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.
richie heaney photography 