A handful of photos from a walk in the woods in Morvern – mostly native birch and oak trees, back-lit by low golden late-afternoon sunlight – absolutely beautiful. Come walk with me.
Tag Archives: light
Morvern 1/4: Approach
The West coast of Scotland – Lochaber, Argyll and further north – is well known for its amazing scenery. Earlier in the year I had a look around on Google Earth and thought the landscape looked pretty impressive opposite Mull around the Ardtornish area on the Morvern peninsula.
It certainly did not disappoint. Even having just driven 4 hours all around Fort William, across and round Loch Eil at great length (single-track road with passing places and a 60 limit), I had to stop to admire the crystal clear blue sky and lines of mountains receding into the distance:
There followed a short drive down to Loch Arienas, which was also just beautiful – blue water reflecting blue sky:
Along the Oak Walk
One of my favourite walks around the local area is the Oak Walk – running along the edge of a large field, it gets beautiful evening sunlight and has some characterful trees
One or two local folk have populated it with wooden sculptures, for amusement factor
And the surrounding paths are well populated with wild raspberries, brambles and even willowherb/fireherb looking pretty in the light.
Trying something a little different
For years now, my photo-processing workflow has been 100% open-source. However, in the interests of greater portability – hack on photos whilst on the go – and partly gratuitously for the sake of variety, I recently acquired an iPad Pro 10.5″ and installed the Affinity Photo app.
As a user experience goes, it’s really quite pleasant. The best way to synchronise files around the LAN seems to be Seafile, which is open-source and available for Linux, iOS and android. My Linux-based workflow regularly produces 64-megapixel images, working on multiple intermediate TIFF files, 16-bit ProPhotoRGB-linear; somewhat surprisingly, seafile, the iPad and Affinity Photo seem able to handle files around 450MiB in size. There are a few small gotchas – I had to import a few ICC colour profiles by hand and as yet, there doesn’t seem to be a way to customise export options (so you have to select JPEG 99% sRGB lanczos yourself afresh every time); I’m sure these things will come in time however.
So here’s a shot from last Sunday afternoon. As I was heading out of Muthill I saw this characterful old tree in a field; on the return journey a few hours later, not only was it still there but the clouds were darker in the background and the golden sunlight caught the bare branches. A very quick bit of parking and even quicker sprint back to the optimum viewpoint and it looked stunning. So I processed it a little further, realising an intention for how it should look that was apparent from the start.
Sunlit tree
The Dumpling
Just to the south of Loch Lomond beside the village of Gatocharn lies Duncryne Hill – a positively cute protrusion consisting of sandstone and conglomerate from the Emsian era early in the Devonian Period, affectionately known as The Dumpling.
Having discovered it on Google Earth, thinking it might afford good views over Loch Lomond and the Highlands to the north, I visited it this past weekend.
I wasn’t disappointed.
Approaching The Dumpling
Some artwork – looking at Loch Lomond from the top of Duncryne Hill:
The Highland Boundary Fault runs from Arran to the south-west, cutting through Loch Lomond between Arden (west) to Balmaha (east), forming a clear escarpment along the side of Conic Hill.
The Highland Boundary Fault runs right through the middle of this photo – through Loch Lomond around Balmaha, causing the rising mountains to the right of the scene.
The clouds were fairly zipping along, obscuring and bathing the landscape in crepuscular rays, so I had to make a short timelapse video of the vista:
With such light and rain-clouds passing by, on returning to the top of the hill I was greeted by a dramatic full-on rainbow with complete primary and secondary bows and supernumaries glowing in super-saturated vibrant arcs over the trig-point.
And just to finish the day’s expedition, there was some beautiful early golden-hour evening sunlight back-lighting a group of trees outside Drymen.
Noctilucent Clouds (NLCs) 2017-06-15
It’s just a week off being the longest day, and it seems never to really get dark at night around here at the moment. Still. While that precludes shooting the aurora, instead it’s noctilucent cloud (NLC) season – just started in the past couple of days so I was very pleased to capture these last night / this morning around 1am.
Apart from being a canary for global warming, NLCs are a beautiful phenomenon, glowing cold bluey-white typically filament threads lighting up the sky. Or, if you leave the camera thinking for 2 minutes they blur nicely with the more mundane clouds:
Noctilucent Clouds, around 1am – Crieff across Strathearn from Auchterarder
A total 2 minutes of exposure to see what the NLCs and ordinary clouds would get up to over that kind of timescale.
And I made a short timelapse – 6 minutes compressed into an 11-second video:
Around Here 5: Subtlety
A short series of photos made while walking the Doglet at some length yesterday evening.
With the scenery of Strathearn along the end of the street, it’s kinda nice living around here.
And the clouds merited a bit of appreciation too.
Glen Affric: Light
Around Glen Affric 3: Morning Sunrise
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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Around Glen Affric: Trees
Having contemplated the role of water in the landscape, the second aspect by which to contemplate Glen Affric is the trees. Home to the largest Caledonian Forest reserve, the place boasts beautiful naturally-seeded old Scots Pine (Pinus sylvestris) trees, their orange-brown bark full of gnarly character; there are also birch and juniper to be seen.
The river walk forms a small circuit around an isthmus connecting Loch Affric and Loch Beainn a Mheadhoinn; it is best taken anticlockwise from the carpark, descending to the river and then returning back through the pine forest.
This particular morning I was pleasantly surprised by the beautiful autumn light, but also by how the snow on Sgurr na Lapaich melted in the less-than-an-hour it took to walk around.
Those are the official landscape photos – this is the immersive 360-degree panorama showing what it’s really like to be there:
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Driving away from the favoured river walk, I just had to stop to admire the birch trees by the roadside, glowing vibrant autumnal yellow gold and orange back-lit by the sun.
And just for amusement, a selfie from the Nice Place itself at the start of the river walk route:
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Around the Black Mount
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
Hogmanay 2016/2017
Happy new year! I saw the year in from Blackford Hill looking at the fireworks over Edinburgh Castle.
Watching folks arrive was almost like a scene from Lord of the Rings – this line of torch lights processing along the hillside track, reminiscent of the last march of the Elves.
Edinburgh Dusk
I spent a happy afternoon and evening watching light turn to dusk over Edinburgh city centre from Blackford Hill.
Loch Lomond: At Inversnaid
There’s a couple of picturesque views to be had just below the hotel at Inversnaid harbour – the waterfall cascading down amongst the rocks one way, and opposite, a line of boulders leading toward the Arrochar Alps across Loch Lomond. Can’t complain.
I don’t often use the Pattanaik algorithm in LuminanceHDR, especially for colour results, but it seemed to work really well with the waterfall, nicely balancing low-key levels and saturation.
Around Here
A couple of views whilst out walking the dog – golden-hour sunlight on Ben Ledi and Ben Vorlich over by Callander, taken from Auchterarder.
Olympus Pen-F, 75-300mm lens, RawTherapee, 5-frame HDRs blended with enfuse and toned in darktable.
The colour photos are for sale on EyeEm: Ben Ledi and Ben Vorlich; sunset tree silhouette.