I was so awed at the sheer acreage of bluebells (harebells?) at Kinclaven woods on my first visit with friends, I went back a couple of days later with the parents as well. Photos happened. It was still awesome. Also cool – a lovely place to just wander through dappled light amongst the trees. Yay.
Lovely atmosphere:
Great light:
Driving up the M90 past Stirling there is a little mound of a hillock at Craigforth, opposite Cambusbarron, which I thought might afford a nice view of the city at dusk.
In practice the mound is owned by a large insurance company with lots of restricted access by road, so I found Scout Head hill a couple of miles down the A811 near Gargunnock.
The snow was nearly a foot deep in parts so it took 1.5hr to walk 3 miles, uphill and down, to say nothing of 1.5hr making photos off the top.
The light was totally awesome. As expected, the hill’s shadow crept across the landscape, chasing the warm sunlight up the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle, leaving Dumyat as the sky turned pink/purple/blue in the Earth’s Shadow.
I made a little timelapse video:
Beautiful winter landscape; the shadow moved its way across the landscape, with the last light making its way over the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle before heading up Dumyat
I flew the drone away from the camera location and made an HDR panorama of Stirling from the air:
The last of the warm light – foreground partially cleared forestry in the shadow of Scout Head hill – contrasting with light on Craigforth, the Wallace Monument and Stirling Castle with Dumyat in the background.
Walking back down the hill in the cold twilight, the mountains of the Trossachs were glowing with white snow against the cobalt blue sky.
(I loved that light so much, I’ve made it available as a framed print via RedBubble already.)
The Forth is just a wee river this far west, but it still gave rise to a cloud of mist obscuring the view of local farms:
It’s only a wee river at this point, but the Forth gave off a large cloud of mist after dusk, obscuring the local farms.
And finishing up with the mankind-vs-nature theme, the Wallace Monument and orange streetlights of Stirling made a great contrast against the blue sky:
A mixture of lighting: vibrant orange tones of Stirling contrasting with the cobalt blue night sky above.
My sense of the geography of Strathearn has not really fitted together until quite recently. There have been a few locations, isolated points and a few lines: the A822 from Gilmerton up past Monzie to the Sma’ Glen; The Hosh at the foot to access Glen Turret; a small B-road between the two; a hill known as Kate McNiven’s Crag; and one or two other areas. More recently I’ve been climbing hills, “bagging” Torlum Hill and Laggan Hill as part of the Lady Mary’s Walk circuit out of Crieff.
The Highland Boundary Fault emerges in a burst of very lumpy landscape at the southern end of the Sma’ Glen. But what it does in the rest of Strathearn to the west, I’ve never really seen.
A couple of weekends ago I explored the Knock of Crieff independently; it struck me that the path up the north side afforded the perfect view along the length of the strath to the far mountains in the west, an elevated view along the glacial U-shape.
So late on Sunday afternoon I took the drone for a spin slightly out over the strath and made a panorama of 7 shots, each a 5-shot HDR exposure bracket sequence – blended on Linux, stitched and edited in Serif Affinity Photo for the iPad.
Lowlands to the left of me; Highlands to the right…
And just for the record, this is what it looked like in the middle of stitched the blended panorama, before I cropped and toned it:
Panorama stitching screenshot
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.
November: season of dreich grey rainy wet horrible days, punctuated by sunsets like this.
I was up early on the morning of March 20th to get to Stonehaven on the coast in time for the solar eclipse.
It’s funny how there was so much discussion as to what filters one should use when shooting the sun: on the one hand, a direct view of the sun’s disc requires special Baader solar filter (approx 23 stops’ filtration); however, when I arrived to see the extent of the clouds, only conventional photographic filters were needed (a mixture of ND1000 and circular polarizer 2-stop filters). And I think the results were all the more dramatic for it, too.
The first of these photos was made using a Centon 500mm mirror lens over 20 years old – from when I bought my first film SLR (a Canon EOS500n – that dates it) It even shows sunspot N 2303 pretty clearly.
The others are with the Sony 55-210mm lens at full stretch instead.
Each image is an HDR of 3 source frames bracketed +/-1EV, converted in photivo, blended in enfuse and worked in darktable.
In the evening of Feb 7 2015, I was driving back along the A90 from Dundee to Perth, right into this sunset. It lasted a while, so I pulled over beside the road in the Carse of Gowrie to shoot it, including a reflection in the car roof (as one does!).
Stunning light.