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I spent most of the day split between bashing out another oil painting and trying in vain to get this minidisk recording again.  I think the main problem is the battery is no longer holding a charge.  With the little amount of work I get it to do, it’s hardly worth buying a new battery.

This is bit of an antique these days.  In its day it was high tech and high fidelity.  I still use it occasionally to record the odd choir piece.  I’ve even used it surreptitiously and totally illegally to record a concert in the Albert Hall.  Now it’s been more or less replaced by the ubiquitous iPhone.

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Missed most of what looked like a clear but cold day, watching Lewis Hamilton win his second world championship. Can’t say I like him, but I think I like Nico Rosberg even less.  Perhaps his less than sporting exploits in the past have caught up with him now.  Karma.

After the race and with just a little bit of light left, I glanced out of the window to see these little toadstools growing in a fencepost in the garden.

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We had decided to go to Perth on Saturday and had booked lunch at Cafe Tabou.  The drive up was interesting from a photography viewpoint with low lying mist in quite a few places.  As usual though, Scotland shoots itself in the foot and provides very few parking places along the route.  Also, there are now average-speed cameras on the A9 from Dunblane.  However, there are no signs to tell drivers what the speed limit is.  How difficult would it be to put some indication of the speed limit?  When we arrived in Perth, it seemed that lots of other folk had decided to visit this weekend too.  We had to drive round quite a few places before we managed to get parked for more than the obligatory 3 hours.  Why 3 hours?  Don’t you want us to stay, Perth?  Anyway, it was a Christmas festival that was causing all these people to try to spoil our day.  Gigantic TV billboards everywhere, noise  and general Ho, Ho, Ho!  I just can’t get excited about all this moneygrabbing nonsense.

On to the photos.

View of the landscape keeking through the mist on the way up.

Don’t know what the group’s name was. They were on the sound stage as I walked past in Perth main street. There is an expression that “what they lacked in skill, they made up for in enthusiasm.” It didn’t apply here. They were loud, and that’s it. Pretty bad really. Nice to see a bassist getting a bit of front stage

Three of the hilarious Absurdist Pipe Band who added a bit of levity to Perth’s Lights On party.

I saw this on the way home from Perth and managed to get parked at one of the few parking places on the A9. I had to shoot through a chain link fence, but managed to fit the lens through the little square of wire.  Processing done in Lightroom with a bit of adjustment brush to lighten the foreground then saturate and clarify the sky area.  Quite pleased with the overall finished article.

Taken at the same point as the last one, but a few moments earlier. The mist kept changing in shape and density, but I liked this one best. Processed in Lightroom and Intensify

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The day started well with some decent sun for a change, unfortunately I slept through it, well, not all of it, but a lot. Managed a quick painting. Not the best, but decent enough and it was a chance to do some painting knife techniques. Went out for a walk along the Luggie from Greenfaulds station after lunch, but light wasn’t good.

I’ve walked this path a few times, but this is the first time I’ve seen the nest sitting on the reinforcing joist. Despite the dull day, there is a lot of colour to be seen if you look hard.

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Little fern growing in a crack on a pillar. I’m not sure what the yellow stuff is. I think it’s probably a lichen of some sort.

I had intended going for a walk this morning and then having a wander round Glasgow by myself. It started off dull with a bit of a drizzle, so I changed plans and managed a different type of painting, using oils again, but limiting my time to 1 hour. Didn’t manage to get to Glasgow either, so no photos. I went out in the early evening to move my car and saw the leaves sparkling in the streetlight. It was difficult to get the colour balance right, so I used photoshop to layer two copies of the shot. Desaturated the top layer and used a layer mask to cut through locally and show the golden leaf. Simple!

Oil on card 280 x 220mm

A little bit of ‘shopping was done!

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Aw naw! It’s nearly Christlefridge! Went in to Glasgow today because S thought it was time we started Christmas shopping. Why, I ask you? It’s not even December yet, let alone double digit December (alliteration) when all sensible people start their shopping. Anyway, it was an excuse to have a nose around Waterstones, the art shops and maybe just a wee jaunt into Jessops (nearly alliteration). Followed by lunch, of course.

The light was quite the opposite of yesterday with bright, bright sun creating high contrast. I liked the way that worked for the pic of the futuristic cinema complex just off Sausageroll Street. A wee bit of post processing in LR5 which did a great job of curing the converging verticals for once and a bit more processing in Intensify to finish it off. It could probably do with a bit more saturation, but where do you stop then? This will do for the moment.
It looks like I’ve got another dustbunny here, but like the last one, it’s a flier. This time it’s a twin engined turboprop. Those with a greater fascination will no doubt be able to ID it from this tiny image. Me? I don’t care, I just like the fact that it’s there.

