Panos, Owls and Lochs

Sorry for the lax blog posting this week. Other stuff keeps getting in the way!

Anyway, last week was a good one. Off fishing on Wednesday to Loch Lunndaidh in the hills above Golspie, a beautiful location with views out over the Dornoch Firth, great photography and 2 fish caught. Todays first picture comes from there, it’s a 6 shot panorama that’s been stitched in Photoshop and then blasted with lots of contrast.

Originally, we’d planned to go camping on Thursday and Friday, but rain stopped play and we headed off instead to Dunrobin Castle, also near Golspie. The castle itself was a bit of a disappointment for me due to the fact that you couldn’t take photographs inside the castle. No explanation was provided as to why this was the case, and you could take pictures outside. Considering I’m paying to look at their castle, I’m at a loss to understand why I couldn’t photograph it…stupid. Added to which, you only got to see a small part of the Castles interior and whilst what you saw was pretty cool, I would have liked to have seen more…also it wasn’t that interactive, I like picking things up and it just wasn’t like that.

Anyway, the gardens were amazing, brilliant topiary and ornamental stuff, which made for great photographic fodder, also the castle has its own falconer who does a couple of displays every day. These are fantastic, and worth the admission price for that alone. Andy Hughes is charismatic, funny and amazingly knowledgable about birds of prey. He actively hunts game with his birds and they are all incredibly trained and in amazing condition. You can get really close to them and I must have taken about 300 shots of the display and the birds afterwards.

This shot of ‘Plop’ the Barn Owl was taken with my 50-150mm lens, I was trying to get close ups of the owls face so was shooting at an aperture of about f6.0. By complete luck, I managed to keep the face sharp and blur the movement of the wings. I’m really pleased with the shot, but it was more by luck than judgement on my part!

Finally, Friday took us to Loch Achonachie at the top of Strathconon, with the weather improving, we were able to get back out fishing, and the final shot is of our little boat on the shore of the loch. It’s processed using my now fairly standard black and white workflow, I’m quite pleased with it.

The full set from this weeks shooting can be seen on the Picasa stream.

Anyway, off to do some shooting out and about in Inverness tomorrow…hopefully that will bring some nuggets.

Games, Pipes and Water Blur

The old piper, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

Great weekend. Every August, Nairn hosts it’s annual Highland Games, the links are taken over by a fairground, the games themselves and the entire town along with just about everyone else descends on our sleepy town for a day of boozing and fun. It’s a grand day out and I thought it would be a good chance to get some cool photos of the celebrations. The weather was great, sunshine and nice chunky clouds that should have made for good photos.

The challenge was the crowds, it was incredibly busy and with so much going on, I found it really difficult to isolate subjects and ‘tell a story’ with my photos, there was lots of photo-fodder but I guess it’s just my lack of experience in these kinds of situations that made it tough to find something meaningful to photograph. Ah well, there’s always next year, my one reasonable shot was this one of a guy from one of the pipe bands. Just a quick bit of black and white and some contrast made a half decent photo. The rest of the shots are on the Picasa stream here…

Disappointed with my failure on the Saturday at Games Day, I decided to head down to the beach on Sunday evening to get some shots of the sunset. I actually missed the ‘actual’ sunset, arriving late but there was still a fair bit of ambient light and I was able to do a bit more experimenting with slow shutter speed stuff. I did some of this last year and had some good results, but that was at sunrise rather than sunset, meaning it was a race against time to get the right shot as I was constantly gaining light. Sunday was much better because the sun was setting, meaning I was loosing light and for some reason this feels like I’ve got more time…of course it’s all relative but anyway I was pleased with the output.

So todays second shot is what I think is the best of my ‘water blurring’ attempts. The camera was wedged on rock inches from the sea and I cranked the aperture round to f22 which forced the shutter speed to slow to about 4 seconds. Even with the light from the setting sun, I was able to blur the water successfully…although it got a bit nervy as the water came surging towards my beloved camera!

Anyway, the shot was then given my usual 5 shot HDR treatment from Lightroom 2 to Photomatix before getting a final contrast blast in photoshop. I’m really pleased with it, and think it’s better than my previous efforts!

Really excited about this week, on holiday from Wednesday onwards and hopefully off to get some camping and fishing done….can’t wait!

To crop or not to crop...

rays over loch broom, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

A great weekend, out to Ullapool on the Western coast of the Scottish Highlands, arguably one of the most beautiful places in the world. The contrast between the rural fields and dunes of my hometown of Nairn and the rugged mountainous coastline of Ullapool is amazing, even more so when you consider there’s only about 50 miles between the two. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I love Scotland so much, you have an incredible diversity of environments all within striking distance of your current location – brilliant.

