Day: January 27, 2015

I drove into Falkirk today and got lost looking for a retail park.  Eventually found it along with the shop where they were selling some good acrylic paint for a quarter the normal shop price.  Still stuck between oils and acrylic.  Oils are much nicer to paint with but they are messy.  Acrylics are easier to work with, but dry too quickly for my style of painting.  Unfortunately, they don’t mix and match, at least I haven’t found a way to do it yet.  Photos taken from the top of the Tak Ma Doon road today.  I accidentally left the AF switch set to manual and screwed up a couple of potentially good shots.  A lesson learned.

I’ve photographed this cottage many times over the years. I wasn’t satisfied with today’s shot, the sky just wasn’t right. So I cropped a bit of more interesting skyscape from another of today’s shots and faded it in to the cottage shot. Much happier with the result.

I had accidentally set the lens to MF before this shot and it was slightly out of focus as a result. It took a bit of post processing to get it looking like I saw it, but I think it’s an improvement over the raw file.

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Took a long walk along the canal in the morning hoping to see the legendary kingfisher.  He/she was out somewhere on business.  However, I did see a pair of swans flying low over the canal and a buzzard off in the distance across the canal and unreachable even at 300mm.

From the top :

1.  One of a pair of swans flying low under the radar on the Forth and Clyde canal.

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2.  Swan flying along the Forth and Clyde canal.

3.  Female goosander looking just a little startled

4.  A beech tree sitting alone under an interesting sky.

5.  Pinecones sitting in a nice horizontal line.