Driving the A9

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Saturday’s involved driving much of the length of the A9 from Perthshire to Inverness and beyond to the Nice Place™, and back down again.

On the return, I broke the journey in two locations I’ve previously admired but never stopped at: one, outside Bunchrew outside Inverness, to admire the clear view along the river estuary to the Kessock Bridge:

  • Many years ago I made a photo of this bridge spanning the river mouth from the shores much closer in Inverness. Since then the road along the south of the river out of the city has become a favourite drive, with its easy straights, gentle bends and occasional views back to the Kessock Bridge in the distance.
  • Many years ago I made a photo of this bridge spanning the river mouth from the shores much closer in Inverness. Since then the road along the south of the river out of the city has become a favourite drive, with its easy straights, gentle bends and occasional views back to the Kessock Bridge in the distance.

Odd: I’ve lived around Perthshire for over a decade and driven this stretch of the A9 many many times, but never explored Ruthven Barracks before. I was fortunate enough to arrive just as the moon was rising in the north-east – a lot larger by eye than it appeared in the photos, but it made a good backdrop to the ruined buildings. Otherwise, in the cold late afternoon light, the ground covered in a dusting of snow, it all looked rather bleak…


  • A view from behind the well-known Ruthven Barracks ruin looking straight up the Inshes along the River Spey to the moon rising in the distance.
  • Classic use for a drone – fling it up and over a ruin and admire the former Ruthven Barracks innards from on high.
  • Ruthven Barracks, near Kingussie, Speyside.

For a final subject, just as I was packing up the drone to leave Ruthven Barracks, I noticed a splash of soft light on very low clouds clipping the Cairngorm mountains in the distance. Long lens; click; got it.

  • No eagles found flying this day – but the distant gorge is on Creag na h’Iolaire in the Cairngorms. An interesting photo to make – I had been standing beside the road, flying the drone around the adjacent ruins, when I spotted the low cloud and soft light in the distance. On closer inspection, one can just about make out the snow-covered slopes of the adjacent a’Chailleach peeking through the cloud.
  • No eagles found flying this day – but the distant gorge is on Creag na h’Iolaire in the Cairngorms. An interesting photo to make – I had been standing beside the road, flying the drone around the adjacent ruins, when I spotted the low cloud and soft light in the distance. On closer inspection, one can just about make out the snow-covered slopes of the adjacent a’Chailleach peeking through the cloud.

Winter around Rannoch

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We made it up to the Rannoch area mid-afternoon in time to admire the pure calm stillness and misty distant mountain reflections on Loch Rannoch.

Beautiful simplicity: flat calm, mirror reflections on Loch Rannoch.

(Obligatory plug – the above image is now uploaded to my main fine-art / landscape website: Blue Stillness, Loch Rannoch.)

Drone photos also happened – flying around inversion layers over the Black Woods of Rannoch.

  • Patches of mist above Loch Rannoch near Croiscraig / Camghouran.
  • ..then we went for a stroll underneath all that mist, too.

And the forest was its usual welcoming self, albeit in subdued winter mode:

  • Black Woods of Rannoch late in the day – hints of mist rising in the distance, colours turned cool. It’s interesting how this end of the Black Woods is so much more densely planted – even though the Scots Pine is a native species, it’s still not naturally evolved. Indeed the history of the Black Woods includes attempts to log the forest – one can only presume this was an attempt to replant, with native species, but still with some potential degree of profit in mind.
  • Black Woods of Rannoch

Birnam Hill: Winter

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A couple of weeks ago in the middle of December, we were treated to a quick overnight blast of snow. It remains my favourite season for photography, so I staggered up Birnam Hill to fly in the late afternoon light.

Landscapes:

  • Snow-capped hills either side of the Highland Boundary Fault line – catching the last warm rays of sunset in the distance.
  • Snow-capped hills either side of the Highland Boundary Fault line – catching the last warm rays of sunset in the distance.

Straight-down abstracts – trees and outlines of the Birnam Burn flowing through the snow:

  • Wiggly shapes – the Birnam Burn running down past Stare Bridge viewpoint.
  • Wiggly shapes – the Birnam Burn running down past Stare Bridge viewpoint.