We spent a very busy Saturday fishing a remote hill loch in the morning and then doing a bit of sea fishing in the afternoon. I can’t remember the name of the hill loch we fished, but if you look at my picasa stream, I’ve geotagged the pertinent pictures so that you can get the idea of where it is, there is no path, just a straight hike through difficult long grass and bracken to get to the top of viciously steep hill. Coming down was much easier!

Anyway, the scenery was beyond spectacular, looking down on Loch Broom to the east and the rocky coastline past Rhue and on to the Summer Isles in the west. It looks so good to the west that we headed off to the Rhue peninsula and did some sea fishing for a few hours. The weather was perfect for both photography and fishing, rolling clouds, shafts of sunlight and heavy showers blowing down the glen, brilliant.

I love taking landscapes, and my weekly jaunts around Nairn are really just rehearsals for opportunities like this. After 2 years of using the same camera body at least once a week, I can shoot with a fair bit of confidence. It really, really pays to practice so that when you are in a new environment/situation with the camera you can use it quickly and confidently. The scenary was so spectacular and it was very difficult to take a bad photo…or so I thought.

Something I’ve tried to shoot in the past are these shafts of sunlight you can sort of see in this weeks picture. They often show up during sunsets, when the sun goes behind a small cloud and the light splays out all around it. What I’m struggling with is getting the crop right. You can crop the entire picture so that you’ve just got the shaft of light and whatever it’s illuminating. That’s great, but you loose the landscape that the shaft of light isn’t illuminating, which can look a bit silly. I’ve gone with the alternative here, showing the shafts of light and their environment. I like it…but the shafts of light look more like “smudges” in the distance and whilst the landscape is really dramatic, I don’t quite know if the picture tells enough of a story.

The same can be said of portraits, I’m struggling with how much you crop. Just keeping the head and shoulders in the frame is great, but you loose all sense of the environment. You might see what I’m talking about with my shot of my nephew Dave, the one on Picasa is more environmental…it shows the loch we climbed to, his rucksack and tells a story about where he is. This shot however captures his face in a lot more detail, and forces you to look at him. I don’t know which is better…maybe they are both rubbish and I should just take up needlework as a new hobby!

In terms of this weeks shot, It’s a 5 exposure HDR with tweaks done in Photomatix and then Photoshop. I’m still not happy with it and might pull it apart and start again.

Next week, I’m on holiday from Wednesday and camping is on the cards….Thinking of hitting some hill lochs that I fished last year near Poolewe…we shall see but I’ll certainly have the camera.

Pride

Pride, originally uploaded by Bexley98.

A while back I was wittering on about ‘capturing the essence’. You can read the babble in detail here, but the crux of it is to sum up the whole of a thing by shooting an element of it. It’s supremely hard to do and I’ve been battling with the concept for years.

So this weekend was the annual Nairn Farmers Show. It’s a fascinating event where the agricultural community from across the North of Scotland descends on Nairn, or rather Auldearn, an even smaller town a few miles up the road. The main objective of the show is to enable farmers to highlight their best livestock, but it’s also an opportunity for local business to showcase their foodstuffs, crafts and so forth. In addition to the livestock show there are fiercely competitive baking, handicraft and produce growing competitions. I was amazed at the standard of the stuff on display, they have a photography competition and the quality was excellent...I might enter a photo next year.

But the critical element of the show is the livestock. Winning means a lot more than just the rosette, the value of the winning livestock skyrockets, which means there is a lot at stake for the major players. The farmers remain relaxed about proceedings but it’s obvious that they are under a hell of a lot of pressure and the rosettes must be all the more valuable in the current economic climate.

As a photographer, these shows are a brilliant opportunity. Lot’s of colour, characters and things to capture, often in difficult light and due to the packed timetable, you get limited opportunities to photograph each subject. I had several objectives in mind whilst I was snapping away, most importantly to improve my shooting of people in their environment, you can’t really call it ‘street phtography’ when there is no street…rural shooting? Ach, I don’t know. Also as the scale of the event is pretty big, it’s impossible to capture everything in a single shot, so we go back to ‘capturing the essence’.

This drags me back to the shot above, this guy was the owner (or at least working with) this massive Shire horse. The horse was immaculately turned out in an amazingly ornate piece of tack that ran the length of its body, I don’t know if it won anything, but I really hope so. What I’ve tried to sum up in his expression is Pride…you can be judge of weather I’ve achieved it all not.

The photo was a bit of a labour of love in the digital dark room. LOADS of contrast from a combination of a contrast layer in Photoshop, then I flattened the image and blasted it again with contrast from ‘Nik Silver Effects Pro’ (brilliant plug in), then I colour toned as per my guide here. I then did a bit of dodging to better bring out the guys face. Then an unsharp mask just to get the face as sharp as possible. I think the effort was worth it, it’s probably one of my only half decent photos of people.

Farmers shows run the length of the country; it’s a great day out and an excellent opportunity to shoot something a bit different. I’d urge you to head along to your nearest one. There are loads more pictures on the Picasa stream.