Saint Patience

I’m not going to spout endless quotes or cliches in this particular post today.  

I would just like to apologise to my readers for any negativity coming through your screens from my last post. It’s currently hayfever season in Scotland and this year seems particularly bad.  Couple that with my over-confidence on parenting skills and the fantastic resilience and genius of two children and you get my PMA taking a good swift kick to the testicles.

But I’m back to my normal (if I ever were normal) self.  I have managed to find some positivity through my camera again and have taken a few hundred photos of the little cherubs only yesterday.  Super shiny sun beating down on my trilby, kindle in hand reading up about my 5D MKIII and life is all good again.

Yep, you read correctly.  Reading about my 5D MKIII.  As much as I like to think I am a good photographer and know everything, unfortunately I don’t.  And the 5D MKIII is a beast of a machine.  Menus within menus within menus.  PhD required just for the Canon manual instructions alone.  So I purchased a kindle book full of layman’s terms and I love it.  Meant I could at least have a go at trying to focus on moving children and use the features wisely.  I’m still in the early stages yet but it’ll definitely ensure that I know how to use all those lovely features over the next couple of months as long as my memory doesn’t fail me!

Speaking of memory failure, I was perusing photos from the start of the year and came across some from my birthday weekend (yay… not again) that I actually hadn’t processed.  I’ve posted a panoramic of Loch Lomond at the Cameron House Hotel below and see what you think.  Personally, I love the yellow sea plane to the left of the frame.  Sorta makes the picture that little bit nicer.

The Game Changer

Wow..  It’s been a while since I have posted on me ole blog and here was me saying I was definitely going to post as often as possible.

Life changes, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse.  In this particular scenario my life changed for the better.  I had mentioned in previous blogs that I was going to post something that I had been “working on” over the last year.  It has absolutely nothing to do with photography per se but more to do with enhancing my wife and I’s life.

At the end of May, Debbie and I finally got through all the waiting and frustration of the adoption process and two little souls were placed with ourselves for us to nurture and turn into adorable, sensible, perfect little people.  I can’t honestly guarantee that they will actually turn out to be anything like that but I shall try my damnedest to make sure it goes that way.

The little people in question are a boy of 3 and a girl of nearly 2.  The only frustrating thing about it is that I can’t actually post photos of the wee cherubs as you never know who may see them and all the legal stuff that goes with that.  I’m sure my 3Tb external storage can take the strain of all the photos I am taking right now.

Which I suppose brings me to my favourite subject in the whole world right now (after my wife and kids obviously), photography!  Having been with the two kids practically 24 x 7 in the last month, I’ve not really had much chance to get out the house myself and take some landscape shots or any other undertaking for that matter.  I had the chance to escape the family for a little while and scooted along to Bangour Hospital (just outside Broxburn).  This particular hospital has been closed for a few years now and it’s all boarded up.  I really wanted to get in to get some stock shots of the abandoned buildings and get close up shots of flaking paint, boards, concrete, etc to start using in grunge art.

I have to say, I got plenty of great shots and great textures to use for future posts which I will show you all in the future but for the moment I shall step back to the beginning of the year and post one of my favourite photos from my birthday weekend, in this case, Rannoch Moor.  Man, that seems so far away!

I particularly like the above photograph just because of the ice on the water.  It wasn’t a cold day, just that the ice was melting from an overnight frost.  I changed the tone of the photo to look colder and boosted the contract and colours slightly, to make it stand out better.

Never A Shallower Song Sung

Loving You by Minnie Riperton (I had to google that) popped into my head and as usual I started to murder the song in my own enigmatic way.  It then got me thinking that the beginning of the song sounded extremely shallow indeed.  I mean, “loving you is easy cause you’re beautiful” does sounds pretty shallow, doesn’t it?  Straight after squeaking the words out, the self created tongue twister title then popped into my head.  And I still can’t say it correctly.  You should try saying it yourself if you haven’t already.  I usually end up saying “Never a shallower shong sung” or Never a shallower song shung”..  It also sounds faintly Chinese when I try to say it so I will probably stop saying it for fear of insulting anyone.

