Evening was interrupted yesterday by a glimpse of sunlight on surrounding neighbours’ houses, resulting in a rapid trot with coat, feet, dog and camera to the end of the street for a view of a gloriously colourful sunset over Strathearn.
Tag Archives: nature
Birnam Hill: Hunting the Highland Boundary Fault
I’ve been to Birnam Hill and Duncan’s Hill area at least six times, so it made a good testing ground for the new Pentax K-1 camera.
It wasn’t the best of days for landscape photography – a bit early in the day for what little light there was to be really photogenic – but there was a moment when the sun broke through and illuminated some birch trees on top of Duncan’s Hill most beautifully:
For some years I’ve known the Highland Boundary Fault crosses the A9 around Dunkeld/Birnam area, but never really pinpointed the exact location.
On my first visit I walked around Duncan’s Hill through Birnam Wood and Rochanroy Wood: I observed a particular lump of rock exhibiting clear strata sticking out of the hillside:
As I passed the edge of the established woodland, there was a pronounced drop of about a metre to the level of the new conifer trees to the right. And I wondered if this was a particular noted geological formation.
Three paths: this one leads down the line of the Highland Boundary Fault
On more recent visits I geotagged the location and compared with the British Geological Survey’s maps to see the rock types change either side of the dip – till, changing to slate and grit and then to psammite and semipelite typical of the Highlands.
On further investigation with Google Earth, the photo on the corner of the dip is right on the line of the Highland Boundary Fault itself, running up from Rohallion Loch through the lodge, round north-east turning easterly across the A9 south of Birnam.
The previous photo pinpointed right on top of the Highland Boundary Fault
Got it! Clear confirmation. Right on the money, first time 🙂
The path continues across a pronounced dip in the landscape before continuing up the other side to Stair Bridge Viewpoint and the King’s Seat on Birnam Hill.
Of course my favourite clear pure waterfall was still running:
The path affords some excellent views back of the Highland Boundary Fault cutting across the landscape:
Highland Boundary Fault to the east of Birnam
And finally, as far up the hills as I wanted to go that day, at Stair Bridge Viewpoint I was rewarded with a clear landscape vista over Rohallion Lodge to the Lowlands to the south:
View from Stair Bridge looking over Rohallion Lodge to the Lowlands to the south
Glen Lyon
In the middle of January, I went for a drive around Glen Lyon. There was enough snow lying that the road was slippy on corners, so I didn’t get anywhere near as far in as I would have liked, but still, the light was a special kind of low cool glow.
Just a few twists along the road into Glen Lyon from Fortingall – we’re going that way into the glowing light, folks.
Trees draped like a fuzzy fir coat over a snowy mountain
This is a pretty commonly shot view from a small layby – but beautiful in the cold winter light, showing the shapes of craggy mountains:
A beautiful view – rugged crags descending to a smooth glacial U-shaped glen
And that was as far as I dared go for the snow. Turning back, I stopped by the roadside to check out a particularly photogenic little lochan lurking on the edge of the forestry:
Snow resting on a frozen lochan, Glen Lyon – I loved the way it sits on the edge of the forestry.
And I just had to take a photo of the beloved Doglet while I was there 😉
The one and only…. 🙂
By the side of the river, dusk was long gone and the blue hour had well and truly set in.
Snow lying on craggy hillsides beside the River Lyon
Landscape and Geology – an NC500 road-trip
Back last November I spent a very happy few days staying up North; the first day was spent in Glen Affric (sunrise, trees, water and light).
Photo Map – a long drive around Wester Ross
In the few years since I was last up there, there’s been a concerted push to market the road around the far north of Scotland as an “answer to Route 66” and thereby promote it as a tourist attraction.
The second day of my holiday saw lousy weather, completely overcast and foggy for much of the time. So I spent the day driving around Wester Ross wondering where the scenery had got to… trying not to think of it as the NC500 but actually enjoying several stops along the route that I’ve been to previously.
The first stop was the well-known view from a layby in Glen Dochart, above Kinlochewe to admire the sinuous road:
An obvious scene: the road wending through Glen Dochart toward Kinlochewe (not depicted: Kinlochewe, because of the mist).
Pity about the mist…
A little further along on the way through Kinlochewe are two mountains – Beinn Eighe to the left and Meallan Ghobhar and Coille na Dubh Chlaise to the right. We pulled off the A-road and Doglet had his breakfast more or less directly on the Loch Maree fault-line whilst admiring the quartzite rock strata.
There wasn’t much to be said for the views across Loch Maree, although the contrast of dull grey skies and warm autumnal orange and yellow colours was pleasant.
Some years ago, there was a TV documentary, a former politician’s search for the most natural woodland in the UK. After much searching around down south in the New Forest, he came north and explored Caledonian Forest remnants, finally finishing up on an island in Loch Maree – a rather bizarre arrangement of an island with a lochan with another island inside that – on which he stated the trees were least likely to have been touched by mankind. There is an obvious viewpoint, a small section of beach, at Slattadale toward the north-west end of Loch Maree, from which the group of islands can be seen.
Of all the photos I made during that day, this was perhaps the most classical landscape, in that I had the idea for these photos – the location, leading lines of foreground boulders, large expanse of silvery water and Slioch in the distance – planned in my mind for ages before revisiting the area.
What you don’t see is how, while I was making these photos (long exposures, totalling a minute’s exposure, focus-stacked) there was another photographer sitting 20yd away, cooking his morning breakfast – so the photos fail to include the clouds of fragrant bacon and fish smoke billowing past the camera…
Speaking of lunch, mine happened at Badachro, at the Inn. Highly recommended – everyone loved Doglet, which is a good start, and the burger was tasty as ever. Mostly the thing I like most is how the coastline is just like Plockton – west-coast rocky sea-lochs and seaweed – but without actually being Plockton that everyone else flocks to see.
