The kitchen started work again at 6.00AM and so did the noise. It was so loud, and it woke both Scamp and me and we just couldn’t get back to sleep, so I suggested we make an early start and get on the road. Breakfast was very good – the food IS good. Shower in the room had an air-lock in it and squealed when you turned the flow up above a trickle. Scamp made sure she complained about this and the abominable kitchen when we were booking out and got a small amount removed from the bill after the receptionist had gone to speak to the manager. The manager chose not to meet his irate customer face to face. I wonder why.
The rest of the run up north passed without incident until we were on the single track section out of Portree when a diddy of a woman decided that we should reverse back a couple of hundred yards to a passing place and allow her through, even though she had just driven past a passing place. I’m afraid that wasn’t going to happen and I was pleased to see her go incandescent when I made silly faces at her through the window. Some people think they own the road. They don’t, I do.
Went for a drive later as we’d arrived far earlier than expected. Drove to Aird and I got two paintings done – TWO! Ok, one was a small sketch, but the other was a full watercolour, both of the same scene. I think the small one is better than the bigger one. I’ll maybe post them some time to garner opinion.
After dinner I went down the slip and got some possible photos. Will know better when I process them, but that may be a problem as it looks like the battery on the Mac is dying. Down to 37% of its designed capacity.
All good things must come to an end, and so it was for us as we left Digg and Staffin and Skye behind and headed back down the road. We stopped for a while at Eilean Donan castle for coffee and a scone. I wandered round the exhibition of photos celebrating 100 years of something – wasn’t really interested in what. Most of the photos were clichéd shots of the castle, with only a couple that held my interest for any time. Needless to say, those were B&W. The worst ones by far were the ones that had accidentally (I hope) fallen into a bucket of Photomatix and had turned out all grungy with too light shadows, too saturated colour and too sharp detail. Just dunk them in the HDR mix, drag them out and that’s it done. Hmm, I used to play with HDR too, but you have to be so careful not to produce rubbish from what could be a decent photo. End of rant.
mobbed, but I got the view he’d painted. I’d like to have the guts to sketch in such a public place. Maybe some day … Anyway, I got myself a new shirt in Skye Batiks. Rather a grungy red and black one with a white batik pattern on the back. Such comfortable shirts. Expensive, but comfortable. Then is was on the road back to 
Staffin. We stopped at the waterfall because I wanted to try a ‘new’ method of shooting multiple images and then blending them in Photoshop to simulate a long exposure. I’d initially intended using a variable density ND filter to do the job in one shot, but forgot to pack the ND. It’s just a cheapo, so it’s not great, leaving light blotches on the finished image, but it’s good for experimenting. The results, while not perfect, show that I am on the right road and with a little more tweaking, ok, a lot more tweaking, I can dispense with the bog awful variable ND filter entirely. Well, after all, that’s what Photoshop is for isn’t it?!
