Dunning Glen

One of my favoured local woodlands, just a few minutes’ drive from home, is Dunning Glen. Starting from the village, stroll up the road, round the corner and through the small doorway into the woods where trees and rivers play.

There are some steep bits, but plenty of the oak trees in particular have a gnarly character.

Herewith, some photos:

My favourite from this particular afternoon was this oak – some of its branches having rotted and fallen off:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods

The latter is available as prints, cards, masks and other products, via my main website: there is a pleasure in the pathless woods.

Autumn in Glen Lyon

A few photos from a trip to Glen Lyon in autumn. An ideal route for an afternoon walk-with-Dog took in 3 distinct kinds of woodland: artificial monoculture (spruce etc, clear barren ground) (fortunately being felled with a view to replacement with native trees), some birch and oak, and (another artificial) an avenue of beech trees.

Anthropocene influence:

Very natural native flora basking in the golden light:

An avenue of beech trees looking quite spooky

Crail: colour

Three views of the beach at Crail – for the geologists, the rock is old red Devonian sandstone. For everyone else, the seaweed is slippery and the water is wet.

Crail Harbour Rocks: then and now

Quite a few years ago, I had just acquired a large-format view-camera (a Shen-Hao); for a first excursion, I took it to Crail in Fife and made an interesting study of the boulders submerged at the water’s edge on the beach.

Fast-forward five years, and I returned to the same beach in Crail with a little Sony NEX-7 camera and retook the same image-brief:

  • Crail
  • closeup
  • water and rocks
  • multiple superimposed exposures

The differences a few yards, a few years, and a different day can make! Enough, perhaps, to justify titling the new image “Crail Harbour Rocks (2)”.

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.

Cauldron Falls, West Burton

One of my favoured parts of North Yorkshire’s scenery is the well-known waterfall at West Burton. Always good for a bit of classical landscape photography, exploring both context and closeup (“intimate landscape”); it’s also quite fun to compare with other people’s views of the same location, although I envy anyone who manages to get good light in such a location.