Balvaird Castle
Phil an I went out on Sunday under the illusion that the rain would stay off. WRONG !
We took a run up to Loch Tay & Glen Lyon, on a good day two very picturesque locations but not in the driving wind and ever present rain. Like two crazy people we stayed out most of the day hoping the weather would clear up  but it was not to be and there wasn't very much photography happening.
We did in fact get some good light when we were about 10 minutes from home so we stopped at Balvaird Castle near Gateside and spent around 1 hour wandering around there, the wind was still blowing hard but the rain was off and the sun was out.

 Situation normal, drive for 2 hours to Glen Lyon, spend all day there then take all days photographs 10 minutes from home

British Pastime

I am now well and truly entrenched in the great British pastime of complaining about the weather, in particular the weekend weather.
Saturday was fine but tied up with club exhibition which went well.
Sunday raining again so I will sit and write some rubbish and maybe get some feedback.
Being a serious but not fanatical photographer I find the space under my bed filling up with black boxes full of 16 x 20 mounted photographs, I still have the first mono photograph I ever developed in a darkroom way back in 19 whenever, What do we do with these gems of creativity which are destined to languish forever in the stoor infested world under the bed ?
I have submitted my first ever photographs to exhibition / salon ( still waiting for results )
This is one outlet and a good indication of where you are photographically speaking
I have never submitted for distinctions either blah de blah RPS or whatever PAGB, I have considered this route to a photographic pat on the back but will these honours make me a better photographer ?
I will still wander around the same hills with the same people taking the same photographs
Or does applying for blah de blah RPS or whatever PAGB and get a knock back focus your attention to do better and take better photographs or is it really that important ?
I suppose it all depends on what you want from your hobby, pleasure from what you are doing and producing or a drive to be BETTER, BETTER, BETTER or somewhere in between where you just want to be the best you can be without being fanatical.
Which doesn't answer the question about what we do with all the 16 x 20s under the bed
What do you think ? Any ideas will be considered


   Regards R.

Easter Weekend
                                                    Sat.
On call engineer again so travelling a distance was out but Spud and I went along to the beach at Tentsmuir (North East Fife )
The beach at Tentsmuir is sort of comes in two parts, if you approach from the Leuchars direction there are miles of sand dunes and beach and if you approach from the Tayport direction there are old fortifications from the war, tidal pools, seals and of course beach. Both areas of the beach are usually strewn with washed up logs and trees, the whole beach is then backed up with forest.
 If coastal photography is your thing you will be hard pressed to find a better location for variety of subject matter.
We live only a half hour drive so we went along early afternoon and had a very enjoyable 3 hours at the Leuchars end photographing in the dunes and waters edge. I did mention a couple of posts ago that you can never get too many photographs of sticks on a beach well I now have another 3 or 4 for the collection

Is it flotsam or jetsam when stuff is washed up? not that it matters but the people who frequent this beach seem to be fascinated with standing large logs on end in the sand like some beach comers Stonehenge type ritual, having said that I think these ones are natural, they are in the dunes back off the beach

This one is not natural and you can almost imagine some midnight ritual involving fire and lots of beer on every second Saturday.

The trip did have its by now compulsory hick up. Parked the van and set off along the beach looking for that little gem to get the juices flowing only to find that I had left my glasses in the van. Have you ever tried the old blind man photography? Not recommended!

 

Sun

Took a forty minute drive inland to some locations we had scouted out at the start of the year for a return trip but no joy this time either and we ended up at Loch Leven for an hour or so. Don't know if Spud got any worth while photographs but I was playing with some panoramic stuff, still learning what works and what doesn't, Sunday stuff didn't work!

 

Apologies

Sorry to anyone who is daft enough to be waiting for the next mishap or failed road trip or the rarest of occasions when it all comes together but either through work or weather I seem to be stuck in photographic limbo, so what's the alternative?
Revisit old files which had been consigned to the Never To Be Seen Again folder for whatever reason.
                                          This is an image shot at St Cyrus in March 2012.