Ground-level tree abstracts:

  • Detail of tree twigs and filigree – lichen-covered branches silhouetted against the low winter sun.
  • Detail of tree twigs and filigree – lichen-covered branches silhouetted against the low winter sun.

As an experiment to help learn my way around the Shotcut video editor, I made a short video of the area too:

Craig Varr: Misty Landscape

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Saturday was one of those strange days where the weather forecast changed, leaving me not particularly inspired where to go take the camera. But I carried on regardless up to Kinloch Rannoch and climbed Craig Varr. The views on the way up were pleasant: nice trees silhouetted against the sky, views along Loch Rannoch; as I reached the top of the crag, however, the mist came down reducing visibility to barely 100yd with low cloud flowing over the trees in front. 

Descending, below the cloud level, I could see clouds zipping along above Loch Rannoch like a steam-train, the mountains opposite appearing and receding in the mist.

  • Sparse trees on Creag an Fhithirich, better known as the Sleeping Giant: a beautiful lumpy shapely crag in the foreground before Meall Dearg across the valley from Craig Varr.
  • Simple things: abstract shapes of tree branches and twigs forming a fine filigree silhouetted against the sky beyond.
  • Some of my favourite landscape elements: a contrasty plasma-cloud sky and overlaping layers of mountains receding into the distance, the other side of the Black Woods of Rannoch.
  • Shape and solitude: a much-windswept lone tree battling the elements at the top of Craig Varr.
  • Shape and solitude: a much-windswept lone tree battling the elements at the top of Craig Varr.
  • On previous visits to the location I’ve tried to replicate another photographer’s work, getting the Sleeping Giant a mile away across the river in the corner of the photo; this time, however, thick mist at the top of the crag put paid to that idea, completely eliminating anything in the distance with a visibility of about 50yd.
  • On previous visits to the location I’ve tried to replicate another photographer’s work, getting the Sleeping Giant a mile away across the river in the corner of the photo; this time, however, thick mist at the top of the crag put paid to that idea, completely eliminating anything in the distance with a visibility of about 50yd.
  • An energetic climb up Craig Varr outside Kinloch Rannoch as the mist flowed over the mountains, followed by a quick descent to return to civilisation. This was taken from the way back down, as I paused to admire the clouds flowing fast along Loch Rannoch like steam trains.
  • An energetic climb up Craig Varr outside Kinloch Rannoch as the mist flowed over the mountains, followed by a quick descent to return to civilisation. This was taken from the way back down, as I paused to admire the clouds flowing fast along Loch Rannoch like steam trains.

Caithness Holiday Day 3: Strathnaver and Strathmore are not Caithness

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As the weather dictated, a slight detour from the east coast away out to the centre and west of the top of Scotland. I explored the road down Strathnaver, starting with a small church at Syre (a distinctive tin-tab construction originally built by the Free Church of Scotland as a mission to nearby Sutherland estate, but now joined to the Church of Scotland since 1929):

Having been there last autumn, the view from the head of Loch Naver was just as compelling (and just as windy)

A wide-angle panorama from the head of Loch Naver

A few hundred yards north of Altnaharra a small road leads off through Strathmore, passing some beautiful landscape scenes of Ben Loyal across Loch Meadie:

Further along, I discovered a beautiful but thought-provoking view: at Allnabad, a former shepherd’s house, now ruined and roofless, looks out over a barren landscape over the length of Strath Coir an Easaidh to beautiful undulating mountains beyond. Unusually for me, I made quite significant changes to the scene – the real lighting was strongly blue-green (a very Fuji summer landscape colour palette) but it works better with hints of relative colour beneath a pale sepia wash for a classic old-time look. (I’ve also slightly moved the small pile of stones relative to the building.) The resultant photo is called “The Story”, partly as a homage to the Runrig song of the same name, partly because of the sense of time – evolution of the land on geological and sociological timescales.

Continuing north up Strathmore, I found the remains of the broch at Dun Dornaigil – conveniently built beside the road 😉 – on a lovely sunny day, just had to fly the drone up where a location a bit downstream made an excellent composition of river leading to the broch and Ben Hope in the distance.

From there we drove up to the far north coast and followed the A836 east, keeping an eye on the landscape to the south. Ben Loyal makes an unmistakable outline with its four peaks; somewhere nearer to Tongue there was a convenient layby giving a comparatively clear view across to the mountain.

