One of my favourite views is the Highland Boundary Fault running through the landscape, immediately in front of me standing at Stair Bridge Viewpoint part-way up Birnam Hill.
It looks particularly pleasant with light and cloud-shadows zipping over the trees too:
And so we come to the last post in the series, a set of photos not entirely in Morvern but more on the way back up the shores of Loch Sunart and Loch Linnhe to the Corran Ferry, across and down to Loch Leven at Ballachulish.
There’s something wonderfully uplifting about rattling along these wee roads on beautiful sunny days, admiring the light.
Some days you only need to come away with one landscape image to justify an excursion.
On Saturday I set sail with Doglet and a friend and strolled through Black Spout Woods around Pitlochry, up to the viewpoint across the gorge where you can see the full height of the waterfall, and then round to the more accessible bit near the top of the falls, which still takes a fair amount of scrambling around on the river bank to get down to.
A nice stroll through the woods, a view across the gorge to the full height of the waterfall, some scrambling around on the banks to get down to this level (a small fraction of the total height down from the top) with friend and dog… A good way to spend an afternoon
There are three conscious aspects to this shot:
I wanted to make the most of the 15-30mm lens, so with a bit of wiggling around at the scene I found a spot right in front of the cascades that would showcase the 16mm ultra-wide field of view with a strong foreground. Nothing clipped; there’s negligible cropping except for lens-correction. There’s something in each pair of corners: the strong diagonal line of the dead tree-trunk in the foreground is echoed by the three distant trees in the far top-left; the negative space of the burnt-out sky has an echo in the expanse of run-off water in the bottom; treated as three stripes, there’s a balance between the height of the frame given to the run-off, to the bright white cascades, and to the woods+sky at the top.
I made 10 source images on the Pentax K-1, varying the exposure as follows:
f/13.0 1/50s; f/14.0 1/8s;
f/16.0 0.4s; f/16.0 0.5s
f/16.0 0.5s; f/16.0 0.8s
f/16.0 1/4s; f/16.0 1/8s
f/16.0 1/8s; f/18.0 1/6s
This set of exposures spans a large contrast range from bright grey sky down to dark shadows in the rocks; it varies the shutter speed so at least a few will make the water look like brushed cotton; it varies the aperture partly to cater for the range of shutter speeds, and partly so as much of the shot as possible has a frame with maximum detail before diffraction. Enough data that enfuse could find a good midtone maximizing local entropy (detail) at every pixel.
Each of the above had pixel-shift enabled for greater resolution, totalling 40 frames of 36MPel resolution. The shutter was open for a combined total of 12s.
I used my open-source Pentax K-1 pixel-shift workflow on each of the 10 images above, and then reused it again to blend all 10 together into a combined HDR average. Opening this in darktable, I proceeded to correct lens-distortion, finalize the crop (16:10 aspect-ratio, one of my favourites for landscape), set detail modules (no need for noise-reduction! some balancing of detail, local detail, equalizer modules though) and exposure, toning (including tonemapping and low-pass filter) and colour (Velvia). There are not many localized modifications, but there are significant grad-ND filters both down through the trees and, opposing that diagonally, up from the bottom of the frame, along with two instances of the vignetting filter (one significant, one just clipping the corners); there is also extra local contrasted masked into an area around the dead tree trunk. Finally I opened the image in The Gimp and ran the G’Mic filter suite including colour-grading twice (once conventionally, once with extra highlight/shadow duotone effects, blended together – this has the side-effect of changing the tonality in the green leaves to make it look brighter/sunnier than it actually was). A tweak to the curves to lift the overall gamma and then I overlaid my favourite texture image, a photo of a sheet of Hahnemuehle Photo-Rag paper, in soft-light mode to soften the contrast and add a small amount of texture into otherwise barren areas.
Working this way hits a sweet-spot in terms of convenience and image-quality.
I did not fall in the river. That’s a good start.
With such a wide field of view, every centimeter counts when choosing the location. With the 15-30mm lens I was able to experiment, iteratively varying location and focal length, until an optimum position was found, all the while seeing exactly what the final composition would be in live-view.
