Category: Scotland

Greenan Castle reflections

On the first weekend for months without any rain or sleet, we just had to pretend to be  real Glaswegians and head ‘doon the water’. We drove down to Ayr and wandered along the shore from Doonfoot to Greenan Castle and the Heads of Ayr on a magnificent day.

These are my favourite shots of the day (without one or both of my two girls in it), with Greenan Castle reflecting in the waters left behind by the tide. I just cannot make up my mind which one works better, the square or the portrait format. What do you think?

Chasing reflections

What else to do than go ‘Doon the Water’ on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

We drove down to Doonfoot and wandered along the beach to Greenan Castle and the Heads of Ayr. I found the perfect spot for a shot of the castle with the reflections in the still water left behind with low tide. Nearly the perfect landscape shot, but Lola had other ideas and decided to pose for the camera.

Eventually, I got the shot I wanted, without Lola and any walkers, as you can see in my next post. This post is all about Lola who enjoyed the afternoon’s wander immensely, and nothing was more fun than run back and forwards between Lynn and I, splashing through the water.

No snow but wonderful light

The majority of the country ground to a halt due to extreme snow falls, but we are out of luck. Absolutely no snow to be seen here. Although I suspect there must be snow on the high grounds, the low cloud base completely obscured any mountains capped with snow.

So my plans to spend part of today photographing snowy landscapes has unexpectedly fallen by the way side. Thankfully, the light was wonderful with the sun fighting to shine through the cloud base.

Swallow singing it’s heart out

Our swallows are back from their African sojourn. At least four pairs have returned the very lengthy journey and are, once again, swooping through the fields, round the cottages and over the loch catching insects.

This swallow is one of a pair nesting in the eves of our cottage, high above our kitchen window, and has made this pole that is stuck in the fence just outside the kitchen window as his favourite perch.

With the high winds this weekend, their speeds are phenomenal, with absolutely no chance of shooting one in flight. But there is plenty of time this summer to try and capture these beauties in flight.

Freefall

At the weekend, we finally got a couple of lazy days at the cottage, with time to enjoy some sunshine on the deck with a book, watching the birds and a little photography. We had an abundance of small birds frequenting the trees beside our cottage and scuffing themselves on thistle seeds and sunflower hearts on the feeders. The noise of the chirping and bird song was at times deafening.

I tried some photography with the same approach as a few weeks back: manually focussing on the plane between a branch and the seed feeders, and triggering off sequences of shots when a bird is about to jump of the branch or fly into the frame. I really need to get myself a wireless remote, as I cannot place the camera close enough to the feeders while staying far enough away from them not to scare the birds.

Unfortunately, I had less success with shooting birds in flight than two weeks ago, coming away with a lot of ‘nearly wonderful’ shots, particularly of the colourful siskins, gold finches and lesser redpolls. These two images of a siskin in freefall are the best of the lot and are in fact two different crops from the same photo.

I just cannot make up my mind which one of these two photo’s I like best. I love the one above for it’s simplicity and making you wonder what is going on. I also love the bigger picture below, with the goldfinch’s look and expression, also wondering what is going on.

Would love to hear what your thoughts are.

I want to be alone!

Just like Greta Garbo said: “I want to be alone!”

Lola was tucked in for a snooze after her dinner. Very unhappy I disturbed her with taking a few pictures. But she will be happy once she gets the bag of goodies from Misfits Dogs a tweet of this picture with the comment “I’ll only come out of my nest for a wonky chomp” has earned her.

The Whangie

The Whangie (‘whang’ being slang for ‘thick slice’) is a massive gash in the rock face below Auchineden Hill. There are various scientific explanations given as to how this geological wonder was formed including glacial plucking and an earthquake. However, a much more interesting and colourful explanation is the myth that the Whangie was formed by the Devil flicking his tail in anticipation of pleasure as he flew over Stockie Muir on his way to attend a Witches’ Sabbath.

The combination of this geological wonder and the myth of it’s origin is the inspiration behind my new photographic project: capturing geological features in the Scottish landscape attributed to and associated with the devil or the occult.

Taking this image posed a real challenge, capturing the wide angle as well as the dark shadows of the rock face and the bright highlights of the cloudy sky. I briefly toyed with the idea of using multiple natural density graduates, but the shape of the sky in the composition made that virtually impossible. So I decided on taking the below nine images consisting of three sets of three bracketed images (-3, 0 and +3 stops) taken with my 24mm tilt and shift lens (shifted left, middle, right).

