Partial Lunar Eclipse 20190716

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A year or so ago there had been a drone pilots’ meet-up on the shores of Loch Leven in Kinross. Late Tuesday afternoon showed indications from TPE3D and Windy suggesting the light would be pleasant, clipping the surrounding hills around sunset. Further alerts from Twitter reminded me of a partial lunar eclipse, with optimum effect around 2235hrs; again, checking TPE3D I saw the moon would rise in the ESE beside / over Benarty Hill across Loch Leven. 

Arriving a little early, I hunted a composition: the obvious jetties by the carpark at the end of the road have locked gates, as does a track along the shore; walking further round, it’s obvious there’s scenery to be had but the path is surrounded by a 5′ hence making it incredibly frustrating to find a composition. In the end I settled for a “layby” with three concrete plinth benches, just tall enough to see over the hedge and just wide enough for the tripod legs. 

With half an hour to kill before the lighting and lunar eclipse kicked-in, I flew the drone to survey the surroundings.

 

  • Loch Leven Castle remains and Bishop’s Hill in Fife from Kinross
  • Kinross House – symmetrical formal gardens, how ghastly.

Around 10pm the moon sneaked out from behind a cloud-bank over Benarty Hill, a perfect orange-red half-jaffa-cake in the Earth’s Shadow.

The last photo of the evening is still my favourite: can’t beat a few hazy clouds diffusing the glow of the still-red moon.

A Bit Damp

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Another Friday evening, another great way to end the week with a camera in hand. As I finished up work, wondering whether to mow the lawn, I looked out the window and saw awesome clouds zipping past.

Grab camera, grab Dog, go walkies and shoot whatever happens. There was rain. There was sun.

And after the rain, the sun illuminating the gently undulating crop fields contrasted amazingly with the remaining ominous clouds beyond.

Simple undulating rural countryside – with dramatic clouds above.

The Far North

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The intended road from Rosal due east was closed for road-works; I took an incredibly long detour all the way to the far north coast of Scotland – next stop the Faroes and Greenland – and stopped at Portskerra to make a couple of long exposure landscapes as the light faded to dusk.

The coastal geology was impressive – alternating areas of gneiss and sandstone with clear strata in the rock.

Portskerra at dusk – a long exposure of waves lapping around rocks on the beach looking north – next stop Greenland…

Dounreay in the distance beyond the next headland

Trying something a little different

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For years now, my photo-processing workflow has been 100% open-source. However, in the interests of greater portability – hack on photos whilst on the go – and partly gratuitously for the sake of variety, I recently acquired an iPad Pro 10.5″ and installed the Affinity Photo app.

As a user experience goes, it’s really quite pleasant. The best way to synchronise files around the LAN seems to be Seafile, which is open-source and available for Linux, iOS and android. My Linux-based workflow regularly produces 64-megapixel images, working on multiple intermediate TIFF files, 16-bit ProPhotoRGB-linear; somewhat surprisingly, seafile, the iPad and Affinity Photo seem able to handle files around 450MiB in size. There are a few small gotchas – I had to import a few ICC colour profiles by hand and as yet, there doesn’t seem to be a way to customise export options (so you have to select JPEG 99% sRGB lanczos yourself afresh every time); I’m sure these things will come in time however.

So here’s a shot from last Sunday afternoon. As I was heading out of Muthill I saw this characterful old tree in a field; on the return journey a few hours later, not only was it still there but the clouds were darker in the background and the golden sunlight caught the bare branches. A very quick bit of parking and even quicker sprint back to the optimum viewpoint and it looked stunning. So I processed it a little further, realising an intention for how it should look that was apparent from the start.

Sunlit tree

The Least Amount of Landscape

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Just to disprove the idea of deterministic landscape photography, as I was driving back from Acharn through Grandtully along Strathtay, the sky took on a most beautiful glowing cobalt-blue colour of dusk combined with the icy diamond clarity of sub-zero late autumn temperatures in the Highlands.

One of those scenes where it took a little work to convert the camera’s recordings back to something resembling what I saw: after dark fell I couldn’t make out what was in the fields beyond the car headlights; there was nothing but horizon and the glow… and one tiny fragment of wispy cloud.

It doesn’t get much more minimalist than this…

Donner und Blitzen

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Wonderful amazing weather last night. The thunderstorm started around midnight, resumed sparking silently but continuously in the distance from 2 to 3am and then restarted yet again around 8-9am with jubilant thundercracks and resounding booming rumbles echoing off the clouds.

These photos were made around 2.30am – just the distant lightning illuminating the clouds.

Epic.

When it snows…

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…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…

Out in the middle of nowhere

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On a whim, a friend and I spent a few hours out in the middle of nowhere, Aberdeenshire – hunting aurora which totally failed to show, avoiding fog and pointing cameras sky-wards to see what could be seen.

I quite liked the lights of a cow-byre against the mist, the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in the constellation of Taurus and a little wisp of cloud below the rising moon.

Around Birnam Hill: landscape old and new

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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.

Aurora!

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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.

Glen Turret: Dark

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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.

Noctilucent Clouds, Perth, 20150623

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A classic location for long-exposure night-time photography: standing on the bridge over the M90 at Rhynd, with the road snaking away into the distance… and a clear display of noctilucent clouds above Kinnoull Hill.

From wikipedia:

Night clouds or noctilucent clouds are tenuous cloud-like phenomena that are the “ragged edge” of a much brighter and pervasive polar cloud layer called polar mesospheric clouds in the upper atmosphere, visible in a deep twilight. They are made of crystals of water ice. Noctilucent roughly means night shining in Latin. They are most commonly observed in the summer months at latitudes between 50° and 70° north and south of the equator. They can be observed only when the Sun is below the horizon.

They are the highest clouds in Earth’s atmosphere, located in the mesosphere at altitudes of around 76 to 85 kilometres (47 to 53 mi). They are normally too faint to be seen, and are visible only when illuminated by sunlight from below the horizon while the lower layers of the atmosphere are in the Earth’s shadow. Noctilucent clouds are not fully understood and are a recently discovered meteorological phenomenon; there is no record of their observation before 1885.

Bright Light / City

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A fairly obvious shot from a viewing location on the south side of the Tay, the road bridge disappearing in a stream of lights flowing to Dundee in the fog. At night. As a long exposure, because it’s what one does, right?

Bright Light / CIty