Monthly Archives: February 2010

Perth by night

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I’m now back in Rugby, after a nightmare journey down from Perth, featuring a closed airport and lack of customer service from the airline, luckily for my next trip I will be driving.

I hadn’t actually planned to shoot anything on Wednesday, I’d been snowboarding up at Glenshee, without the camera gear, it was another perfect blue sky day of Scottish snowboarding. After getting back into town, we went to the Shake Bar for a Scottish tablet milkshake, which everyone should experience in their life. We enjoyed the milkshakes overlooking the Tay as the sun was setting and for some reason, the Tay was flat clam making the reflections of lights from the bridges really vivid. So we rushed back to grab the cameras and these are the resulting images:

Kinnoull Hill

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After a couple of days with rubbish light, we were able to get out with the cameras again, we decided to keep it fairly local and walked to Kinnoull Hill on the outskirts of Perth. I’d remembered about a pond, that was used for the sport of curling in the olden days, from a previous trip, so we took a detour to find it again. The pond was frozen and the ice was pretty thick, certainly enough to take my weight. (Don’t play around on frozen lakes etc, it isn’t big or clever)

The real reason for choosing Kinnoull Hill, was Kinnoull Tower, a derelict tower perched on the edge of a cliff, probably a look out post to spot people coming up the Tay from the North Sea/Dundee. Its well positioned to catch the evening sun and with the Tay weaving away in the background. This afternoon the Tay was fairly full, with hardly a ripple and I really like the way this image has come out.

Also in Kinnoull Woods there are a series of wooden sculptures by Pete Bowsher (aka Chainsaw Pete), this bird of prey (looks like an eagle, but buzzard sized) was up near Kinnoull Tower.

Perthshire Landscapes

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Seeing as I’m up in Scotland, amongst some stunning scenery it would be silly not to make the most of it, so along with my Dad we are trying to get out to take photographs each evening, when the light is good.

Our first evening we headed north up the A9, past Dunkeld and then left the car and headed up the hill towards a loch that we thought would catch the evening sun. After a few wrong turnings we came out of the woods into a meadow, where we should have stopped, due to the sun almost having disappeared behind the mountains, but instead we carried on for the loch, by the time we reached in the sun had already dropped. This was a great shame, as the loch was frozen and there was a pretty green cottage on the bank. I’m pretty pleased with the image below, but can’t help wondering how much better it would have been 20 minutes before.

A Busy Start To The Year

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Wow! Where has January gone? It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was up in Scotland for Xmas, I’m going back next week.

Towards the middle of January I had a very busy weekend, spending the Saturday at the SWPP convention in London with my Dad and some of his class mates from his photography course, the main thing I took away from the show was the motivation to try new options for displaying my images, especially printing to and stretching canvas and acrylics.

The Autosport show was great, it is always good to meet up with familiar faces, see all the cars and generally get excited for the 2010 season. The highlight for me was seeing the Ma5da Racing cars in the Live Action Arena, the live show itself was good, but seeing the MX-5s on track, entertaining the crowd, along with the likes of drift cars, Aston Martins, Jaguars and Jenson Button, even though the result, a win for Jonathan Blake in the mk3 was somewhat predictable!

I’ve finally got my wide angle lens, the Canon 17-40f4L, back from Fixation who were servicing it after it sacrificed itself to stop me getting a ski in the face at the Wham Bam Swad Jam last year and am looking forward to using it in Scotland next week.

That is pretty much all the photography news from me, the year has got off to a slow start, but I am looking forward to the rest of 2010 being very busy!