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.

Colourful Jerdune

In a followup to the monochrome blog entry Derelict Jerdune, here is Jerdune in all it’s colour and glory.

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.

Spring details

As promised in my previous blog entry Life is a blur here are a few intimate landscape images, or visual poetry if I may plagerise Colin Prior, from our Sunday afternoon’s wander through Mugdock Wood. I love this time of the year, with lovely detail and colours in young budding plants and flowers. The main image of a tiny purple pine cone offset by the young green needles is my favourite.

Life is a blur

After a glorious Saturday spent mostly reading the third novel in Stieg Larson’s Millenium trillogy in the sun in our garden, Sunday morning was a bit of a let down with heavy clouds and the odd light shower. So we decided to head into the woods for a wander off the beaten track after lunch. We had hoped for fields of blue, but unfortunately, the bluebells in Scotland appear to be out at least a week later than the England bluebells shown in glory on the web by others in the past week.

Thankfully the weather had improved quite a bit, so we ended up wandering through the woods with a mixture of sun and cloud. We started of from Drumclog Car Park, but headed due North across tracks through the woods rather than following the main track to the West. On reaching the edge of the woods, where the ground dips down to the swampy grass fields, we headed West, but when the opportunity came, we crossed the fields to the other side, crossing little streams meandering through the fields.

On reaching the path that leads down from Mugdock Castle to the West highland Way, just above the old gamekeepers cottage, we followed this well paved path down to the West Highland Way and Allander Water. A welcome opportunity for Lola to have a paddle in the river before heading back up along the tracks through the woods and back to the car park.

The light was wonderful and provided good opportunities for landscape photography. The images of the afternoon ranged from landscapes (vistas) to visual poetry (intimate landscapes) and abstract photography. In the absence of enough bluebells for a typical blue landscape image, I decided to experiment and make the most of the few bluebells in bloom. Using a slow shutter speed and moving the camera downwards while pressing the shutter button, I created some pleasing abstract results.

I used the same technique to take some abstract images of flowering broom and birches framed by fresh green grasses. I am pleased with the results, especially the mian image of the birches. The last image included is a reject, where I failed to get the camera movement and pressing of the shutter button coordinated. hopefully this will give you an impression of the few bluebells amongst the green grasses that form the basis of the abstract bluebell images.

A future blog entry will likely include the landscape and visual poetry images from this delightful wander.

Walking the edge

Our usual Saturday afternoon walk is always and eventful time for our little Lola. People and dogs galore, and with a bit of luck she can steal some bread from the children feeding the ducks in the river. Nothing is better than splashing in the river, fetching sticks, running circles around ‘slow’ friends and chasing or getting chased by ‘fast’ friends.

The weather was dry but very overcast this afternoon. Trees are budding, but strangely enough and lots of blossoms coming out in the West End gardens, but no blossoms out along the River Kelvin yet. So I just spend an hour throwing sticks and shooting Lola running into the river and clambering back onto the river bank. Then Cara, a bouncy Visla, joined us for the usual dog chases.