investigation, I went to St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. There were lights all around the rood screen and candles; the Blessed Sacrament was processed around the aisles in glory; there was sweet rose-scented incense; there were many rose-petals; the organist opened the swell and hit a 32′ pedal as folks clanged bells around the table. And there was joy.
Festival celebrated properly, methinks.
The Day After the Night Before: around Brighton
At last, last year’s photos are all processed and finished!
Herewith, a selection of snaps from a New Year’s Day stroll along the beach in Brighton and Hove.
Thought for the day: art is what you make of it, not the subject-matter to hand.
Bluebells
A day out, today, with the Focus on Photography Perth meetup group. We parked in the MacRosty park carpark in Crieff and strolled along Lady Mary’s Walk, a dismantled railway line on the north side of the River Earn to the Trowan woods.
Many photos were taken. I was feeling a bit experimentalist, so deployed a couple of tricks:
- Helios 58mm f/2 lens with lens-cap covered in many holes – this gives many superimposed images, a bit like a starburst filter; I thought it would work well with the small-scale textures such as repeating blue and white flowers
- an infra-red filter – partly for long exposures in daylight (it’s similar to using a 10-stop ND1000 filter) and partly for the effect when shooting foliage with a strong red filter.
Herewith:
Glen Affric: Landscape
Two final landscape scenes to close this series. It was a long morning spent watching the sun rise, walking around the River Walk and along the side of Loch Affric past An Tudair, before returning to the River Walk a second time and clambering up the opposite hill to the memorial to capture the passing light on pine-covered mountains above the loch.
Glen Affric: Caledonian Forest
From wikipedia:
The Caledonian Forest is the name given to the former (ancient old-growth) temperate rainforest of Scotland. The known extent of the Roman occupation suggests that it was north of the Clyde and west of the Tay.
The Scots pines of the Caledonian Forest are directly descended from the first pines to arrive in Scotland following the ice-age; arriving about 7,000 BC. The forest reached its maximum extent about 5,000 BC after which the Scottish climate became wetter and windier. This changed climate reduced the extent of the forest significantly by 2,000 BC. From that date, human actions (including the grazing effects of sheep and deer) reduced it to its current extent.
Today, that forest exist as 35 remnants covering about 180 square kilometres (44,000 acres). The Scots pines of these remnants are, by definition, directly descended from the first pines to arrive in Scotland following the ice-age. These remnants have adapted genetically to different Scottish environments, and as such, are globally unique; their ecological characteristics form an unbroken, 9,000-year chain of natural evolution with a distinct variety of soils, vegetation, and animals.
To a great extent the remnants survived on land that was either too steep, too rocky, or too remote to be agriculturally useful. The largest remnants are in Strathspey and Strath Dee on highly acidic freely drained glacial deposits that are of little value for cultivation and domestic stock.
It’s also amazingly beautiful. I can happily drag myself out of bed at 3am and drive several hours north to arrive at the forest in time to watch the sun rise: with its ancient history, the scent of the heather, watching mist flowing around the old pine tree-tops catching the morning light, there’s nowhere more gorgeous on Earth.
Glen Affric: Rockery
There’s an impressive outcrop of rocks (psammite and semi-pelite, looking rather like limestone) near the waterfalls in the River Affric. Some kindly soul had balanced these pebbles on a boulder on their way past previously.
Glen Affric: Mixed Thoughts
Sadly, it’s not all good news at the glen – a few years ago, the Forestry Commission installed two paths, one wending its way between the trees like a play-park and the other using non-native sandstone paving flags to enlarge the walk beside the river – in the process, cementing its way through the pine trees’ roots. I am not impressed.
The other two photos in this set are a bit strange by my standards, too: shooting directly into the sun with only a few seconds to capture a crepuscular ray, I extended my usual HDR bracketing from 1EV to 2 stops either side; it’s taken me the last 6 months and no fewer than 10 re-processing iterations to make the best I can of that scene and the results are necessarily unrealistic in order to capture detail in both foreground and sky. The scene is from the path along the south side of Loch Affric to Kintail, beside Loch Salach a’Ghiubhais (“dirty loch of the pines”) – I have no idea what they did to merit such a title, as it seems a pretty gorgeous place to me.
Glen Affric: Trees (4)
Lots of Scots Pine trees around Glen Affric.
Favourite Trees can be seen from near the carpark above the River Walk around the glen – these are the same pines that appear in Heather and Trees.
Gnarly struck me as a pleasant old character, enjoying the morning sun, on the way up the side of Coille na Feithe Buidhe to the memorial.
The trees is Pinus sylvestris are to be found along the south side of Loch Affric, on the path that ultimately brings you out in Kintail near Skye.
Glen Affric: Tree Closeups
Glen Affric: abstracts from reality
There’s an art to this kind of abstract – seeing, reducing the scene to an interplay of lines and shapes and seeking a kind of balanced visual weight across the frame. Hence, spatial distribution – nothing so crass as having one subject on which the eye can focus, but a pleasing arrangement nonetheless.
Glen Affric: Trees (2)
Further studies in the shapes of characterful trees, Glen Affric: this time, in black and white.
Glen Affric: Trees (1)
It’s no secret that Glen Affric is my favourite place on the planet. We’ll come to why, later. Meanwhile, the first in a short series of posts studying the more characterful shapes of trees at the glen.
Sun behind clouds
Helios 58mm f/2 lens wide open but with a pinhole drilled in the lens-cap, giving an effective aperture of about f/30 (almost two stops narrower than the lens’s own aperture scale). This was just slow enough to allow a reasonable hand-held exposure of the sun behind iridescent clouds, although it still took a lot of care to retrieve detail in the highlights.
Perth close-ups: floral colour
The last in a short series of photos from a stroll around Perth.
These are all processed slightly differently from my usual workflow – instead of darktable, I used RawTherapee with a film emulation (allegedly Fuji Provia). As with the others in this series, all images were made on a Helios 58mm f/2 prime lens, pretty wide open.