Caithness Holiday Day 2: Whaligoe Steps and Camster Cairns

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Many moons ago… the parents and I were on holiday around Caithness and having trouble finding the way to Whaligoe Steps. As his tractor turned by the end of the field, we stopped a farmer to ask directions. To southern ears, the instructions sounded memorably like “turn right at the fussky-osk”. With a little thought we established the meaning… and twenty-two years later I still remember the turn of phrase and was pleased to identify the first phone-box in this Spring’s return visit.

Whaligoe Steps themselves are 365 steps down the side of a steep cliff to a former port for offloading herring boats; women would gut the fish and carry it up in barrels.

The place itself is quite an impressive geo with a fault nearby in the rock – strata lines pushed up by thrust – and pleasant views out to sea.

Further down the road are Camster Cairns – quite impressively large piles of rocks with interior chambers, perhaps the oldest buildings in Scotland at 5000yr old.

It had been another ludicrously hot day, with temperatures up over 25-28ºC, so we finished the day’s explorations on the north coast at the Slates of Fulligoe in East Mey, where the setting sun was partially obscured by a thick sea haar – very pleasantly cool.

 

This was the second evening I’d set out to make a timelapse of the sunset into dusk. At least this time I was prepared for haar coming in off the sea (chose a safer less-cliff-top location near the path back, for starters). It did not disappoint: over the course of an hour the sun moved, the waves came and went, and a huge bank of fog moved in transforming the scene from brilliant sunset reflecting on the water, to complete white-out. All the possible moods of the landscape in barely an hour – quite awesome.
This photo is a temporal flattening of a timelapse sequence – using the intervalometer to shoot HDR brackets 3*±1EV at regular intervals which can be made either into a timelapse video or averaged-out into a still, like this. (The sun itself is blended from fewer images to avoid motion blur.)

Autumn in Glen Lyon

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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

Autumn Years: Abandoned A93 Road, Craighall Gorge

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On a recent excursion elsewhere, a friend tipped me off to the existence of the gorge at Craighall, through which runs the remains of the abandoned A93 road from Blairgowrie to Glenshee.

It’s funny to think that the bridge was constructed in 1994 and the road decommissioned in 2008, both of which are well within my lifetime – and given how I visited Glenshee several times in my early years having just moved up to Perth in 2004/5, it’s entirely possible I might have used the old road unawares.

These days it’s little more than a 40-minute saunter for dog walkers – almost like wandering through a woodland but with crash-barriers beside and the occasional painted stripe of a white line former road marking peeking through the inch-deep mud and moss.

With the leaves turning gold in autumn, it’s a post-urban delight in its own way.

Gear Change Time

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Back in May I had a bit of a holiday. Figured the primary camera would be occupied taking timelapse video sequences for a couple of the evenings, and what happens if I find something else to take a photo of? So a friend suggested I get a Fuji X-T20.

Loved it.

Sold the K-1 dSLR and all the other Pentax kit, bought a Fuji X-H1 and some nice lenses to augment it.

Having spent all last Friday having the day off for the purposes of swapping the gear, I called in at Portknockie to make some photos of the well-known Bow Fiddle rock. The tide was low, requiring more care scrambling over the rocks.

Getting a bit more artistic, a long exposure view of the clouds passing by and a toned and tweaked edit:

The Zeiss 12mm f/2.8 Touit Fuji X-mount lens is a beauty. Being for APS-C crop-sensor only, it’s comparatively small, but elegantly formed with the curves flowing from lens-hood to body where the aperture and focus rings are smooth rubber perfectly integrated into the body.

I still maintain the most interesting views are to be found within the caves beside Bow Fiddle, not just staring at the lump itself. This is the first test image made with the Zeiss lens – sitting inside one of the caves, looking out, an HDR composite of 5 frames ±2/3EV each and even so it took a delicate touch getting the best RAW conversion and blend (haven’t used LuminanceHDR in ages!).

Testing my newly acquired Zeiss 12mm f/2.8 Touit lens – inside one of the caves looking out, of necessity a 5-shot HDR ±2/3EV. That lens is awesomely sharp, even with slightly elevated ISO around 640-1600.

Finally, one to relax with: the most serene simple composition of blue-grey sky with warm crepuscular rays spreading from behind a cloud. Light and sea, what more does one need?

