Glen Affric: Mixed Thoughts

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Sadly, it’s not all good news at the glen – a few years ago, the Forestry Commission installed two paths, one wending its way between the trees like a play-park and the other using non-native sandstone paving flags to enlarge the walk beside the river – in the process, cementing its way through the pine trees’ roots. I am not impressed.

The other two photos in this set are a bit strange by my standards, too: shooting directly into the sun with only a few seconds to capture a crepuscular ray, I extended my usual HDR bracketing from 1EV to 2 stops either side; it’s taken me the last 6 months and no fewer than 10 re-processing iterations to make the best I can of that scene and the results are necessarily unrealistic in order to capture detail in both foreground and sky. The scene is from the path along the south side of Loch Affric to Kintail, beside Loch Salach a’Ghiubhais (“dirty loch of the pines”) – I have no idea what they did to merit such a title, as it seems a pretty gorgeous place to me.

Crail: colour

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Three views of the beach at Crail – for the geologists, the rock is old red Devonian sandstone. For everyone else, the seaweed is slippery and the water is wet.

Crail Harbour Rocks: then and now

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Quite a few years ago, I had just acquired a large-format view-camera (a Shen-Hao); for a first excursion, I took it to Crail in Fife and made an interesting study of the boulders submerged at the water’s edge on the beach.

Fast-forward five years, and I returned to the same beach in Crail with a little Sony NEX-7 camera and retook the same image-brief:

  • Crail
  • closeup
  • water and rocks
  • multiple superimposed exposures

The differences a few yards, a few years, and a different day can make! Enough, perhaps, to justify titling the new image “Crail Harbour Rocks (2)”.

Perth Street Stories: groups

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Back in November, Perth council thought to hold a winter street festival – never mind that it wasn’t Christmas, Advent (at the time) or even winter yet, at least it was a good excuse to get folks tramping past the shop windows.

Herewith, a handful of street scenes – a little different for me – this time, groups of humans.

I didn’t rate the bell-ringers very highly; the slow and disjoint performance (only identifiable by the title on the sheet music saying “Jingle Bells”) served only to distract at close range from the pop-noise coming from a couple of large speaker-stacks a little further down the pedestrian precinct.

Around St Fillan’s

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Loch Earn is still an idyllic scene despite everyone stopping to take photos in St Fillan’s. Herewith, two obvious views:

Personally, I like this view instead:

People Watching / People Watching

People Watching / People Watching

There’s a time-/context-axis running from the far distance – first there was the landscape, then there was Robert Mulholland’s statue Still, then there’s people taking photos of it, then there’s me shooting them. All things considered, a bit “meta”.

It’s been a while…

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It’s been a few months now since I called time on the fixation with black&white closeup as a style. So it’s time to remember how to do it… Herewith, mostly as a lens-test, cyclamen and cactus plants from the kitchen windowsill.

Since I last looked, RawTherapee has changed a lot – I’ve learned that the `Contrast by Details’ control was responsible for some undesirable noisy artefacts in previous profiles, it’s gained better control over black and white conversion and even support for X-Trans sensors (now there’s something to lust after).

Announcing Timelapse.jl – frame interpolation for timelapse photography

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A few years ago I wrote a python utility for interpolating a greater number of frames from a smaller set, for use in timelapse video/photography.

Recently, I’ve been trying to learn Julia. As a small challenge – to fulfil a potential forthcoming need – and because it claimed to be quite a fast language – I’ve rewritten the core of the script.

It’s quite refreshing – none of the gratuitous OO classes I had to create with Python, just a couple of functions to do the essential interpolation. And watching the output frames flash by… it’s pretty nippy, too.

It doesn’t yet support EXIF directly, nor can it modify images directly on the fly, but if you want to have a play then go download it from Github: https://github.com/spodzone/Timelapse.jl

Cauldron Falls, West Burton

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One of my favoured parts of North Yorkshire’s scenery is the well-known waterfall at West Burton. Always good for a bit of classical landscape photography, exploring both context and closeup (“intimate landscape”); it’s also quite fun to compare with other people’s views of the same location, although I envy anyone who manages to get good light in such a location.