Another late rise today. This is becoming a habit. I’d say we were missing the best part of the day, but that wouldn’t be correct. The light level this morning when we woke was a definite ISO 10000 and that would have been with f1.8 @ 1/30th (that means really, really dull to non-photogs). Tonight’s big film was The Dark Knight. We can beat that. We have The Dark Day … every day. Enough of this repartee.
Just to get out of the house, we decided on a trip to Stirling … for a curry. Rather than go to what had been out favourite curry shop, Mr Singh’s, I thought it would be a good idea to try out a new one, well, new to us. I didn’t know what it was called, but I knew where it was. It turned out to be the ‘Spice Garden’ and it was good, very good. The only let down was that their Irn Bru came from a bar nozzle with not nearly enough gas. I can forgive that if the food is good, and it was. We’ll be back.
On the way back, I wanted to get a POD. I intended it to be Stirling Castle, but from the standard tourist viewpoint, the view was not as commanding as I hoped it would be. Well, what do you expect from the Council created parking place. I turned 180º and liked the view up the carse. A ‘carse’, which my spellchecker thinks is a the plural of ‘car’ is “low-lying land beside a river” and the Carse of Stirling can be beautiful on a good day. Today wasn’t beautiful, but the carse was doing it’s level best, so I took its photo. Then I grabbed my tripod and walked across to see if Stirling Castle looked any better from the other side of the road. It didn’t, but the mound at the old cemetery did look good and there were lots of people happily standing on it to make it look quite dramatic. I imagine they thought they looked dramatic too. I took a few shots just to make them think they were dramatic and important.
When I got home, the carse photo was easy to process. The dramatic rock took a little longer. Because the shots were taken with the same focal length, aperture and shutter settings, it was easy to sandwich two of them in Potatoshop with the empty rock on top and the dramatic person beneath. Then all I did was change the opacity of the top shot to allow the ‘ghost’ underneath to show through. Simple! I’ll do the Stirling Castle shot another day. I’ve just remembered where to take it from and it’s’ not the Council approved tourist place either. Well, it wouldn’t be, would it?