Autumn at Glen Affric (2)

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Having visited my favoured spot overlooking the Caledonian Forest, I proceeded up the side of Am Meallan to the well-known location with a view over the lodge and along the length of Loch Affric.

It’s definitely an autumn morning location: the sun rises behind you, skimming up and over the tops of mountains beyond Loch Beinn a’Mheadhoinn, rising as it heads south; accordingly, patches of bright sunlight interspersed with cloud-shadows lap like waves across the undulating landscape from distance right over you.

Of course I had to make a timelapse video of it:

Loch Affric timelapse 2017-10-14 from Tim Haynes on Vimeo.

And two more photos to summarize the morning:

Sunlight and cloud shadow – an outcrop of Scots Pine and birch trees on Sgurr na Lapaich

Proper colours. The most beautiful shade of green pine foliage interspersed with orange/yellow warm birch trees, all lapping up the early morning light.

A classic view – soft heather and bracken leading past Loch Affric to the mountains beyond (Kintail / Glen Sheil in the very far distance).
I had befriended a fellow photographer down at the glen earlier; the first I knew that they had followed me a few minutes later up to this memorial viewpoint was the word “WOW!” exclaimed a few feet behind me.

Autumn at Glen Affric (1)

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For about 13 years I have been of the opinion that it has not been a year without at least one trip to Glen Affric.

My favoured time is autumn, late October, to catch the trees in the Caledonian Forest reserve at their most colourful.

Arriving before sunrise, the light is all dull  and the scenery a moody shade of gloomy – the last vestiges of moon stars remaining in the cobalt blue sky.

One of my favourite scenes at Glen Affric – two ncie birch trees amongst purple and green heather.
Sadly this shot has been marred in recent years by the installation of a large wide path cutting right through the heather between bench and trees; this photo used to be easier to compose but now I’m too conscious of having to position the frame to avoid the path just below; it’s becoming too much of a trick-shot for my liking.

 

Slowly, over the course of an hour after the posted sunrise time, the sun will gradually rise behind Meall Dubh beyond Loch Beinn a Mheadhoinn, casting a beautiful light on the forest:

Having arrived so early, it is a delight to bask in the first proper warm sunlight of the day:

One of my favourite birches – always think it should be called “Dancer” for some reason – basking in the first warm rays of sunrise amongst the heather.

Sunrise at Kinnoull Hill

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Early one morning in August I set off up Kinnoull Hill in Perth; a 40-minute stroll through the woods and I arrived at the top just in time for sunrise.

There are a couple of classic viewpoints, although juggling foreground foliage is not the easiest. This is the view closer to the tower with a hint of sunlight behind the hill, a line of light streaking round to illuminate some of the yellow trees below:

Sunrise behind Kinnoull Hill, with the River Tay running along the Carse of Gowrie into the distance

And this is a little further back, the sun having risen illuminating the whole Carse of Gowrie and River Tay, sky still shades of yellow and pink:

A classic view of the tower and River Tay from Kinnoull Hill, Perth

Walking back through the woods was rather pleasant too – lots of dappled sunlight on the trees.

This was one of the first photo-sets I processed using Affinity Photo Pro on the iPad. Loving the colour and tone already!

Birnham Hill

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One of my favourite views is the Highland Boundary Fault running through the landscape, immediately in front of me standing at Stair Bridge Viewpoint part-way up Birnam Hill.

It looks particularly pleasant with light and cloud-shadows zipping over the trees too:

Morvern 5/4: The Road Back

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And so we come to the last post in the series, a set of photos not entirely in Morvern but more on the way back up the shores of Loch Sunart and Loch Linnhe to the Corran Ferry, across and down to Loch Leven at Ballachulish.

There’s something wonderfully uplifting about rattling along these wee roads on beautiful sunny days, admiring the light.

Morvern 4/4: The Viewpoint

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After the long drive, the walk in the woods, the angst of the cleared township, the second part of the walk resumes through the woodlands up hill to the viewpoint, looking out over Loch Doire nam Mart to the caves in craggy Beinn Uamh and beyond. On a sunny day with a few white clouds in a crystal-clear blue sky, it doesn’t get much nicer than this.

