In Inverary

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This past Saturday was the Word-wide Photo Walk; as has become an occasional habit, I attended the Inverary walk.

There was a trip around the Inverary Jail:

  • It’s ALIIIVE!! Rather too-closeup detail of a wax model at Inverary Jail.
  • Winter is coming(TM) Two sides of a barred doorway Inverary Jail, taken on the Worldwide Photo-Walk 2019
  • What shall we do with this one? Looking back it does seem somewhere between crazy and barbaric, acts that were considered crimes in previous centuries, their understanding and severity fuelled by basic superstition.
  • Detail of keys on a keyring, Inverary Jailer’s uniform closeup
  • Black paint, white plaster: original piping for gas lighting installed in 1841. Technologies come and go…
  • Our illustrious host for the Worldwide Photo Walk in Inverary, 2019 One of the challenges for the group was to take a photo of someone we spoke with on the day.

and around the town front and Castle:

  • Detail of a fallen leaf amongst stones in the River Ary with Inverary Castle in the distance
  • An ornate stone bridge over the River Ary in the grounds of Inverary Castle.
  • An awesome grey stone lump in Gothic Revival style – dating from 1743, replacing an earlier castle of a couple of centuries previous.
  • Scotland’s last working Clyde Puffer, the Vital Spark of Glasgow, berhted at Inverary harbour.

and early-autumn scenery around Dubh Loch:

  • The beginnings of autumn: no rich leaf colour yet, but shades of yellow and green (equal parts conifer needles and tree-beard lichen) taken across Dubh Loch.
  • Small boat parked above the jetty beside the boathouse, Dubh Loch.
  • A mostly overcast grey end of the day, but with a little subtle direction to the light illuminating the underside of the bridge beautifully.

Some of these are available as prints over on ShinyPhoto.

Inverary: A Tale of Three Techniques

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In August I called in on an old friend in Inverary for a small guided tour around the local forests with camera in hand.

There was one particular photo I had in mind – ever since I first saw an old ruined barn with disused farm machinery, it was crying-out for the bokeh-panorama (aka Brenizer) technique – instead of one straight shot composed with the final focal-length in mind, one uses a longer lens (preferably a fast prime) and stitches the results into a panorama, to give an image with narrower DoF than was possible at the focal length in question.

Here’s the straight scene, taken on the Fuji X-H1 on the 16-50mm f/2.8 at 18mm – even wide open there’s no significant blurring in the background.

So here’s the stitched result, taken using a Helios 56mm f/2 wide open – drastic focus drop-off:

It took 100 frames at source – 2.4Gpx – but the result would be the equivalent of an 18mm lens at f/0.6. 

The second technique was keystone/perspective adjustment. On seeing a stone waterworks in the woods, my friend challenged me to get a view of it straight-on without using the drone. That’s simple enough – even though it’s several feet above head-height.

The third technique was simple long exposure: night had long fallen before I left the town but the clouds moving across Loch Fyne/Shira looked pleasantly ominous. Keeping base ISO, f/6.4 gave a 7s base exposure – with HDR 5*±2/3EV this became 7+18+30+27+10 = 92s combined total, retaining exposure from brightest point of clouds into shadowy areas in the mountainsides. (Contrast is not just a daytime problem!)

Several long exposures blended together into an HDR image of clouds and smooth water, Loch Shira from Inverary.

Photo-Walk 2017

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For several years, on and off, I’ve attended an annual Photo-Walk based in Inverary, Argyll. This year was no exception – always good to catch up with friends I’ve met on the walk previously.

As always, Argyll is a favoured place and Autumn a favoured season; the combination of light and landscape makes for enjoyable drives.

An auspicious viewpoint – right next to the public toilets on Inverary front – but it makes for a cracking view up the loch toward a spot of sunlight illuminating the hills around Ardkinglas.

This time the organizer, Richard, had brought a couple of props – most notably a bottle of Isle of Jura Superstition and I had one or two ideas in mind “just in case” we ended up at a particular favourite waterfall.

 

We made our way down the slippery embankment to the burn, where I set up tripod amongst the boulders to maximize the lead-in lines of water flowing around the rocks up to the waterfall – tripod placement was fairly tricky with a wide-angle (24mm) lens and the slippery lumpy terrain to negotiate – and then as the camera was busy taking 20s exposures (4x with pixel-shift) I trotted back and forth through the water firing a flash-gun down onto the bottle of whisky and surrounding rocks (manual triggering at 1/8 power with the diffuser out and reflector down to stop the light itself registering in the scene).

Product Placement
I quite like Isle of Jura whisky… not necessarily on the rocks though.

I had originally experimented focussing in on the bottle itself and using a wide aperture to restrict depth of field, but that did not fall naturally through the scene – the waterfall was still sharp behind – so I stopped-down to make everything in focus and relied on post-processing tricks in Affinity Photo to draw the eye onto the bottle differently instead – some Orton effect and various soft-light Gaussian blurs, masks and elliptical gradient fills to boost the saturation, make it all glow and still leave the bottle sharp and bright. The final toning came from Snapseed of all things.

I’ve done a little product-photography before but never tried blending [bad pun intended] it with landscape work, let alone pairing it with light-painting, but I think it worked – certainly compared to the straight shot, the bottle with its amber glow just makes it.

Argyll PhotoWalk 2016: Around Inverary

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I was a bit late joining the photo-walk this year, but caught up with the small crowd of folks in Inverary prior to walking around the town with a camera in tow.

The views from the front, looking up lochs Shira and Fyne to sunlit mountains surrounding Glenkinglas, were stunning.

We also went around the Jail, where one of the guides pretended to have been naughty…

Around Inverary

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At the start of October, I spent a happy Saturday on a photo-walk organized by a friend around Inverary in Argyll, the group numbering nearly 20 folks.

It was quite a day – over 7 miles walked, folks socialized with, the town and surrounding landscapes investigated.

We started with a trip up the bell-tower and the adjacent All Saints’ Scottish Episcopal Church in the middle of town:

After that, we visited Inverary Jail – quite interesting to get a glimpse of the conditions folks lived in. A friendly guard posed for us:

As we were walking around to the castle for lunch, there was a burst of sunlight over the landscape. A few days prior to the excursion I had discovered an old Pentax film camera in a storage box, and loaded it with film and acquired an extra 50mm prime lens for it, along with an adapter to the Sony NEX-7. So this is Strone Point and the top of Glen Kinglas, on an old 50mm f/1.7 “nifty fifty” Pentax PK-fit lens:

We had lunch in the Inverary Castle tearooms:

Inverary Castle

Inverary Castle

The afternoon was spent climbing up Dun na Cuaiche. I was impressed to see what an effect the geology has on the area, as (igneous) felsite hills to the north of the town give way to psammite (partially metamorphosed sedimentary) bedrock along the shore of Loch Fyne. The watchtower is a folly – the only thing it looks out over is the castle itself, affording no real protection from anyone else feeling like invading!