I digress.  I just wanted to post a picture that I had been meaning to take for some time now.  I’ve been asked by some people if I had pictures of the Forth Rail Bridge in my collection and I had two.  Two.  Now for a landscape photographer that lives about 25 minutes away from the iconic bridges, this is particularly poor.  And one of those photos was taken in my first year of owning a DSLR whereby the composition, lighting, etc isn’t particularly brilliant.

So, on Cinco de Mayo (I sort of knew this day was part of the calendar as I particularly like all things Mexican anyways – for more info on it, go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinco_de_Mayo) I decided that I would take a drive and head to the North side of the bridges, i.e. North Queensferry.  This was a first for me as I’d typically taken the photos from South Queensferry as I know this place a little better.  I was greeted with some brilliant cloud porn (for a photographer, getting fantastic clouds makes for better photos, or at least that’s what I am saying) and with it being a little bit windier than normal, I decided to get the Big Stopper out.  Nothing rude dear readers, as the photogs amongst us will know that the Big Stopper is Lee filters 10 stop filter.  Basically, it blacks out the light, which in turn gives rise to some very long exposures.

In the case of the photo below (I’ll do just one for the moment and post others once I get round to processing them), I used a 0.6 ND grad with the Big Stopper and got the funky cloud streaks in the photo.  Comments from posting the photo earlier have indicated that some people prefer the black and white photo and I tend to agree.  See what you think.

The Cupboard Under the Stairs..

That’s my new place for storing all my photography gear.

I’ve been relegated due to ever changing circumstances within the Heaney household.  I used to have the middle room within the town house we live in but I am now firmly down in the dungeons as they may say.

Needless to say, my equipment takes up an awful lot of space!  I didn’t realise it at the time but the middle room was full of my cameras, lenses, backpacks, lights, etc.  To see them all packed into the little cupboard under the stairs makes me realise that perhaps I should get rid of a few bits and pieces.  Maybe in time!

I’ve also got my iMac downstairs now and this, in turn, has freed the middle room for other purposes.  Those purposes I shall talk more about in future blog posts (it’s quite exciting even if I do say so myself!) but for now I will concentrate on this blog.  Now that the iMac has also been relegated downstairs along with my gear, I suppose in generalistic terms it means I know where everything is.  No more scuttling about trying to find different bits and pieces before a shoot.  And that’s where this post comes in.  I am a few days away from shooting a wedding just up the road and I’m getting all excited/scared for it coming around.  It’ll be a fab wedding as I know the brides mother and she’s a good laugh.  I’ll no doubt get lots of jokes and comments, which will help relax everyone on the day!  I will post some photos in the next couple of weeks to show you all how it went. 

I suppose for now I would like to show you some photos that I took whilst up in Glencoe for my birthday weekend.  I finally managed to shoot the Buachaille Etive Mor (pretty famous Scottish Mountain) and I think I did it justice.  See what you think.

No Offence But…

Now how many times have I heard that particular line said only to be offended in the next sentence?  Numerous times, that’s how many.  However, no matter how many times I’ve heard it or how many times I am going to hear it, I do honestly believe that the person saying it doesn’t actually mean to offend.  At least, I will always give them the benefit of the doubt, cos 9 times out of 10 I really don’t mean to offend when I utter those immortal words.

Anyways, the reason I start this particular blog with this particular sentence is that I always seem to have this habit of unintentionally offending people.  And this particular week seems to be no exception.  You may have read that I went to St Andrews last weekend (is it really the weekend again?  Thank God I hear you say!  I second that) and I went with Debbie as I really wanted to take some photos for my website.

We got there, had our usual coffee and scone (rock and roll, eh!) at our usual coffee shop and then we headed off down to the beach to take some photos of the castle first of all followed by a drive to the other beach to take some photos of the whole of St Andrews.  Got some lovely photos I may add and I was really excited to load them off my camera and play about.  I got a great picture of the beach walkway and I then tweaked it to be a dark sepia colour as the sky in the background dictated I do so.  It did really.  It told me to “change the colour of this photograph to dark sepia or else!”  I didn’t want to find out what the “or else” part of that sentence was going to be so I changed it.  You can see how the photo looks below:

