Last weekend it was ludicrously hot around home – 25ºC after lunchtime – so we drove all the way up north to the Black Isle for a stroll around Fortrose and neighbouring areas. We started with a stroll down to Chanonry Point where the lighthouse looked good in black & white.
Tag Archives: lighthouse
At Tarbat Ness
Continuing the third day of my holiday last November, having been to the Reelig Glen in the morning, with the weather still mostly inclement, I went for a nice long drive up to Tarbat Ness by Portmahomack. The lighthouse – the third-tallest in Scotland – was engineered by Robert Stevenson in 1830, a stripy shapely construction standing on cliffs above the Devonian old red sandstone shore, making a great classic scene to photograph.
And this is the more immersive view of what it’s like to be there:
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Around Mull
A small selection of photos from a weekend trip to Mull last September – a couple of views around Lochdon, Duart Castle from the ferry and Lismore Lighthouse basking in the sunlight on the way back.
A Change of Direction
Sometimes, one’s photography takes quite a turn.
A few years ago, I was all interested in large-format landscape work, when a fellow member of the photo-club inadvertently threw the spanner in the works by saying his particular approach gave results that represented how he felt at a given scene. Hang around: how come every LF landscapie I know feels exactly the same way then, if that way is defined by 5×4 format, tripod low on the ground, golden-hours (normally morning, strangely), portrait orientation, near-mid-far, Fuji Velvia film, grad-ND sky and rear-tilt perspective, amongst other things? Having seen that as a clique fashion rather than individual expression, I rejected it and promptly went digital, making a photo a day using overcast dull light to show the shapes of trees in the local woodland realistically.
Last Saturday marked something of a milestone: 4 years of posting a daily photo on Blipfoto. Over time, the idea of forcing a photo a day (especially one as considered and well-processed as I strived to achieve) has become artistically unhealthy and my enthusiasm for the site has waned considerably, so I called it a day.
In some ways, the future looks to be a return to landscape; certainly I intend shooting a lot more of it than I have previously, but I’m intending letting the inspiration drive matters not forcing it by the calendar. I’m hoping to post more often on this blog as well, but using the real camera as well as the mobile, so there’s been a bit of re-branding happening too…
So it was, on Sunday afternoon, with head slightly reeling from the decision, I set off with Dog for an afternoon stroll, with no idea how far or where we’d go except that I wanted it to be a long walk. And it was the longest we’ve been on since moving here, I think – left Portpatrick and walked past the golf course to Port Mora where I usually turn inland and walk through the Dunskey Glen, but this time I continued past Port Kale and the transmission huts (where cables came ashore for monitoring communication during the Troubles in Northern Ireland)…
Transmission huts in Port Kale, outside Portpatrick
…and with a bit of determined plodding along the Southern Upland Way, the next thing we saw was Kilantringan Lighthouse in the distance.
Kilantringan Lighthouse along the Southern Upland Way, black and white with my favoured platinum toning
It took 2.5 hours, so probably 8 miles or thereabouts, given very few photo-stops and some leisurely steep bits.
All in all, an excellent way to spend a Sunday afternoon.
Around Cairnryan Point Lighthouse
I walked maybe half a mile along the pebbled shores of Loch Ryan, attempting to make interesting photos in classical landscape style. Of this kind of scene, one particular favourite survived the editing purge:
However, the photo I favour most from this afternoon was a serendipitous find, a result of some gentle urban exploration. Just standing in the doorway of this ruined building, all the light through the windows and lines and curves somehow fell together into a classic composition, a celebration of abandonment in grunge:
It also looks radically different in colour:
Portpatrick Lighthouse
Portpatrick Lighthouse
It’s amazing what you can do to improve mobile-phone image-quality in Hugin, Darktable and the GIMP.