View to Loch Lomond across Stockie Muir

With the sun shining, Lola and I decided to head out of town for a long walk in the country. The plan was to head for Loch Ardinning for our usual wander along the loch and across the muir. However, the traffic on Maryhill Road was very heavy, meaning a long queue at the roadworks on the road to Milngavie. So we changed our minds and headed up through Bearsden towards Drymen for a wander from the Queen’s View to The Whangie.

What a good decision it turned out to be. Not for avoiding the potential delays as there were roadworks in Bearsden as well, but simply for the stunning views towards Loch Lomond and the mountains beyond. It’s been way too long since we have done this walk, and I had more or less forgotten how splendid the views can be.

INSERT INTERACTIVE PANO

This interactive panorama should give you an appreciation of the views we had across Stockie Muir towards Loch Lomond and beyond. It is best seen in full screen, enabling you to explore the vista and intimate aspects through scrolling round and zooming in/out.

Chaffinches galore

The seed feeders in our garden attract a large variety of finches and tits. The chaffinches are, without a doubt, the most numerous, easily outnumbering the green finches, gold finches, blue tits, coal tits, great tits and siskins combined.

While enjoying a warm late morning with a mixture of sunshine and cloud on the deck, I decided to do a little experiment. I set up the camera with my 400mm lens combo and remote trigger release on my tripod, composing a frame just to the left of one of the seed feeders, manually focussing on the plane containing the seed feeder and setting the camera to aperture priority at f8. Every time one or more birds were about to fly into the frame, I triggered a burst of three to four shots.

After quickly deleting the large number of shots with empty frames, I set about selecting the ones that are sharp as well as showing a nice flying pose.  What actually amazed me was the high success rate of sharp and nearly sharp images with a first attempt.

Once I had my shortlist of images, I set about cropping these to a tighter composition round the chaffinch, generally 20% to 25% of the frame, boosting the contrast slightly and brightening the shadow areas a little to compensate from shooting into the sun.

I am pretty pleased with the results and will definitely repeat this approach with a few tweaks. The next time I will place the camera much closer to the feeder with a tighter composition and at a slightly different angle using my 70-200mm lens at 200mm. This should bring the focal plane more in line with the common flight path and provide some extra sharpness and wider depth of field. The tighter composition will probably affect the success rate, but should require less cropping and therefore, better quality images.

The male chaffinch is actually a colourful and wonderfully striking little bird, as illustrated by this series of seven images. They are often overseen by photographers as they are so common, but should deserve much more attention.

These three images show a female chaffinch in flight. Not as colourful and striking as the male, but still a cute little bird and a worthy subject.

To illustrate the nearly sharp images, here are three shots that would have been great if they had been sharper.

A peacock on the daffodils

The fabulous weather has brought out the butterflies en mass this week, resulting in the unusual combination of red peacock butterflies feasting on bright yellow daffodils.

I just love the beautiful colours of the daffodils and the peacock.

The wee scurry beastie

The weather has been absolutely fantastic this week, more like having a mid somer’s day in the middle of March, than the heavy snow we had two year’s ago at this time. We have been able to eat lunch outside in the sun all week, admiring the hazy views over the loch and Arran, the flocks of birds frequenting the trees and our seed feeders, and the black throated divers wailing on the loch.

Yesterday we spotted this little weasel scurrying through one of the big hollow trees in the orchard. Thankfully, I had my camera with 400mm lens at hand, so I got these couple of shots while sitting at the table. I got up and followed it round the side of our fence until it disappeared behind our neighbour’s shed, but it was too fast to get another shot off.

This is the second time we have spotted this shy and fast animal in over a year. Our neighbour’s kids call it ‘the wee scurry beastie’ as it used to live in their loft, scurrying across the ceiling. We don’t know where it’s nest is these days, but it can’t be far.

Pink rain over Arran

After a hard days work at our cottage, making good progress with creating a second bedroom from the junk store upstairs, it was time for a rest. While admiring the view with a well deserved glass of wine, the dark grey rain clouds over Arran started to turn pink. So I decided to grab my camera and sprint up the little hill at the back of the cottage.

Thankfully, I was just in time to capture a couple of ‘close up’ images of the pink rain and blue and pink clouds over Holy Island with my lens zoomed out at 200mm, followed by a series of six images with my lens zoomed in at 70mm resulting in the ultra wide panorama below, before the sun disappeared below Kintyre and the rain clouds changed back to their boring grey.