And this is what it’s really like at Badachro:
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On a previous trip I had explored as far as Poolewe but not had a chance to go further; this time I stopped off at Loch Tollaidh to admire the rocky outcrops across the water (Lewisian Gneiss and other igneous rock).
Classic Wester Ross landscape – huge lumps of Lewisian gneiss, beside Loch Tullie
Signs of industry: on the shore of Loch Tollaidh is a small jetty, presumably a put-in for boats to go inspect the small salmon farm. That and the remains of a very dead boat, wood bleached inland, caught my attention:
On travelling up the coast to Mellon Udrigle (what a wonderful name!) I was struck by the view across the Wester Ross Marine Protected Area to the mountains on the horizon on the mainland. On the left, a bit of misty cloud drapes over the top of Beinn Ghobhlach; to the right, there’s more mist flowing over Sail Mhor but the huge bulk of An Teallach was completely hidden behind the cloud.
A wide-angle panorama: low-lying cloud (with a bit of precipitation) and mist flowing over Sail Mhor – the full bulk of An Teallach is completely hidden in the cloud beyond.
The mountain on the far left is Beinn Ghobhlach.
By the time I got back onto main roads, with a very long drive ahead, the light was fading fast toward dusk and the blue hour and clouds in front were thick and closing in fast, so I made one final photo for the day by the side of Little Loch Broom and scarpered fast.
Lots of mist in the distance, travelling the A832 past Beinn Ghobhlach.
I was rather glad to get back in the car and head off before the weather got really bad!
Winter along the Provost’s Walk
This is fast becoming one of my favourite walks around town – not least because it’s less muddy than the other track out the back. Yesterday I awoke to find the world had turned white, complete with snow-drift piled-up on the front lawn by a passing snowplough. Naturally, over-inflated reports of traffic confusion abounded, although by the time I had to drive anywhere in the evening, the roads were as clear as a bell.
Anyway. I like this path. The Ruthven Water makes a great spot for the Doglet to paddle. All very relaxing and shiny in the white snow.
This is what it’s like around here…
Provost’s Walk:
Arty photos:
All shots taken on the Pentax K-1 using my new hand-held HDR workflow.
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: water
I had a short holiday at the start of last November, a few days spent in Glen Affric. There are several aspects why it’s my favourite part of the planet, but for the purposes of this post, we consider the role of water in shaping a landscape, eroding its way through rocks to form river, gorges and waterfalls.
First, the impressive 150-foot drop of Plodda Falls from the top:
Second, some of the cascades in the River Affric, part of the way around the River Walk, rich autumn colours glowing in the morning sunlight:
And finally, a couple of 360-degree panoramas, partly to offer a behind-the-scenes view – they take a little while to download once clicked:
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Along Loch Tay
It’s a classic viewpoint – at the head of Loch Tay standing on the shores at Kenmore, looking down the length of the loch past the Crannog and island to mountains in the distance. Even without dramatic contrasty sunlight, it didn’t disappoint.
For the record, these were both 8-second exposures, around f/4.5 and ISO 400 using a Nisi circular polariser filter to balance the light between sky and reflection. Both images are a pair stacked for noise-reduction.
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
West Woods of Ethie
My friend Tom and I went for a stroll in the West Woods of Ethie in Angus. Not a woodland I’d encountered before, but it was quite magical in some ways – quite conscious of lurching from one clearing to another, surrounded by the characteristic shapes of beech trees in their green and yellow-orange autumn plumage.
For a slightly more immersive view of the woods… click this and wait a while 🙂
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The Least Amount of Landscape
Just to disprove the idea of deterministic landscape photography, as I was driving back from Acharn through Grandtully along Strathtay, the sky took on a most beautiful glowing cobalt-blue colour of dusk combined with the icy diamond clarity of sub-zero late autumn temperatures in the Highlands.
One of those scenes where it took a little work to convert the camera’s recordings back to something resembling what I saw: after dark fell I couldn’t make out what was in the fields beyond the car headlights; there was nothing but horizon and the glow… and one tiny fragment of wispy cloud.
It doesn’t get much more minimalist than this…
The Falls of Acharn
Today’s random philosophical question: is landscape photography actually deterministic?
Research maps. Check weather forecast. Think about time and location and the maximization of opportunity. Take camera and go. Point it at things. Come back, process to some degree of satisfaction.
The process is certainly repeatable and it takes an incredible amount of luck to sway the results.
A couple of weeks ago, having passed by the village a couple of times this year on other travels, I set out for Acharn on the south side of Loch Tay with intention of using camera and tripod. They were duly deployed. And here are the results…
I was particularly pleased with the last pair, longish-distance zooms across the gorge to the water cascading over some very silvery-grey rock with two tree branches aligned like chopsticks beside the splash-down.
Finally, just for a sense of context, a making-of snap from the phone – this is how the last two were made:
Loch Chon Reflections
I’ve had it in mind to visit Loch Chon in the Trossachs for a little while now, to see if I could find similar views to other photos of the area.
It didn’t disappoint – there were some wonderful reflections of colourful trees to be enjoying.
On the Way to St Fillan’s
A few months ago now, I spent a happy Saturday afternoon driving around the countryside – visited some old haunts and refreshed memories. I had it in mind to spend some time shooting the well-known statue Still by Rob Mulholland in Loch Earn at St Fillan’s, but was more taken by the landscape en route – a little mist rising off a forest, clouds so low they obscure the outlines of the mountains.
So the majority of these photos were actually taken whilst parked in a layby off the A85. But I couldn’t possibly admit to that. 😉