Beautiful simplicity: a very cool blue-grey sky with orange crepuscular rays in the distance.

Aberdeenshire Coast: Catterline

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I’d never really explored much of the Aberdeenshire coastline. On Saturday, however – feeling liberated from EV range anxiety – I discovered Catterline, just south of Fowlsheugh and Dunnottar. Towards the end of a beautiful sunny day, with just enough low golden light on the landscape… I had to fly the drone a bit, too.

The coast enjoys many large rocky outcrops (all conglomerate for a few miles around):

Perhaps my favourite shot is one of the more unusual by my standards: quite a thought-out composition of receding layers of rock, with the cliffs behind casting a huge shadow mid-way up one of the rocks, with Todhead Point lighthouse in the distance – near and far, light and dark, mankind and nature all rolled into one:

Todhead Point Lighthouse from Catterline Bay

Not bad going for the little Fuji camera; having set it to f/16 for depth of field, I’m surprised it chose exposures 1/52s and 1/26s at ISO 1600 and 1/60 at ISO 1000 for its HDR bracketing, but the results are excellent, no noise problems even in the shadows.

To finish, a simple statement of peace: nothing much, just sky above, a gentle disturbance in the sea below; all is calm, all is blue:

Peace: blue sky, blue sea

Waterfalls and Mountains

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We spent Saturday afternoon driving around the Tay Forest Park – up to the Mains of Taymouth at Kenmore for lunch then along the south Loch Tay road to the Falls of Acharn – a comparatively steep climb up the side of the gorge and negligible water in the falls, but there was pleasant subtle light making the most of the colours on the surrounding rocks:

Nice rocks (typical Highland semi-pelite) covered with colourful beech leaves and green moss. Shame they’d forgot to turn the water on…

Next stop: just outside Ardeonaig there is a tiny layby where the view of the southern end of Loch Tay opens up. There was pleasant light on the sides of Ben Lawers too:

Still a favoured viewpoint right by the side of the South Loch Tay road – lovely soft mountainside illuminated by gentle light and shadow.

Driving further down the road to Killin, there was an awesome cloud inversion flowing around Ben More in the distance, outside Crianlarich – so I stopped at Lix Toll services and made a panorama of it:

Observant viewers will spot there’s even a tiny fragment of snow remaining toward the far left of the shot on Stob Binnein – not bad for the last week of June!

The final stop of the afternoon was at Edinample Falls along the South Loch Earn road – a small gorge but beautifully shaped with pleasant light through the surrounding trees and a decent amount of water flowing around the rocks.

An overview of the waterfalls at Edinample – lovely sunlight illuminating the rocks nearby

 

Around Rosal

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This was a strange place of varying thoughtfulness. Having previously visited Aoineadh Mor and found its handful of ruined crofts more thought-provoking, this was rather the opposite experience: having far more settlements dating back thousands of years including cairns, a souterrain and remains of crofts, with a history of particularly brutal evictions, there’s no real viewpoint from which one can see the extent of the clearing and experience all the time or place at once, so it lacks a certain atmosphere.

One thought, however. The Highland Clearances were mostly for the purposes of replacing crofting (seen as not cost-effective) with sheep farming (supposedly profitable). In practice, it’s a story about commercial failure: the sheep did not prove profitable, rendering the grassland barren; the monoculture spruce woodlands being farmed as the latest cash-crop are also barren, failing to nourish the land; the eviction of folks living a subsistence existence (which increasingly feels the innocent honest approach) was an offence against humanity – and yet the blasted sheep still remain.

The state of the Forestry Commission’s tourist information boards also being cast down on the ground, however, did provoke thought – is that sheer vandalism, an artistic statement about care and decay of property, or super-artistic irony that preservation itself should go the same way of all things?

 

The landscape did provide a few moments of beautiful contrast, illuminating the foreground trees against the shadowy dark might of Ben Loyal, however:

Ben Loyal from Rosal Clearance village

Ben Loyal from Rosal Clearance village

Around Strathnaver

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Strathnaver is a beautiful area – rural life, peaceful and quiet, where the only traffic jam is a herd of sheep trundling along the road beside the loch. Simple and elemental, a play of sky and land, light and limited human influence.

Outside Altnaharra:

Beside Loch Naver: