CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

If you are shooting landscapes up in the Highlands of Scotland you will eventually come across a herd of Highland Cows.  I love photographing these shaggy beasts and, for me, they rank up there with Edinburgh Castle, whisky and haggis as an iconic part of Scotland. On the last trip north we were shooting in Glen Lochay when we came across some Highland Cows the other  side of a dry stone wall with a beautiful view up the glen as the clouds started to break. I decided to fit the XF100-400mm to the X-T2 to capture some shots of the cows as they munched on some tough grass, keeping one eye on the rain that was approaching fast across the mountains. The images were captured in colour and converted to mono in NIK Silver Efex Pro2. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING THE ADVERTISERS ON THIS PAGE By clicking on the adv...

The Flying Scotsman is probably the world's most famous steam locomotive and this morning it headed south through East Lothian.   Built in 1923 the Flying Scotsman became the first steam locomotive to reach the speed of 100mph in 1934.  The engine was retired from service in 1963 but was used to tour in the UK, USA, Canada and Australia setting a new long distance record for a steam locomotive, covering 423 miles between stops while 'Down Under'.   The Flying Scotsman recently underwent a £4.2million restoration and travelled up the East Coast Mainline at the weekend but as I was working in Italy I was unable to get out to take some pictures. However on my return to Scotland yesterday I found out that the Flying Scotsman was going south today, travelling through Dunbar at 9am.  So I grabbed the camera bag and headed south of Dunbar to capture some images of the mechanical icon. Using the Fujifilm X-Pro2 and XF50-140mm f2.8 I used the new camera's exce...

Continuing my exploration of the hills around Dunbar looking for new photographic locations I travelled up from the village of Spott along the road to Woodhall and Elmscleugh.   The road drops drop to a ford crossing the Woodhall Burn and as you climb the hill on the far side there is a nice shot across the small glen with the old farmhouse at The Brunt perched on the opposite side. I stopped the car and walked up the hill to get the best position.  Luckily the sun was still high enough to light the burn and not cause too many deep shadows in the image. The X-T1 was fitted with the 10-24mm f4 lens, with a focal length of 17mm for this shot.  I had a Lee 0.9 ND Soft Grad fitted to help hold the brightly lit sky back three stops.  The final image was converted to mono using Silver Efex Pro2.  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING THE ADV...

As a long time user of Nik Color Efex Pro 4 software, which is a plug in filter system for Photoshop and Lightroom, I had a nice surprise in my email inbox when I was offered the full Nik software suite for free, which included the Silver Efex Pro 2 package.  I tested this software last year and it converts colour images from colour to black and white, with several creative effects quickly available.  Being a traditional photographer who started his career producing black and white images in the darkroom, I like using photoshop in the traditional way by dodging and burning manually.  The Silver Efex package is very good but I couldn't justify spending £160 on the software.  However as I now have it for free I can now produce mono images a lot faster and easier using Silver Efex. Here are some examples of how I use Silver Efex, the first shot is the converted mono image and the second is the original colour image. ...