It’s the first time I have photographed the Forth Rail bridge since all the maintenance work has been completed. I was hoping for a bit of colour from a sun rise however as usual whenever I make the effort to be out and about before sunrise , the sun decides not to show.
I ended up in Portencross recently hoping for a colourful sunrise as there was no sunrise to speak of I had to work a bit harder in order to get any reasonable pictures. Well here is just 3 of the old Portencross pier, please let me know what you think of them.
I just got back from doing some work close to Elgin in the North of Scotland. As I was away for a few days I took my camera with me. Having never visited this area of the country before I had done a little bit of research and had seen a few pictures of this rock, know as the bow fiddle rock which is just off the coast of Portknockie. I arrived at this location just in the nick of time and once again found myself running from the car to find a good vantage point. There was only 15 minutes till sunset and I could see that the late evening sun was perfectly illuminating the rock. So with only minutes to spare I took a few different shots.
The Bow Fiddle Rock
The image above was my favourite and is actually a composite of 2 different images.
Image number 1 (the rock) 24-105mm Lee circ. polarizer plus a 2 stop Lee ND hard grad
(35mm, F16, ISO 100, 1 sec)
Image number 2 (the sky, sea and foreground) 24-105mm Lee circ. polarizer plus a 2 stop Lee ND hard grad and a 10 step Lee big stopper
(35mm, F8, ISO 400, 65 sec)
I then used photoshop layers and masks to reveal the rock only on the long exposure layer. I liked the way the blue tones from using the big stopper made the oranges/yellows tones of the rock pop within the image.
I was doing some work this week for a company based in Girvan. As I was staying over night I thought it would be a good opportunity to get out and take some pictures. Here is an image of the Turnberry lighthouse.
One of the challenges of a landscape photographer is the mid day sun which tends to bring harsh lighting conditions with strong shadows not ideal for this type of photography. These conditions however are a plus if you have an infra-red camera. I had one of my older digital SLR camera converted to only detect infra-red light by a company called ACS. You can take infra-red images with the use of filters on a standard camera however this involved long exposures (no hand held shots) and makes composition difficult and you can see nothing through the lens with the filter attached.
For my final day on Skye I planned on photographing the sunrise from a vantage point that included the Old Man of Storr.
The Storr is a rocky hill on the Trotternish peninsula of the Isle of Skye. The hill presents a steep rocky eastern face overlooking the Sound of Raasay, contrasting with gentler grassy slopes to the west. The Storr is prime example of the Trotternish landslip, the longest such feature in Great Britain. The area in front of the cliffs of the Storr is known as the Sanctuary. This has a number of weirdly shaped rock pinnacles, the remnants of ancient landslips. One of the most famous of these is known as the Old Man of Storr.
After a day of exploring the island I had decided to capture some images from Duntulm beach which can be found on the Western coats of Skye just past the most northerly point. This location was pointed out to me by a other photographer who I had met the previous day so a big thank you to Dimitri Vasiliou.
Well I am just back from my annual trip to Skye where I get a few days of doing nothing but taking and thinking about taking pictures. Although I take tens of thousands of pictures a year very little of them are actually for myself so to get a weekend to indulge in my passion is always great. Although I was away for a total of 48 hours in true there are only about 6-8 hours where the light will be suitable for landscape photography. These hours of photography are called the ‘Golden’ hours and are the hours before and after both sunset and sunrise, during these hours assuming the weather conditions are suitable the light quality is at its best. One of the down side to landscape photography at this time of the year is the early sunrises (5:30am), which means ideally you want to be up and on location for about 45 minutes before the sun peeks over the horizon. My next couple of blog posts are going to detail the locations, condition and a few of the images captured at either the sunset or sunrise.
I have a free weekend coming up and I am planning another photographic trip to Skye. Just like last year it will involve some early rises to hopefully capture a colourful sunrise or two from good vantage points and then perhaps a sunset from the western side of the island. Here are some images I captured during my short visit last year.
All of these images are available to purchase as a limited addition print from my fine art gallery