This episode is a study of green tree foliage and roads.
Tag Archives: forest
Inverawe Impressions (2/10)
Part 2 of an ongoing series of posts about the Inverawe estate in Argyll.
This time, we concentrate on mankind’s intrusion into nature. For the most part, the laird leaves the woodlands alone, untouched; however, the Forestry Commission clear-felled the slopes of Ben Cruachan, initially leaving the mountainside bare but there are now young trees beginning to grow in the barren patches. The unfortunate consequence has been damage to some of the water-courses, resulting in culverts that used to flow with beautiful clear peaty water now stagnant and clogged-up with algae.
Inverawe Impressions (1/10)
This is the first in quite a long series of of blog posts.
Several years ago now, I spent a couple of years making one black and white image a day, every day, for nearly 2 years, concentrating a lot on the shapes and forms of trees in the Inverawe, Argyll, avoiding the contrasty light normally appreciated in landscape photography.
This new series takes the same fascination with filling space with shapes that caught my eye, but permits for colour. All images were taken in the course of a couple of hours on a return visit walking around the estate; for the most part they were shot at f/8 with HDR bracketing +/-1 EV, processed in RawTherapee, Darktable and digiKam.
A Walk in the Woods
Details from a walk in the Black Woods of Rannoch, one of the Caledonian Forest reserves, in September.
Seasonal Delight
Detail of a fly agaric mushroom – just one of many tens of fungi found on a walk in the Black Woods of Rannoch, one of a few Caledonian Forest reserves.
Colour or Black and White?
No doubt this is one of the oldest conundrums, generally long-since answered. The conventional approach is that black&white is meant to be an end in itself (a choice made at the time of shooting rather than an option or fallback in processing), in order that the eye be drawn to forms and shapes and textures, appreciated for their own sake without the distractions of realistic colour. As such, you’d expect most images to work either as black&white or as colour; it can also be somewhat annoying when one sees an image presented in more than one way as though the photographer couldn’t decide. It’s even more irksome when you are that photographer. Today I reprocessed an image taken a couple of months ago, and was struck by how it looked in the intermediate colour form before applying the intended toning.
Shapes in the Dark – colour
Shapes in the Dark – black and white
In this case, I contend the two images both stand alone independently well, and they convey different things; further, the the colour gives a means of distinguishing the silhouetted trees from the surrounding foliage that the black&white image does not, making it look moodier.
A Carpet of Bluebells
It appears to be spring again; with the ground covered in a carpet bluebells all around, walking Dog in the local woods is a joy.
6 shots, made fresh this morning, with the Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 lens (almost wide-open).
Perthshire
Early(ish) mornings with thick frost on the grass, painfully bright in the glare of the sunlight as the world warms from -3C overnight.
Autumn sunlight in the grounds of Gleneagles
Thick misty clouds lurking in the glens.
Forests of primarily oak and birch, the trees green with moss while their fallen leaves cover the ground in a thick carpet of orange, yellow and red.
Autumn sunlight and a partially frozen pond
A red squirrel scampering up a beech tree.
Freedom to walk in the woods, basking in the joyful glory of it all.
The Wee Cauldron waterfalls, just north of Comrie