Pixel-shift – moving the sensor around in a 1px square pattern – works as a great way to increase the resolution.
The alternative would be to shoot a panorama, but that would still require HDR blending of frames as well as risking motion-artifacts in the trees; with just HDR on its own, the ghosting of the leaves from averaging multiple frames is a more pleasant indication of movement rather than errors in stitching. Additionally, shooting a panorama would require just as much care over camera position but would not allow a preview of the composition.
As a hybrid option, with cameras that lack pixel-shift or equivalent technology, one could compose approximately and then vary the tripod position subtly to emulate hand-held camera-shake; this is almost identical to pixel-shift in terms of super-resolution, but varying the camera position risks introducing artifacts from lens-distortion and parallax between foreground and distant parts of the scene, that pixel-shift avoids.
Additionally, shooting every frame 4x over, automatically, increases the overall exposure time into multiple seconds, even in daylight, which avoids the need for Big Stopper-type filters (especially handy on a lens that would require a special holder for such).
Having spent a few days based in my favourite Glen Affric hunting scenery up in the far North, I drove back down Loch Ness. Thinking to take a detour along the A827 (toward Skye), I joined the A87 south only to be met with road-closed signs.
There was a bit of light in the layby while I made my mind up…
The view from the layby also included a classic interaction of mankind and nature – rarely, for me, this is highly manipulated (several partial wind-turbines removed and the remaining one moved across the frame and inverted) but illustrates the concept and contrast quite nicely:
“Speaking to the Sky”
Originally a photo of a few large wind turbines on the slopes of Meall Dubh; made into a bit of a statement.
Given that the first detour was closed, I went a little further along to Loch Cluanie on the road to Skye and had a quick play with the new Nisi filters[amazon], admiring the sunlight on the loch shore:
Perhaps not the best light for landscape work, being late morning / nearly noon, but quite nice and bright sunlight on Loch Cluanie nonetheless.
A rather late lunch was had at my favourite pub in Glencoe, the Clachaig Inn.
The weather turned foul as we travelled through Glencoe, but it made for an interesting timelapse video of the clouds and mist lapping around two of the Three Sisters mountains (Beinn Fhada and Gearr Aonach):
And this is what it looked like shooting it… complete with chamois leather cloth to keep the rain off the camera:
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On the third day of my holiday last year, the weather took a turn for the worse and my chosen route for the day was closed until Spring, so I went for a walk around the Reelig Glen just outside Inverness.
To be more accurate, the first walk around the glen was favourably interrupted by a very friendly wee collie dog, so I did the whole route a second time with the camera…
It was beautifully relaxing, good for the soul. A place of shapes and light and more shapes and green and autumnal orange colour.
About half-way around the route, just round from crossing the bridge, is Dughall Mor – a Douglas Fir tree that at one time was the tallest in Britain. They do not put any signage by it, except for a very tiny mark on the bark, but I know which it is.
One of these trees used to be the tallest in Britain.
(I know which – they don’t advertise it for safety reasons, save for a very small mark.)
About six years ago, on my first visit to the glen, I also met a small dog and attendant human; the conversation has stuck in my mind, partly for the subject-matter but mostly because of its gentle and slightly surreal nature. A person who knows there’s nothing better to do than to sit on a bench watching the old dog play in the burn. At the time, I wrote about the encounter thus:
The Shadows of Importance
As I came nearer, crossed over a small bridge over a burn, I saw an elderly Westie playing, slowly investigating all around… with his also-eldery designated human sitting on this bench.
And we conversed.
About the important things.
Dogs, trees, and somewhere waaayy down the line, people.
We walked through the woods and he showed me a tree that once was tallest in Britain.
The world of bright city lights was gone, a garish cheapness for and of strangers, long forgotten, as though it never was.
And there was complete serenity.
Some days I’d post an admiration of the forest. Today you get the waypoint where Hamish played and Geoff sat.
Or maybe it’s still an admiration of the forest anyway…
Scene of an encounter
This time of making the circuit around the Reelig Glen, there was no sign of Geoff or Hamish – but I remembered them, and was grateful for all the dogs who love me.
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The light, when the clouds permitted, was glorious – illuminating the foliage beautifully.