After a second walk through the woods around Aoineadh Mor, towards the top of the hill one comes across this beautiful view: conifer trees, Loch Doire nam Mart and more trees scattered on the slopes of craggy Beinn Uamh, all beneath a crystal clear blue sky.

Well, it does get a little better – Doglet had his dinner on the shores of the loch in amongst the rushes. Lucky chap.

Morvern 1/4: Approach

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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:

Lady Mary’s Walk, Crieff

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Only catching up on photos taken at the end of April…

Lady Mary’s Walk runs West from Crieff along the side of the River Earn, mostly on the flat until one reaches the foot of Laggan Hill after a mile or so, where it forms a circular route back to MacRosty Park.

At the end of April I went for a stroll to hunt bluebells.

The path was particularly pleasant – quiet, leading on through the woods.

 
 
 

As an aside, I’m sure there never used to be such a profusion of wild garlic on these Perthshire woodland nature trails 10 years ago – I only first encountered the stuff whilst out in Galloway.

I was a bit early for optimum bluebell season, but did find a few areas of good blue ground coverage:

And at the western extremity of the route there is a ruined house – it could be quite eerie given the right lighting.

Trying something a little different

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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

Just One Photo

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Black Spout Waterfall, Pitlochry

Some days you only need to come away with one landscape image to justify an excursion.

On Saturday I set sail with Doglet and a friend and strolled through Black Spout Woods around Pitlochry, up to the viewpoint across the gorge where you can see the full height of the waterfall, and then round to the more accessible bit near the top of the falls, which still takes a fair amount of scrambling around on the river bank to get down to.

 

A nice stroll through the woods, a view across the gorge to the full height of the waterfall, some scrambling around on the banks to get down to this level (a small fraction of the total height down from the top) with friend and dog… A good way to spend an afternoon

Technicalities:

There are three conscious aspects to this shot:

Composition

I wanted to make the most of the 15-30mm lens, so with a bit of wiggling around at the scene I found a spot right in front of the cascades that would showcase the 16mm ultra-wide field of view with a strong foreground. Nothing clipped; there’s negligible cropping except for lens-correction. There’s something in each pair of corners: the strong diagonal line of the dead tree-trunk in the foreground is echoed by the three distant trees in the far top-left; the negative space of the burnt-out sky has an echo in the expanse of run-off water in the bottom; treated as three stripes, there’s a balance between the height of the frame given to the run-off, to the bright white cascades, and to the woods+sky at the top.

Sensor controls

I made 10 source images on the Pentax K-1, varying the exposure as follows:

f/13.0 1/50s; f/14.0 1/8s;
f/16.0 0.4s; f/16.0 0.5s
f/16.0 0.5s; f/16.0 0.8s
f/16.0 1/4s; f/16.0 1/8s
f/16.0 1/8s; f/18.0 1/6s

This set of exposures spans a large contrast range from bright grey sky down to dark shadows in the rocks; it varies the shutter speed so at least a few will make the water look like brushed cotton; it varies the aperture partly to cater for the range of shutter speeds, and partly so as much of the shot as possible has a frame with maximum detail before diffraction. Enough data that enfuse could find a good midtone maximizing local entropy (detail) at every pixel.

Each of the above had pixel-shift enabled for greater resolution, totalling 40 frames of 36MPel resolution. The shutter was open for a combined total of 12s.