 Saw the end result in my head when I was framing up and had to wait about half an hour for the tide to come in and half submerge the front posts, yea, happy with the composition, the end result was nice enough but not what I had in mind, now to any full time photoshop user it is a flick of a switch and hey presto got what you want but I am not that photoshop user, my image processing consists of some adjustment layers (Levels and Brightness & Contrast) with a wee bit of Cloning and Spot Healing to tidy up then send to printer. So this file ended up reluctantly in the NTBSA folder because although I played around in Elements 9 for yonks I couldn't find the right switch, slider or tweeker to make it work.
Enter the prolonged period of photographic inactivity and a revisit to THE FOLDER and yes it was just a drag of the Clarity slider all the way to the left to smooth out all the detail in the sand and sea then process in the normal way.             As easy as falling off a bike !

 

If you know that it's junk then throw it out but maybe it's just waiting for a light to come on in your head.
            Everybody has a NTBSA folder so when you start getting twitchy visit THE FOLDER.

                                                                   Happy hunting

The Easy Option

February has not been kind, STOP! The whole of the autumn and winter have not been kind to landscape photographers who can only indulge at weekends but February has been the most frustrating by far.
Some fabulous frosty, freezing cold, misty mornings then weekend the weather's good enough to get you out but shutting down around mid-day with blanket cover of clouds, this is not always head for home time, depending on where you are and what you hope to photograph flat lighting can sometimes be a bonus but not if you are up a hill praying for some directional sunlight or a 2 hour drive to a loch side, cup of tea in hand waiting for that same sunlight knowing that it's not going to happen. This is what February 2013 will be remembered for we went to some nice locations, Loch Lomond, Aviemore, Loch Rannoch and the best photographs were taken at my doorstep when I took advantage of some sunny spells and kept it local.
Never let anyone tell you that Landscape photography is an easy option,
It does my head in but there is nothing else I would rather do.

We were at a presentation by Charlie Waite recently and he reckoned that if he got 10 good images in a year he was doing well, now there is no way I am comparing my photography to that of Charlie Waite but 10 - 12 good photographs (Rab Kerr standard ) in a year, yea I'll take that

A Strange Weekend !

I took an off the cuff run to the beach at Kirkcaldy on Sat. because I had nothing better to do and came away with a couple of reasonable images, ( they are not photographs yet because they are not on paper ). Kirkcaldy beach is well visited by all the local photographers and so the photogenic areas are shot from every conceivable angle, so to try for " a bit different " I went for the panoramic.

The stitching is a bit rough but it's a quicky to get on the blog, ( yea ! that's what they all say ) the key to this type of image is to make sure that everything is level if it's not it doesn't stitch well, this is four files shot on the horizontal covering about 150 degrees and merged in the Canon utilities program. I will play with this again when the opportunity comes along but to get it right, like everything else it's a learning curve. the other bit of luck on Sat was a lump of tree washed up on the beach, it doesn't matter how many pictures of washed up logs you've got there's always room for one more. this one

was done with a slow shutter and receding wave and more important NO DEVIL DOG roaming the beach.
Sunday was a planed trip to the Bonny Banks.
Went up the east side to Rowardennan then worked our way north on the West Highland Way for about an hour, the weather was a bit hit or miss but that didn't really mater because as good a walk as it is it is not very inspiring photographically. There are some very good stops on the way south down the loch but we have pretty much shot them to death and so didn't stop on this trip.

S.P.F. Print Championship

The first spell of good weather since November and I am heading to Stirling for the S.P.F. print championship. This is the annual Scottish Photographic Federation print competition involving all the photographic clubs in Scotland showing both colour and mono prints and being judged at international standard so it is a feather in the cap if you score well.

 Cut to the chase, I would have liked to have done better but the mono section was being scored really tight with most prints scoring 11 to 13 from a possible 15 so scoring a 10, 11 and 12 although not great my three prints were in the mix and our club score was in the top half

12

10

                                                                                  11
                              Hopefully I will get out next weekend, destination undecided