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.
Tag Archives: black and white
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.
Late Night Mist
Late Saturday evening, I was driving back from Argyll to Perthshire; got as far as a country lane outside Braco a few miles from home and saw this beautiful fog swirling around a copse of trees with the Ochils in the background, all in the silvery moonlight.
Olympus Pen-F, Pentax 50mm f/1.7, 3 frames at 8s*8 in hi-res mode.
Unusually for me, there’s been quite a bit of work removing extraneous distractions such as foreground telegraph poles. But the feeling is still there 🙂
Late Night Mist
Black Woods of Rannoch
A few photos from a stroll around some of my favourite Highland Perthshire woodland, the Black Woods of Rannoch. A great way to spend the afternoon – chilling out with camera admiring the light and shadows among the pine trees
Birks of Aberfeldy
It’s been a year or so since I last strolled around the Birks – high time to check all the waterfalls and trees are still there. (Spoiler: they are.)
Around Loch Rannoch
It remains one of my favourite parts of Highland Perthshire – with walks in Caledonian Forest to enjoy, beautiful landscape around Loch Rannoch, and this most recent discovery – as I was driving I saw a little round fuzzy grey/black creature trundling along the verge; when I realised it was a badger, well, the car just pulled its own handbrake on so I could get out and say hello. On talking to a few passers-by, it transpires they’re well known, living in a sett under an old pine tree’s partially excavated roots.
Wildlife is awesome.
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.
Birnam Hill
I’m losing count of how many times I’ve been up Birnam Hill near Dunkeld, which is no bad thing.
My favourite waterfall is still running and the scenery from Stair Bridge viewpoint, overlooking the line of the Highland Boundary Fault running past Rohallion Lodge is still beautiful.
Herewith, a comparison of colour vs black-and-white renditions.
In the Woods
The Black Woods of Rannoch are a particularly favourite stroll. One of the Caledonian Forest reserves (the only one I know in Perthshire), they boast many native and rare flora species – Scots Pine, birch, rowans, alder, willow and juniper and lichens and fungi – as well as being home to wild deer (as I discovered when a stag suddenly trundled right across the path barely 20yd in front of me).
Interaction with mankind is a different matter. There’s something about the flow and depth of river water in the weir that creeps me out, but the text on the last sign-post says:
The Black Wood of Rannoch Canals
Before you you can see a ditch cut through the heather. This dates from around 1800 and once formed part of a York Building Company scheme to remove timber from the Black Wood of Rannoch. In order to extract the logs they devised a system of canals (the ditch before you was the lowest of the three canals).
The scheme provided a great deal of work and employed most of the men and women of the district. Over four miles of canals had to be dug using picks and shovels. The trees then had to be felled before being floated along the canals and then down a chute to Loch Rannoch. The logs were tied together in rafts for the journy down the loch to Kinloch Rannoch, then sent singly down the Rivers Tummel and Tay to their final destination at Perth and Dundee.
If the project had been a success, the Black Wood of Rannoch would have ben completely destroyed. In the event, the plan to float the logs down the rivers did not work. The scheme was abandoned, and the wood saved.
Employment just does justify desecration. The woods are too special.
Snowy Strathearn
The view driving south-west along the A9 just above Forteviot is quite a treat – an open expanse of Strathearn with the river and road flowing through the landscape, bounded on the south by the Ochil hills.
On a snowy winter’s day with passing sunlight, even better!
Herewith, a few photos taken in the course of a few minutes as a filthy dark cloud rolled in.
Hunting Kelpies
Situated right beside the M9, the Kelpies are a bit of a tourist trap, but it had to be done…
Rather stupidly, I set out with intentions of making long exposure photos of the kelpies – and then found after a few miles down the road that I’d left all my filters in the other camera bag. So, f/22 was deployed, along with a lot of stacking for synthetic long exposures. In one case it took over 60 images median-blended to eliminate the humans milling around. Still, it’s probably better that way – I’m always happier when image data arises from photons than algorithms or localized manipulation.
And some of my favourite shots are from the boardwalk through the marshes on the way back to the carpark.
When it snows…
…it does it properly. A small handful of photos taken late one evening when all around was quiet (apart from some lunatic burning-out the clutch in their Ford to get up the road) and covered in white (and slush) and no light but streetlights…
Cultybraggan Camp
Another set from a photo-excursion in May this year, directly contrasting with the pleasure of nature’s bluebells earlier in the day.
Cultybraggan is situated just outside village of Comrie. It was first used as a prisoner of war (PoW) camp during World War II and then became an Army training area before housing a Royal Observer Corps nuclear monitoring post and a Regional Government Headquarters. The camp ceased to be used by the military in 2004 and is now owned by the Comrie Development Trust.
The camp is also right on the line of the Highland Boundary Fault, running from Glen Artney straight through the camp and up through Dalginross and along the A85 through Strathearn.
Unusually for me, I’m trying a little artistic experiment – overlaying the same texture of trees (taken much more recently in Glen Lyon) over images, to see what can be made of it.
Above Comrie
A selection of photos taken around Glen Lednock, mostly up the Melville Monument overlooking Comrie.
This is Highland Boundary Fault territory; the fault itself runs up Glen Artney from the south-west straight through Cultybraggan PoW Camp, on through Comrie and across the A85 to the east.
I was also struck by how vintage Comrie itself looks from afar – a nice ratio of buildings interspersed by trees, with such a low vehicular traffic flow (even on a Saturday afternoon) that one could almost imagine the cars being replaced by carriages.
And no visit to Glen Lednock could be complete without the obvious long-exposure photo of the Wee Cauldron waterfall, of course!
A stroll around town: mankind’s bits
The flip-side of my previous post on what nature does around town: making architecture and art look interesting.