I first visited Glen Affric in September 2006, more or less 10 years ago. Not long after, I discovered the joy of standing at my favourite bench watching the sun rise behind the distant mountains, its light casting shadows of the trees on the mist. Since then I’ve been longing for a second chance at the same scene – and this year, with a bit of good timing, I think I managed it.
And another behind-the-scenes 360-pano selfie of what it’s like to be there…
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I had a short holiday at the start of last November, a few days spent in Glen Affric. There are several aspects why it’s my favourite part of the planet, but for the purposes of this post, we consider the role of water in shaping a landscape, eroding its way through rocks to form river, gorges and waterfalls.
First, the impressive 150-foot drop of Plodda Falls from the top:
Second, some of the cascades in the River Affric, part of the way around the River Walk, rich autumn colours glowing in the morning sunlight:
And finally, a couple of 360-degree panoramas, partly to offer a behind-the-scenes view – they take a little while to download once clicked:
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It’s a classic viewpoint – at the head of Loch Tay standing on the shores at Kenmore, looking down the length of the loch past the Crannog and island to mountains in the distance. Even without dramatic contrasty sunlight, it didn’t disappoint.
For the record, these were both 8-second exposures, around f/4.5 and ISO 400 using a Nisi circular polariser filter to balance the light between sky and reflection. Both images are a pair stacked for noise-reduction.
Detail of blades of grass poking throuhg a frozen Lochan na h’Achlaise, Rannoch Moor.
At the end of November I spent a happy Saturday afternoon driving out to the Black Mount area in Rannoch Moor, with photos in mind.
Didn’t help that I left the main camera battery at home in the charger, so was limited to the spare. Well, it makes one think when even turning the camera on to compose through the EVF uses finite battery life, especially in the cold. Lots of “pre-visualising” going on to keep the film-throwback photographer purists happy.
There were plenty of cars zooming along the A82 but a little stroll out into the bogs resulted in some nice landscape.
The crowning joy of the photographic excursion, however, was the total cliche scene of the Buachaille from the River Coupall. It’s sufficiently well-known that folks groan when it appears in photo-club competitions. The composition is more or less fixed, with varying extremity of weather conditions providing the value-additions to the photo.
This time, I spotted a little wisp of mist coming up Glencoe as I turned off down Glen Etive. There were only two other folks at the location; they said it was their second attempt that day as, on the way down the glen, there had been 20-30 folk milling around.
Funny how such an iconic landscape location still has people who will shoot it in suboptimal light.
We took a few photos, and dusk fell, with glorious shades of warm purple tints and an orange sky.
My temporary companions departed, leaving just me – well into post-sunset dusk blue-hour – at which point the wisp of mist rounded the base of the mountain underlining it in white to match the waterfalls in the river. And that is the shot of the day.
Stob Dearg – Buachaille Etive Mor from the River Coupall, Glen Etive
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…
Today’s random philosophical question: is landscape photography actually deterministic?
Research maps. Check weather forecast. Think about time and location and the maximization of opportunity. Take camera and go. Point it at things. Come back, process to some degree of satisfaction.
The process is certainly repeatable and it takes an incredible amount of luck to sway the results.
A couple of weeks ago, having passed by the village a couple of times this year on other travels, I set out for Acharn on the south side of Loch Tay with intention of using camera and tripod. They were duly deployed. And here are the results…
I was particularly pleased with the last pair, longish-distance zooms across the gorge to the water cascading over some very silvery-grey rock with two tree branches aligned like chopsticks beside the splash-down.
Finally, just for a sense of context, a making-of snap from the phone – this is how the last two were made:
A few months ago now, I spent a happy Saturday afternoon driving around the countryside – visited some old haunts and refreshed memories. I had it in mind to spend some time shooting the well-known statue Still by Rob Mulholland in Loch Earn at St Fillan’s, but was more taken by the landscape en route – a little mist rising off a forest, clouds so low they obscure the outlines of the mountains.
So the majority of these photos were actually taken whilst parked in a layby off the A85. But I couldn’t possibly admit to that. 😉
More experiments with the Olympus 7-14mm lens: a study in trees around Glen Lednock.
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.