Tag: scotland

Despite having lived in St Andrews for almost 4 years now, I had never walked along the Lade Braes, a lovely path that follows the old walls of the town out along the route of the ‘lade’ (an artificial stream) that was cut to ensure a freshwater supply to the cathedral.

This first one was probably my favorite of the bunch, but at the time I wasn’t expecting it to be anything special.

Rewinding back to the beginning of the walk here. I dropped the colour from most of these after I scanned them, but for some reason I left this one with the tint it ended up with after the scan.

I took the dSLR with the 100mm macro as it had just rained (& still was a bit) & I was hoping to get some clichéd close-ups of droplets on leaves, but with most of the walk in the shade of the trees, the sun behind the rainclouds & the fact the 100mm macro is only an f4, I couldn’t really get anything without cranking up the ISO into noisy territory.

Luckily I grabbed the Canonet as an afterthought as I was heading out the door & was glad I did as even though I still had to shoot most things with a very slow shutter, the combination of f1.7 & not focusing on subjects less than 30cm away meant I at least came back with some usable snaps.

I had it loaded with Tri-X & with a yellow filter screwed on. Of course the filter wasn’t of much use with no blue sky about & I think it actually caused the washed-out almost IR look to the foliage, but at least it didn’t completely ruin the shots. A lot of them would’ve looked better if I wasn’t forced to shoot wide open because of how dim it was, but hey – at least I got something.

This might’ve come out nicer with a longer shutter (& no ugly sandbag wall in the background), but even managing to get it this slow handheld was a feat!

Likewise with this. I might go back at some point with a tripod, cable release & a set of NDs or something.

Really need to start taking more attention to my framing. Even with more DOF this would still look bad with the end of the branch jutting out at the bottom.

Not really the sort of subject I wanted to shoot at f1.7.

This came out better than expected though. The almost IR like quality to the foliage helps it I think. But then I am biased.

Wanted to finish the roll before I started retracing my steps on the way back. Time for bench shots.

Just look at how this is perfectly framed so the angle of the bench draws the viewer’s eye… straight off the edge of the photograph in the opposite direction to the rest of the image >.< It takes some skill to be able to frame a shot so badly after actually stopping to consider the framing.