I spent a happy 25mins yesterday evening biking around the outskirts of town at golden hour.
Full video – 25mins compressed down to 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF4MYvQ-IDQ
Evening bike-ride
Tag Archives: Auchterarder
Evening Stroll Photos
In the words of a twitter friend of mine: A few photos made whilst walking for approximately half an hour with the dog.
Nothing special – just nice low evening light and details of the pastoral landscape around.
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine. 
Photos made whilst walking the dog for approximately half an hour in golden evening sunshine.
Autumn Mists
A handful of photos from walking the dog one afternoon – stark trees, mist, low clouds, distant hills: Perthshire landscape at its autumnal moodiest.
Another day… another sunset
“Slight chance of convective weather” is rapidly becoming my new favourite weather alert, especially coming at the end of the day where it signals turbulent blends of low sun, rain and thick clouds.
It doesn’t get much better than last night, either. With sunset happening just after dinner… perfect 🙂
And my favoured view of the receding hills into Strathearn was looking particularly lovely in orange-pink tones too:
Sunset and showers – beautiful warm pink light despite the rain pouring down.
Around Here: testing the Fuji X-T20
A couple of weeks ago it occurred to me that, with a holiday looming and desires of taking lots of long timelapse photos of an evening, should I wish to take other scenes while timelapse was recording I’d be out of luck with just the one camera. And so on a whim I followed a friend’s advice and bought a second shooter, a Fuji X-T20.
It’s totally amazing – “the Little Camera that Canâ„¢” – personified. Diametrically opposite to everything I’ve become accustomed to with the Pentax K-1: custom user-modes do not encapsulate drive modes such as burst-rate, bracketing or intervalometers, just some rudimentary exposure (auto)-ISO settings and things; and the JPEGs are absolutely stunning, with targets defined within colour-space not by intended purpose (“landscape”, “portrait”) but rather by film-emulation.
It’s so good I’ve reworked my entire RAW-processing workflow such that images from both cameras now look like the Fuji’s out-of-camera JPEGs whilst emulating Fuji Provia slide film of old. Quite some drastic changes required over and above the default RawTherapee profile – most notably yellow-greens are dramatically deeper and greener and there’s a “Fuji red” going off. It’s nice to have a point of reference in colour-space, so I know what’s “normal” and where processing deviates from it.
Anyway. Some quick snaps taken one lunchtime stroll through nearby woods:
And my favourite of all, a partial 22º solar halo – the first photo of the walk:
Having just returned from the holiday that prompted the acquisition, it’s interesting just how fast it’s become my primary choice of camera if only for reasons of lighter-weight whilst travelling.
Around Auchterarder
I’m not entirely sure why, but I got it into my head to make a series of photos without reason or purpose so I spent a couple of lunchtimes walking around Auchterarder just snapping scenes. Very different to my usual contemplative landscape style – this is reactionary, street photography, with a consistent presentation style (sepia-toned monochrome). All images were shot on a Pentax 15-30mm f/2.8 lens at 30mm nearly wide-open at f/3.5 as well using a daylight whitebalance.
Funnily enough, reducing the variables by insisting on one focal-length and aperture and allowing automatic exposure left me free to think about composition – in such relatively alien territory, wave the lens around and see what looks good.
Around town:
I took the new-found constraints into the surrounding countryside:
Country 2:
All images processed using RawTherapee; uncropped, but exposures normalized and the consistency of toning arising from an orange pre-filtered black and white conversion with sepia toning to finish.
Along the Oak Walk
One of my favourite walks around the local area is the Oak Walk – running along the edge of a large field, it gets beautiful evening sunlight and has some characterful trees
One or two local folk have populated it with wooden sculptures, for amusement factor
And the surrounding paths are well populated with wild raspberries, brambles and even willowherb/fireherb looking pretty in the light.
Around Here 4: dramatic sunsets
Evening was interrupted yesterday by a glimpse of sunlight on surrounding neighbours’ houses, resulting in a rapid trot with coat, feet, dog and camera to the end of the street for a view of a gloriously colourful sunset over Strathearn.
Winter along the Provost’s Walk
This is fast becoming one of my favourite walks around town – not least because it’s less muddy than the other track out the back. Yesterday I awoke to find the world had turned white, complete with snow-drift piled-up on the front lawn by a passing snowplough. Naturally, over-inflated reports of traffic confusion abounded, although by the time I had to drive anywhere in the evening, the roads were as clear as a bell.
Anyway. I like this path. The Ruthven Water makes a great spot for the Doglet to paddle. All very relaxing and shiny in the white snow.
This is what it’s like around here…
Provost’s Walk:
Arty photos:
All shots taken on the Pentax K-1 using my new hand-held HDR workflow.
Wet Reflections
Just a couple of photos from a stroll beside a burn down the bottom end of town today at lunchtime – not great light, in fact it was beginning to rain. But if looking up doesn’t work, look down and take abstract photos of trees reflected in the burn instead…
November Sunset
November: season of dreich grey rainy wet horrible days, punctuated by sunsets like this.
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.
Sunset Timelapse
Further experiments making timelapse videos – this time the sunset looking across Strathearn to Crieff – from my favourite spot for hunting aurora.
The second has Ursa Major emerging, one star at a time, over the course of 50 minutes around midnight.
Both were taken using the Olympus Pen-F with its built-in intervalometer – the first with the 12-60mm f/2.8 PRO (four-thirds) lens, the second with the 7-14mm f/2.8 PRO (micro-four-thirds) lens – but the RAW ORF files were reprocessed using RawTherapee for better tone control, the results interpolated to generate 1500 frames (1 minute at 25fps) using a custom Julia script and merged with ffmpeg.
The audio is a minute of the T-in-the-Park festival recorded from a mile away with vocals added by sheep in nearby fields. A quick frequency analysis in Audacity shows the thumping bass peaks at around 58Hz (A1)…
T-in-the-Park festival from a mile away – frequencies peaking at 58Hz
Around Here
It’s been a lousy grey and wet day – definitely dreich – here, so here are a few photos of a walk I took down the road one evening a few weeks ago, on a lovely sunny day.
Graveyards? Not exactly my usual photographic cup of tea, but OK then…
Landscape is a bit more my scene, however. There’s some lovely undulating pastoral scenery around here, with views across to the distinctive shape of Ben Effray.
All photos made using the Olympus Pen-F and the four-thirds 12-60mm f/2.8 lens using 5-shot handheld HDR technique.
Nacreous Clouds
It was a pretty decent red sunset but seeing polar stratospheric (nacreous) clouds for the first time is the icing on the cake. Awesomely beautiful.
According to wikipedia, polar stratospheric clouds are clouds in the winter polar stratosphere at altitudes of 15,000–25,000 meters (49,000–82,000 ft). They are best observed during civil twilight when the sun is between 1 and 6 degrees below the horizon. They are implicated in the formation of ozone holes. The effects on ozone depletion arise because they support chemical reactions that produce active chlorine which catalyzes ozone destruction, and also because they remove gaseous nitric acid, perturbing nitrogen and chlorine cycles in a way which increases ozone destruction.