Category: United Kingdom

Ayr and Greenan Castle

On Sunday afternoon we headed to Ayr for a wander through it’s old town, along the promenade and beech, hopefully ending up with some time to chill on the beach in the end. Although it was fairly windy, it was sunny and warm, so we had a very pleasant stroll along the promenade, to the old dry dock and back through the old town.

In the old dry dock, we stumbled upon an old fishing boat called the Watchful, an iconic symbol of the glory days of Clyde coastal fishing. The vessel was restored to it’s original state with the help of West Coast Marine and ‘volunteers’ from the Community Service Rehabilitation Programme.

During our wander through the old town of Ayr, we came across some wonderful old houses and St. John’s Tower, the towering remnants of a once proud church that stuck it’s feet in the ground in the 13th Century. In fact, St John’s Tower is the oldest surviving building in the Town of Ayr and was restored in 1914 to it’s full glory by Lord Bute.

Eventually we ended up on the beech close to the where the River Doon enters the sea. A wonderful position with views across the beachfrom South to North, from Greenan Castle and the Heads of Ayr to Arran. While Lynn stuck her head in the newspapers, Lola and I ventured onto the flats for some photography. I haven’t had much chance recently, but a wonderful opportunity calling for use of my tilt and shift lens and polarising/graduated filters.

A wander around the GoMA

A lunchtime wander exploring the GoMA with some of my work colleagues.

A wander to the Albert Bridge

A lunchtime wander exploring the Albert Bridge and the Clydeside with some of my work colleagues.

A wander round St. Enoch’s

A lunchtime wander exploring the St. Enoch’s Centre with some of my work colleagues.

Fire at Notre Dame

Bloody vuvuzelas! Due to their deafening noise, we didn’t hear the fire engines of at least three fire brigades going past. It was only when I took Lola out for her walk after the game had finished that I noticed all the commotion outside. Lots of people flocking towards Queens Terrace to see the old Notre Dame school and chapel ablaze.

I rushed home to get my camera (and Lynn) and went back along Victoria Circus. We joined a small crowd congregating at the end of a pathway up towards the school to the West side of the fire with a clear view onto the side of the Chapel and the South-North spur of the red sandstone building. A great vantage point from which most of these images were taken. What a disaster, another Glasgow landmark under development mysterously going up in flames.

A bit later, I walked round further, but the view from Queens Terrace was poor due to the cordened of road with the building and the fire obscured by trees. A couple of shots though before deciding to go back to the much better vantage point.

The fire, sparks, steam clouds, water beams and lights provided opportunities for some wonderful shots. Quite a few images that all have there own strengths. Although some appear to be similar, look at them thoroughly, as there are significant and interesting differences in their detail, like a spark cloud in the sky or behind the lit windows.

A wander to the squiggly bridge

A lunchtime wander to explore the Squiggly Bridge and the Broomielaw with some of my work colleagues.

A wander along Buchanan Street

A lunchtime wander along Buchanan Street with some of my work colleagues.

A wander along the River Clyde

A lunchtime wander exploring the South bank of the River Clyde with some of my work colleagues.

Whippet triplets

You probably have gathered from the images on my site, that creating panormas (vistas) and virtual realisties by stitching multiple images together is one of my specialities. So I decided to do an experiment with three images shown below that I took of Lola at Portencross Beach.

And I am quite chuffed with the result.

Now how did I do that?

Anyone can do this! It’s easy. But be warned, you’ll need an awful lot of wine. To start off, I select the images in Lightroom, right click and select Edit In – Merge to Panorama in Photoshop which seamlessly launches Photomerge from Lightroom and saves the result back to the Lightroom catalogue.

In the Photomerge dialogue, there are a few options, but I just leave the settings as default. In my experience, Photoshop will either do a wonderful job or makes an absoluate hash off it, in which case I simply refer back to using PTGui Pro. In this case, Photoshop came up with a perfect stitch.

Then kick off the photomerge, open a bottle of wine, and poor yourself a glass. When your glass is empty, just refill it. Go on, have another glass. Take the whippet for a walk. And, yes you guessed it, have another glass. When Photoshop finally completes the number crunching, this is the result.

Then a suitable crop. Unfortunately, a few bits are missing in this case, requiring a little cloning work. Had I used a slightly wider focal length, a crop would have been sufficient. More crop in this instance would have lost part of the reflection and would have taken away any space (sand) above Lola.

Finally, another glass of wine to celebrate the result.

A wander to the Clyde Tiger

A lunchtime wander exploring the Clyde Tiger on the North bank of the River Clyde with some of my work colleagues.

Beech whippet

The first weekend of the summer with scorching sunshine. After a day roasting in the garden on the Saturday polished off with lots of wine over a bbq, what else could one do except head to the nearest beach on the Sunday. Well, maybe not the nearest, but Portencross Beach is our favorite, and certainly one of the best within easy driving distance, reasonably quiet with spectecular views across the water to Arran and on a clear day even to Ailsa Craig.

The tide was well out, making the beach enormously wide, with wonderful stretches of rocks containing puddles, and bright green sea weed. Only the second time we have been on a beach with Lola, and boy, did she love it. Mooching through the seaweed, paddling through the puddles and waves, chasing and being chased by other dogs, rolling on a dead seagull and harassing typical Glaswegians for blackened sausages from their bbq.

These few images hopefully illustrate the whale of a time Lola had. She was so tired after running ragged that she slept all the way home in the back of the car, which is very unusual, and was even quiet during our second bbq of the weekend. I admit this is a blog entry with whippet overload, but hey, the images are wonderful if I may say so myself.
It was very hazy, and without polaroids, Arran was not even visible. I will have a look through the landscape and intimate landscape images taken that day, and dedicate a future blog to these if they are worthwhile sharing.

Clyde tiger

The Clyde Tiger is a very impressive mural to promote the Chines Year of the Tiger. It was created by The McFaul Studio and forms part of the Tiger Beer’s “Tiger Lucky Eight” promotion. The mural can be found along the Clyde Walkway on the North side of the Clyde just East of the King George V Bridge, and can be spotted from any train crossing the Clyde on their approach to Central Station.

Although I had walked along Clyde Street a few times in the preceding weeks, I would not have spotted this mural if it wasn’t for a tweet from a fellow photographer. So after checking it out on Thursday with a test shot, I headed back at lunchtime on Friday with my tilt and shift lens and tripod. The main image is constructed from two images, one shifted left and one shifted right, using my tilt and shift lens, then stitched into the letterbox format measuring a massive 30 million pixels.

I will add a page to my Insight pages soon with the detailed steps I went through on site and in post processing to get this great image.

Convert virtual reality of the Clyde tiger to html and insert

This virtual reality hopefully gives you a good appreciation of the location of the mural and it’s size. Below are a few more images, noting that the second one was taken with a fish eye lens, and the last one similar to the first one, but with some titl to attempt to blur the foreground and background. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it quite right, as it hasn’t worked out the way I wanted it to be, so I’ll have to get back there next week to try again.