Post-processing

I used my open-source Pentax K-1 pixel-shift workflow on each of the 10 images above, and then reused it again to blend all 10 together into a combined HDR average. Opening this in darktable, I proceeded to correct lens-distortion, finalize the crop (16:10 aspect-ratio, one of my favourites for landscape), set detail modules (no need for noise-reduction! some balancing of detail, local detail, equalizer modules though) and exposure, toning (including tonemapping and low-pass filter) and colour (Velvia). There are not many localized modifications, but there are significant grad-ND filters both down through the trees and, opposing that diagonally, up from the bottom of the frame, along with two instances of the vignetting filter (one significant, one just clipping the corners); there is also extra local contrasted masked into an area around the dead tree trunk. Finally I opened the image in The Gimp and ran the G’Mic filter suite including colour-grading twice (once conventionally, once with extra highlight/shadow duotone effects, blended together – this has the side-effect of changing the tonality in the green leaves to make it look brighter/sunnier than it actually was). A tweak to the curves to lift the overall gamma and then I overlaid my favourite texture image, a photo of a sheet of Hahnemuehle Photo-Rag paper, in soft-light mode to soften the contrast and add a small amount of texture into otherwise barren areas.

Why this Workflow?

Working this way hits a sweet-spot in terms of convenience and image-quality.

I did not fall in the river. That’s a good start.

With such a wide field of view, every centimeter counts when choosing the location. With the 15-30mm lens I was able to experiment, iteratively varying location and focal length, until an optimum position was found, all the while seeing exactly what the final composition would be in live-view.

Pixel-shift – moving the sensor around in a 1px square pattern – works as a great way to increase the resolution.
The alternative would be to shoot a panorama, but that would still require HDR blending of frames as well as risking motion-artifacts in the trees; with just HDR on its own, the ghosting of the leaves from averaging multiple frames is a more pleasant indication of movement rather than errors in stitching. Additionally, shooting a panorama would require just as much care over camera position but would not allow a preview of the composition.
As a hybrid option, with cameras that lack pixel-shift or equivalent technology, one could compose approximately and then vary the tripod position subtly to emulate hand-held camera-shake; this is almost identical to pixel-shift in terms of super-resolution, but varying the camera position risks introducing artifacts from lens-distortion and parallax between foreground and distant parts of the scene, that pixel-shift avoids.

Additionally, shooting every frame 4x over, automatically, increases the overall exposure time into multiple seconds, even in daylight, which avoids the need for Big Stopper-type filters (especially handy on a lens that would require a special holder for such).

The Dumpling

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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.

A Day In Clouds

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That was 2017-06-20, that was. A beautiful blue sky with white fluffy wispy cirrus cloud catching the setting sun…

…followed by a noctilucent cloud display around 1am:

NLCs are the highest-flying clouds, occurring at altitudes up to 80km where the next highest type (cumulonimbus) only reaches 12km and most are lower still. Most typically they resemble a fine silver filigree of ice-cold pale blue, although more complex forms have been seen. First maybe-seen in 1885, they only really came to prominence since the 1980s, as a canary for changes in the upper atmosphere linked to climate change.

As I stood and watched the display, a patch of silver mist formed over Strathearn and made its way west along the A85 toward Crieff, so I made a little timelapse video – 17 minutes’ data compressed into 1:

Noctilucent Clouds (NLCs) 2017-06-15

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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:

Portknockie

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Continuing the mega road-trip drive from a day in April: having taken in Dunnottar castle I proceeded up to Portknockie on the north Moray coast. A well-known location with lots of scope to explore, sitting on a transition between red sandstone conglomerate and quartzite underlying rock.

 

Bow-Fiddle rock itself is situated just beyond the mouth of a cove with interesting caves to the north side:

The approach to Bow-Fiddle rock at Portknockie.
We’re heading down to that strip of a pebble beach…

There’s a classic composition to be had by heading down to the boulders just beyond the pebble beach, plonking one’s tripod on the rock and adding enough ND filters to make a long exposure. With the right light and the wind kicking-up choppy waves, it can make for pleasantly dramatic arty photos. And despite being a sunny day, having to lie down on the hard rock to keep my shadow out of the shot, it definitely didn’t disappoint…

Technical details:

Pentax K-1; Samyang 24mm f/1.4 lens at f/11; Nisi ND1000 (equivalent to a Big Stopper) and circular polariser filters; ISO 100; 30s exposure using pixel-shift for a total of 2 minutes’ exposure at high resolution.