Continuing the theme of failed attempts to do astrophotography, I spent an evening out at Newport-on-Tay in Fife. There’s a neat little road leading down to a carpark with a tiny beach and rocky outcrop… with the interplay of artificial lights and huge blanket of fog, it needed photographing 🙂
Tag Archives: light
Out in the middle of nowhere
On a whim, a friend and I spent a few hours out in the middle of nowhere, Aberdeenshire – hunting aurora which totally failed to show, avoiding fog and pointing cameras sky-wards to see what could be seen.
I quite liked the lights of a cow-byre against the mist, the Pleiades and Hyades star clusters in the constellation of Taurus and a little wisp of cloud below the rising moon.
A Day in Argyll (3): Catching a Ferry
Late in the afternoon I caught a ferry from Oban out to Mull.
Several times in the voyage, the light was just amazing.
Leaving Oban with sunlight and clouds over Kerrera:
An epic vibrant complete double-rainbow seeming to hover just 50yd behind the ferry:
Stunning light approaching Mull:
There’s something relaxing just simply watching the low sunlight reflecting off the bow-waves around the boat:
Detail of soft sunlight reflecting on the sea and bow-waves from the ferry.
A Day in Argyll (2): Inverawe
No trip to Argyll is complete without a drive around Inverawe. A beautiful place, with woodland left to nature to do its thing in the middle of the estate. This time, the trees were particularly gorgeous in the sunlight.
Of course, what really matters is that Old Friend, the first and most characterful of the trees I later identified as a goat willow, is doing well. He is.
My favourite of many old goat willow trees around the estate – increasingly falling apart at the seams, it’s still a characterful tree.
Foggy Night
I just strolled home through the fog from an evening at the photographic society.
Aurora!
For the second time, I was lucky enough to see the aurora from Perth, last night. It was quite an impressive display; by the time I got out to darker skies it was quite low above the horizon, but the greens were strong to the naked eye and some strong rays came and went over time.
I still need to work on a good viewing location, but out beyond Rhynd is a good start.
Dunnottar Castle
Dunnottar Castle is a ruined medieval fortress located upon a rocky headland on the north-east coast of Scotland, about 2 miles south of Stonehaven. The current ruins date from the 15th and 16th centuries, but there is believed to have been fortification on the site since the Early Middle Ages.
The ruins of the castle are surrounded by steep cliffs that drop to the North Sea, 50 metres (160 ft) below. A narrow strip of land joins the headland to the mainland, with a steep path leading up to the gatehouse.
I made these photos over the course of a couple of hours after the eclipse in March, partly because I know the place well, partly because I was reminded of it by a photo in the local photo-club, and partly because I wanted to reshoot it at greater quality with newer processing techniques. It’s a pity the path down to the shore is so muddy – perhaps I should revisit either in winter or early spring instead.
For the record, the workflow for these is:
- tripod, SRB ND1000 filter, multiple frames around 8s shutter-speed at source
- RAW conversion in Photivo
- HDR panorama in Hugin + enfuse
- tonemapping in LuminanceHDR
- post-processing in darktable
- further post-processing in Gimp:
- colour toning
- film emulation (vintage, Ilford Pan-F or Rollei black and white film emulation)
- wavelet sharpening
- organization (tagging + metadata) in digiKam
- bulk resizing with ImageMagick.
In the Woods
It’s been a while since I made photos of closeups in the woods – and for the most part, last time around I avoided contrasty light for the purpose too. Last night, I took a single prime lens (my favourite Pentacon 50mm f/1.8 of old) and one of my favoured strolls over Craigie Hill around the golf course, seeing what there was to be seen under the trees…
Dramatic Sunset
In the evening of Feb 7 2015, I was driving back along the A90 from Dundee to Perth, right into this sunset. It lasted a while, so I pulled over beside the road in the Carse of Gowrie to shoot it, including a reflection in the car roof (as one does!).
Stunning light.
Glen Affric: Landscape
Two final landscape scenes to close this series. It was a long morning spent watching the sun rise, walking around the River Walk and along the side of Loch Affric past An Tudair, before returning to the River Walk a second time and clambering up the opposite hill to the memorial to capture the passing light on pine-covered mountains above the loch.
Glen Affric: Caledonian Forest
From wikipedia:
The Caledonian Forest is the name given to the former (ancient old-growth) temperate rainforest of Scotland. The known extent of the Roman occupation suggests that it was north of the Clyde and west of the Tay.
The Scots pines of the Caledonian Forest are directly descended from the first pines to arrive in Scotland following the ice-age; arriving about 7,000 BC. The forest reached its maximum extent about 5,000 BC after which the Scottish climate became wetter and windier. This changed climate reduced the extent of the forest significantly by 2,000 BC. From that date, human actions (including the grazing effects of sheep and deer) reduced it to its current extent.
Today, that forest exist as 35 remnants covering about 180 square kilometres (44,000 acres). The Scots pines of these remnants are, by definition, directly descended from the first pines to arrive in Scotland following the ice-age. These remnants have adapted genetically to different Scottish environments, and as such, are globally unique; their ecological characteristics form an unbroken, 9,000-year chain of natural evolution with a distinct variety of soils, vegetation, and animals.
To a great extent the remnants survived on land that was either too steep, too rocky, or too remote to be agriculturally useful. The largest remnants are in Strathspey and Strath Dee on highly acidic freely drained glacial deposits that are of little value for cultivation and domestic stock.
It’s also amazingly beautiful. I can happily drag myself out of bed at 3am and drive several hours north to arrive at the forest in time to watch the sun rise: with its ancient history, the scent of the heather, watching mist flowing around the old pine tree-tops catching the morning light, there’s nowhere more gorgeous on Earth.
Glen Affric: Trees (4)
Lots of Scots Pine trees around Glen Affric.
Favourite Trees can be seen from near the carpark above the River Walk around the glen – these are the same pines that appear in Heather and Trees.
Gnarly struck me as a pleasant old character, enjoying the morning sun, on the way up the side of Coille na Feithe Buidhe to the memorial.
The trees is Pinus sylvestris are to be found along the south side of Loch Affric, on the path that ultimately brings you out in Kintail near Skye.
Sun behind clouds
Helios 58mm f/2 lens wide open but with a pinhole drilled in the lens-cap, giving an effective aperture of about f/30 (almost two stops narrower than the lens’s own aperture scale). This was just slow enough to allow a reasonable hand-held exposure of the sun behind iridescent clouds, although it still took a lot of care to retrieve detail in the highlights.
Crail Harbour Rocks (3): optimum light
A continuation of, and the latest in, the “Crail Harbour Rocks” theme – I’ve already posted a comparison of the original study at this location from 2007 against a similar closeup from 2015; here we have a classic intimate-landscape view – optimum golden-hour light at sunset touching the rocks from foreground into the distance.
Ben Lomond
Classic views – the familiar pointy triangular shape of a snow-covered Ben Lomond with its head in the clouds, from the Loch Ard Forest track