Luminous Landscape Forum
The Art of Photography => User Critiques => Topic started by: Peter Stacey on August 22, 2013, 06:38:25 pm
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A recent snap at a random location by the side of the road on the Cairngorms, heading from Avemore to Balmoral.
One of the kids needed to pee urgently, so we stopped at the nearest place we could pull over at the side of the road. Something about the tree, stream and valley caught my eye, so I snapped a single shot. Would love to have spent more time there exploring:
(https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-k4FT_BaO_Io/UhWtlIr_aKI/AAAAAAAACYM/v079IimzJHg/w428-h632-no/ScotlandPeeStop.jpg)
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Excellence achieved through serendipity is always a welcome gift.
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Vey nice picture ruined by two things:
a. as everyone knows, the Cairngorms is a perfectly flat area and so the lens distortion is terribly obvious on the horizon;
b. awareness of the actual content of the stream, formerly though to have been composed - as are all the others there - of straight scotch, ruins an otherwise spirit-enhancing experience.
Apart from that, it's an excellent image evocative of the normal Scottish weather and landscape. If anything, it might, just might, have been improved by the presence of a tall, Scotish lady wearing a sly smile, dressed in black cloak and advertising a certain brand of insurance policy intimately connected with dead husbands.
;-)
Rob C
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... serendipity is always a welcome gift.
Thanks for the comment and absolutely agree. Serendipity has its own kind of satisfaction.
Most of my photography these days is pre-planned and leisurely, as I enjoy the time it takes to visualise and work to capture a good shot, but every now and then a situation just presents itself that can't be ignored.
I had a similar thing a few years ago when I was in Salisbury for the first time. A group of us headed to Stone Henge at the end of the day, but by the time we arrived it was closed.
The only thing we could do was stare through the chain-wire fence. We were there for only about 5 minutes, but in that time this glorious light came across and with my lens pushed up against the fence I was able to capture this:
(http://peterstacey.com/img/2617664405_b5dc5c805a_o.jpg)
I've been back many times since, but not captured anything close to this in terms of the light or sky.
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Apart from that, it's an excellent image evocative of the normal Scottish weather and landscape. If anything, it might, just might, have been improved by the presence of a tall, Scotish lady wearing a sly smile, dressed in black cloak and advertising a certain brand of insurance policy intimately connected with dead husbands.
:D
Thanks.
Somehow I think if Hayley Hunt had just happened to be stopping by the side of the road to pee also, the framing of the shot would have been somewhat different. ;D
As to the weather, it's more fickle in Scotland than anywhere. This shot was taken about an hour earlier at the top of the funicular railway (strange name that):
(http://peterstacey.com/img/Cairngorms19.jpg)
Lovely summer weather.
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Boy, I wish all my pee-stops were as photographically productive!
Tony Jay
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This shot was taken about an hour earlier at the top of the funicular railway (strange name that):
It's purely descriptive, in fact: from Latin, meaning "little cord".
Jeremy