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Sitting in O Sole Mio having lunch, I glanced across the street and saw the sign for the off sales at the same level as the one for the Tron Church. Two examples of good spirits perhaps?

I was taking my niece to Hamilton today and had a half hour or so to myself, so I took a walk around the mausoleum and it’s beautifully landscaped park. No sarcasm there for once, it’s a real testament to the landscape gardeners of Hamilton council. Of course, the lovely weather helped!

It looked to me like a canal in Amsterdam on a small scale. It’s actually the Cadzow Burn in Hamilton S. Lanarkshire. I was lucky today because the light was simply beautiful. What I liked most about this pic was the (almost) symmetry of the scene and the textures on the grass. Truly, It’s all about the light.

The mausoleum was built in 1842 by the 10th Duke of Hamilton.
I remember going on a guided tour, ‘way back in the ’60s and being told that the building was tilting because of subsidence due to mine workings and the effects of flooding of the nearby River Clyde. Now it appears to have righted itself again. Its high stone vault previously held the record for the longest echo of any man-made structure in the world, taking 15 seconds for the sound of a slammed door to decay. Still an impressive building.

The avenue of trees leading to the mausoleum, looking rightfully regal in the late autumn sun.

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Just some folk enjoying the sunshine. I liked the way the streetlamps on the left seemed to echo the trees on the right.

Two gentlemen out for an afternoon stroll. Just coming out of the underpass that links the the Low Parks to Strathclyde Park under the M74.

It was only when I got a bluetooth speaker, I realised just how difficult we make it to connect devices. With this simple protocol we can take away the need for a jack plug. You know, the one that always tangles in headphones. That’s why I bought myself a pair of bluetooth headphones too. In our connected world, we seem to make things more and more difficult for ourselves. Why do we have at least three common USB systems? Have manufacturers forgotten what the ‘U’ stands for? That’s not to mention firewire 400 and firewire 800 and USB3 and … The list goes on and on.

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… the heart of the sun.

Sunday 16th Nov 2014

Just another somewhat less than ‘diamond day’ where the sky cleared around 2.30pm and for an hour there was some useable light.  S encouraged me to get out for a while before I made the dinner.  Salt crust sea bass.  Fiddly but lovely!  Here are the results of today’s walk around St Mo’s and other places.

I usually try to clone out the cables from the pylons, but I actually like them here because they seem to frame the sun.

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Solitary crow watching the sun set.

I simply couldn’t get the Tamron lens to focus on the grass stem.  The target was just too small and the lens kept being drawn to the clouds and the setting sun.  So, it was back to old fashioned manual focusing.  If I’d been thinking properly, I could have used the focusing screen on the back instead of the viewfinder, but that would have come with its own camera shake problems.  In the end, this was probably the best choice.  It’s not quite 100% sharp, but it’s good enough and the f10 setting probably gave me a bit more DOF latitude.

Went to photograph a farm in deepest Ayrshire today, but the light wasn’t right and I wasn’t happy with the results, so until the results suit me, you won’t be seeing them here.  My blog, my rules!  After that, I got solidly lost in the hinterland of Newton Mearns.  Didn’t actually thing they’d allow a dobber like me into their gated community, but they did.  Having said that, the polis did tail me for a few miles, just to make sure I got the message and got back on the M77 sharpish.

This is the Balgray reservoir.  To be more precise, it’s the access walkway to the little control tower on the reservoir.  I liked the detail in this vandal deterrent.  You can see by the graffiti on the door in the background that it’s more decoration than deterrent, unfortunately.

This is the picture of the day.  It’s the tower and access walkway at the reservoir.  I watched two Polish blokes fishing nearby.  One of them caught a pike.  I remember my dad telling me that Poles used to fish in the loch at Glenboig for pike and were the few people who would eat the fish.

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I left the dreadful Blipfoto today.  It’s been on my hit list for a few weeks now.  It consistently loses entries I add to my collection there.  The interface is clunky and extremely user-unfriendly.  Ok, so is this at times, but I’m making this my own as I go along.  Any mistakes are mine, not some dobber in Embra collecting my money and not providing a decent service.  It was good to start with, but now it’s becoming worse each week, so I’ve left.  That leaves me with Flickr (slow, but a reasonably good audience) and this (long may it continue).  Thoughts of Chairman Zog.