If you zoom into the photo, you can see a very cool sign that someone has put up about dog fouling..  No, I don’t mean a desperate slide tackle out with the normal rules of a challenge but more the fact that people don’t clean up after their dogs.  That is one thing that really grates my nipples.  People really should clean up after their dogs.  It reminds me of a funny story when my friend Aldo and I were at our friends wedding in Clonakilty, Eire, and we were all mulling about on the lawns, drinking champagne.  As we were walking about, we noticed that someone had stood in some dog poo, to which we were giggling away and saying things like, “I wonder which idiot did that!”..  Lo and behold, did Aldo not look down and find out that it was him!  Cue me laughing my behind off and barely able to breath.  Reasoning behind that is that we were all wearing kilt brogues, which in themselves are expensive shoes but they have a very ornate brogue pattern, which just happened to hold onto quite a lot of said poo.  As I would say, Classic!

Back to St Andrews then.  So I walked over the walkway and decided that I wanted to take a panoramic photo of the front of St Andrews.  So, camera out, focus on the buildings and I decided that I was just too far away to take pictures with the 24-70 on the camera.  I could have walked closer but I was a good 10 minutes away from where I would have to be and the light was fading fast.  So I then did something that I said I never would.  Changed my lenses on the beach.  Dangerous move as sand can be flying about all over the place but I lucked out somehow as no sand got into the camera..  Phew.

So with the 70-200mm lens bolted onto the camera, I mounted it onto the tripod and took 5 photos in landscape format.  Once stitched together in Photoshop, I then tweaked the colours and brightened it a little and cloned some distractions out and straightened the horizon.  I’ve also added in a little watermark to the photo but I am not to sure if I will go down this route or not.  Jury’s still out on it for me.  That’s for a future blog for me to argue over the use of them or not.  Here’s the photo:

In terms of the watermark, I really think it sort of detracts from the look of the photo but then again, I don’t want my photos being pinched without some credit.

So to finish off, this is where the next offence by myself came into existence.  I asked my friend at work to take a look at the photo and give me some critique on it.  I know he LOVES St Andrews so his comment was just, “cracking photo but no offence, leave St Andrews alone, as that is my domain”..  No offence taken.  To be honest, it was a tongue in cheek comment taken as such.  St Andrews is all yours again Dave.

Better to Burn Out Than Fade Away!

A brilliant quote from a brilliant movie.  Said quote is from Clancy Brown as the Kurgan in Highlander and he plays the part with such aplomb.  He oozes such character on screen and quite literally steals the movie for me.  Being Scottish, I love everything about Scotland and the Scots.  Well, most of it.  There are some aspects that I don’t particularly enjoy but I will leave that for another day.  And there I go again..  Deviating from what I was wanting to blog about..

I did want to talk about the fact the film also stars Sean Connery (a Scot) as an Egyptian (amended as i got this wrong first time!)and Christopher Lambert (a Frenchman) as a Scot..  And that’s the crux.  The actual accent of Mr Lambert is terrible!  Why on earth didn’t they just put Sean in as the lead character?  I mean, he’s Scottish and could carry off the role perfectly fine.  I suppose he was a little too old.  It doesn’t detract all that much from the film but enough to make it slightly annoying..

But onto the other points I was wanting to make alongside my minor grievance with Highlander.

Point 1.  The film has opening scenes at one of my all time favourite places, Eilean Donan Castle.  What a spectacular place to take photographs.  The drive up is stunning and you are hard pushed to not stop every 5 minutes to get the camera out and take what I believe to be some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world.  And it’s right on my doorstep.  I do feel blessed to be able to hop into the car and drive North to go see some of this fantastic landscape.

Point 2.  The fact is, I do feel kind of burnt out.  Life is kind of hectic right now but it’s all good.  Suppose the thing to think about here is that it’s good to be busy and I am not complaining about it, per se.  Just wanted to get it down on paper/screen as a way of sounding off!

To finish off, I’d like to post a photo of Eilean Donan Castle that I took back in 2010.   It’s one of my favourite all time photos and I processed it back when I was just starting to get used to Photoshop.  All the elements that day just came together.  A little light snow, brilliant cloud scape, reflection on the water.  And there was a wedding on that day too and the bride looked beautiful in her dress (a lovely deep shade of red!)