Taken on a long stroll with Dog: from the Southern Upland Way, slightly south of Portpatrick, appreciating patterns of cloud, light and precipitation across the sea over Ireland.
Tag Archives: sky
Sun, Sea and Sky
I never used to understand the appeal of going to the beach. I still don’t, but I do appreciate the simplicity and stillness of gazing out to sea from the coast instead.
Sunlight on clouds
Taken above Portpatrick harbour, looking mostly south.
Colours of Dusk
The last remnants of warm yellow-orange colours in the sky as night falls
Clouds
As a general rule, lumpy undulating clouds (‘mammatus’) are a sign of a storm mostly spent passing by. I still got a bit wet walking the dog under this lot, however…
Ailsa Craig
One of my favourite bits of coastline is that just north of Lendalfoot on the A77 through Ayrshire, for its great geology and view over to Ailsa Craig, the home of granite used in curling stones. On a pure clear blue sunny day, who could resist it?
Around the harbour
Dog and I spent this morning walking down to the village, left and up along the cliffs. When in portpatrick, take photos of the harbour, anchor and flag against a lovely blue sky with hint of summe cirrus cloud. It just had to be done again 🙂
Clouds
Moderately turbulent cloud patterns, out for a late stroll with Dog, sunset this evening.
Spray
This spray of Cirrus uncinus cloud formation caught my eye…
Cirrus uncinus
Filamentary
Simple cloud appreciation.
ISS
I did only say this blog would be mostly mobile photography. Time for something a little different.
Thanks to a tip-off from a Facebook page and some friends in Leeds, a couple of nights ago I watched the International Space Station passing overhead for the first time. I didn’t know what to expect; the magnitude (-3.0) hinted at it being “incredibly bright”, and indeed so it was. Bearing in mind I had no idea what to expect, the less said about those attempts at photographing it, the better.
But last night, I investigated further using Heavens Above and saw another passing was scheduled for 2329hrs. Seeing the weather conditions were favourable, I chose a location toward the top of a nearby hill and stood around to wait.
Approaching from the west:
disappearing toward the east:
Some notes on the image processing:
The approach image comes from 6 frames at ISO800, f/4, 14mm, 15s each, taken in quick successsion; the departure image used 12 frames at ISO800, f/5, 29mm, 30s each. The high ISO was chosen partly in order to give me a chance to compose and track, partly to ensure the ISS showed up bright against the background. Both apertures are fairly wide to maximize the light captured yet give a reasonable depth of field in the landscape given the wide-angle focal lengths in use (I had pre-focussed the camera on infinity half an hour before setting out). High-ISO sensor noise is thermal and therefore random; however, long-exposure sensor noise gives a fixed pattern of hot and dead pixels. Therefore, by keeping the exposures short at 15-30s I was able to pan between shots, aiding the composition (the ISS’ path is subject to slight changes at the last minute), meaning all pixels could be calculated from more than one image with spatial offsets – stacking reduces image-noise. Finally, I took a dark frame (with the lens-cap on) to record the actual noise profile.
Initial RAW conversion used RawTherapee in order to subtract the dark-frame; images were stitched together using Hugin and enfuse biassed toward image entropy for high quality landscape and sky tones; because the averaging process reduced the intensity of the ISS’s track, I further blended the intermediate aligned images using ImageMagick and the maximum operator and overlaid the results selectively using the GIMP. Final colour toning and spatial control (high- and low-pass filters) was done in Darktable.
Update 2013-06-18: the approach photo is now available for prints or download at 500px.
More Clouds
Big Sky minimalism strikes again, as is its wont in Galloway. Nothing but blue sky, green grass and leaves and white wispy clouds.
Infinity
Curves :the road ending away into the distance beneath white fluffy cloud
Well, for small values of infinity, anyway. Can’t beat a brisk roadside walk with the dog in such sunny weather as this 🙂
Big Sky
Evening scenery: gently undulating landscape and fluffy white clouds in a big blue sky.
Undulating Landscape
Enoch Hill Radio Station (canmore id 215965 according to the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland), taken from beside the A77 road.
I thought the evening light looked particularly appealing on the landscape with its gentle rolling hills.
Map:
Little Cloud
If there’s something not lacking in Galloway landscapes, it’s sky… Lots of sky… Big skies. Very big sky. And today is a particularly pleasant bright sunny day, yet not too hot, so all one has to do is look up and appreciate the clouds zipping by.