I’ve made a few photos of this waterfall since the start of the year: it might only be small, located a long walk away from home in the corner of Port Mora bay beside a cave, but being my own discovery makes it more favourite than some of the other waterfalls in Galloway.
SRB ND1000 filter, two frames at 30s each; experimenting with a fairly thick-black tonality and the 6×7 portrait aspect-ratio.
Wee Waterfall
Well, they say photography is partly about seeing interest in mundane things. So here are five views of a simple bit of street-furniture:
All are black and white, HDR made from 3 frames bracketed +/-1EV.
A simple comparison today, the same scene seen two ways.
First, colour. The camera chose a fairly cool whitebalance, which lends itself to a purply-blue tint reminiscent of certain slide films of old:
And this is what can be made of it – a much shinier, silvery monochrome rendition, the punchy contrast emphasizing the foreground rock shapes:
Both have their merits – you can favour whichever you wish!
Technical details:
Sony NEX-7;
an HDR of 3 frames: ISO 100, f/10, for 1/125, 1/250, 1/60s exposure times;
processed in RawTherapee, blended in enfuse, manipulated in darktable.
I don’t often “do” street-photography – possibly because I don’t often “get” it. But when I saw this statue in a Carlisle shopping centre, the potential for a photo was pretty clear and it didn’t take too long before the other characters moved themselves into place.
Ringtone
A sculpture by Judith Bluck FRBS of Jimmy Dyer, a well-known itinerant fiddler and ballad singer in a shopping centre, Carlisle.
I like to think it’s possible to find serenity – and the odd quirky detail – even in a town.
It’s been a bit breezy the past couple of days – winds gusting over 50mph locally and up to 100mph nationally. Fortunately, the gardener has just finished staking all the trees that needed it, so the storms passed us by with no significant damage – the only loss appears to be this wooden trellis that’s blown over, with the honeysuckle creeper climbing all over it severed at the root. No sad loss, really, as I spent too much of the summer pruning the thing in an attempt to keep the walkway accessible underneath it anyway.
Bamboo makes for almost ideal bonfire material – dries out easily, burns efficiently, and being hollow, keeps a ready supply of oxygen in the fire core.
There can’t be many more bonfires left in the year…
Sunlight and tree shadows on the road
Down on the sea front, looking toward the disused BT radio transmitter station
Taken during a lunchtime stroll down to Portpatrick: a moderate haar from the sea, obscuring the village in the distance.
It was good to go away for the weekend, and it was good to get back home again too nice sunny views around Portpatrick harbour too.
Being Lifeboat Week in the village, it would be remiss of me not to post a photo of RNLI 16-21, the RNLB John Buchannan Barr, the lifeboat stationed at Portpatrick:
One of the few New Year resolutions I’ve ever made was this year, and it was to look for photo opportunities characterised as much by areas of dark as by light – a kind of counter to the principle of seeking “good light”, largely because I find the term distasteful, so rather than photography, “writing with light” I hoped to print with dark instead. It’s actually been quite a successful strategy, over that I hope to continue using on occasion, as often as I remember anyway.
After a comment on blipfoto today, I did a bit of research into ferns. Earliest fossils of ferns data back to the Carboniferous period (325Mya), although the more modern species go as far back as the Cretaceous (145Mya). So now we know…
Out of focus: patterns of light and shadows of tree leaves.
A few months ago, when we moved into the area, one of the first local scenes I spotted was this view of beech trees along the brow of a small hill, running along the side of a fence, terminating with a gate and a hawthorn tree.
I managed to capture the view with the remnants of snow as the deeper drifts melted away:
Some Trees
and I wrote a previous article about what set that image apart from a quick mobile snap of the scene as well.
As a photographer, I was looking forward to capturing the scene in varying seasons – indeed, I could anticipate my output becoming repetitive and running out of inspiration for different ways to portray it.
I got as far as two variations.
First, The Answer: tall beech trees, covered in new foliage for the onset of summer, blowing in the wind:
The Answer
and then an evening portrait of summer skies with blue wispy cirrus clouds above the trees:
Some Sky
In the past week, the impressive beeches have been cut down; a drain pipe has been laid just this side of the trees, the fence is removed and the whole hillside has been ploughed so what used to be an expanse of green grass is currently brown soil. I guess at least that won’t last long before it recovers.
Our Earth Was Once Green
Yesterday evening I caught a TV programme about Scotland’s landscape, from the point of view of some awful Victorian book, a rather romantic tourist guide for “picturesque” views, the programme showing the contrast with tourists’ search for an “authentic experience” of Scotland – yet pointing out how, more or less by definition, to be a tourist is inevitably to be an uninvolved spectator.
One of the guests in the programme was a local photographer, who explained how landscape photographers struggle with the dichotomy of presenting the landscape as timeless, pure, untainted by human hand, whilst knowing in the back of their mind that they’re perpetrating a myth through selectivity, that the landscape is far from wild and natural – the deforestation dates back 8 millenia to pre-history, what now appears as Highland heather-clad grouse-moor heath used to be crofting land prior to the Clearances, etc.
While landscape used to be my chosen genre of photography, and a fair proportion of what I now shoot – including the above – still qualifies as such, I think it’s time to recognize that landscape photography is not just about the tourist photographer seeking ever-wilder ever-more-northern scenery, nice as that can be, but rather includes potentially less travel whilst valuably documenting the landscape changing from year to year, whether those changes arise from natural forces or human intervention.