The Lochan by the Pap
Continuing on my daily review of our Scottish holiday, we’re on a talk around the lochan in the hospital grounds below the Pap of Glencoe. Also, apologies for the slow posting at the moment, I’m working long hours during my full time job (internet software development) and also creating a site for a holiday company and a landscape photographer. I’ve also got a new site and have just finished captioning the pictures for it. Hopefully now I’ve finished the site updated I’ll get a few more posts up. Fortunately I’ve not been out with my camera since Scotland so I’m not working up a back log…
Anyway, back to the lochan. The walk is a very gentle one with well maintained paths and little in the way of inclines; I have a feeling it’s been specially designed as a physiotherapy walk for heart patients (they have little heart icons on the wooden signposts for the gentler walks). This doesn’t mean the walk is uninteresting though as it takes you around a wonderful little lochan, through some forest areas (mostly fir but some deciduous) and it has great views of the pap.
As I was going around the walk, I had two photographic ideas in my head; one was to try to capture the ferns that were growing out of the sides of trees and the other was to capture the star moss that was so prevalent, sometimes in banks as deep as a couple of feet. The fern picture opportunity came first but I had a great deal of trouble creating a composition until I decided to use the tree-ferns as background material. One large fern was in the foreground that I could use and, with the help of a little ‘crutch’, was in just the right position to match the curve of the tree (pretend I didn’t mention the crutch thing)..
The main problems in this photograph were with the wind and also judging how much to let the tree in the background fall out of focus. I wanted to show the tree to have ferns I didn’t want the tree to be in focus so that the fern in the foreground stood out more. In the end I took a couple of shots and I’ve still to develop the one with slighly more depth of field.
A bit further around the walk we met up with a gentleman who had just been on a course with Ian Cameron. He used to be a rescue helicopter pilot and we talked about how his unique vantage point gave showed him different possibilities. He was taking a picture of the Pap which I was later to attempt myself a coupe of days later but he also told us that there was a Fly Agaric mushroom just around the corner that was particularly photogenic. Well we didn’t find the particular mushroom he talked about (he showed us a photograph of it) but we did find the one on the right.
Now this was a photographic challenge as I was determined to capture the mushroom with a good amount of context, in this case the small pier, the trees and the lake. In order to do so, I had to have my camera at ground level (which meant no tripod) and in order to get an appropriately sized mushroom, I had to use the 80mm lens at a distance of about 8 inches. The photograph at the bottom shows the setup. Trying to focus and then insert a quickload without disturbing the whole lot was a nightmare. It’s fortunate that my wife is so patient as I was there for about an hour (and I pinched the book she was reading to prop up the camera). Another issue that I had to remember was that with so much rear tilt, the bottom half of the picture needed compensating for bellows factor differently than the top of the picture. This was simple enough to work out by using a ‘quick disc’ style calculation which showed an extra half a stop was needed for the bottom, hence I added half a stop of extra grad to the top.
The result isn’t something I would think of as ‘my kind of photography’ but I like it never the less.
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