Beyond these Shores

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:

Sunlight on water

And this is what can be made of it – a much shinier, silvery monochrome rendition, the punchy contrast emphasizing the foreground rock shapes:

Sunlight on water

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.

Storm Surge

Apparently there’s “exceptional weather” doing the rounds at the moment. From last night until midday the wind speed has been around 40mph gusting to 63mph. On hearing mid-morning of a storm surge coinciding with high tide around lunch-time, Dog and I set out to see what it looked like.

The waves were impressive – the highest I’ve seen around the harbour. The coast-guard were doing an admirable job of directing such little traffic as dared or needed to get close; a small crowd gathered to watch the waves.

I made a small video of the goings-on as well:

 

Water, water, everywhere

Saturday was wet. Very wet.

This was the view just outside Portpatrick, at the corner of the Dunskey B-road turnoff, water flooding off the hill onto the road.

Flood

On arriving home, I discovered a drain outside the gate was unable to cope with the sudden rain, and a gutter-load of water was flowing in a channel down the driveway, pushing gravel through the gate.

It took half an hour’s shovelling gravel to persuade some of the water to flow into a flowerbed the other side of the fence; in the meantime, the garage was flooded about 3in deep.

A couple of days later and the scale of damage caused is clear; while the driveway is now arguably better than it was before, roadside embankments have obviously suffered

Collapsed embankment

as has the road surface – the erosion from gravel and dirt flowing over tarmac is quite severe:

tarmac road surface showing serious erosion due to