Category — Scotland

Just had to post this.

First off a wonderful wee article about the vendace, the UK’s rarest freshwater fish: click here.

Then a pretty unbelievable, and extremely unrelated, article from down in New Zealand: click here. Gave me a good wee chortle that one.

Ansel Adams was one of the greatest photographers ever. His landscape photos of Yosemite in the west of the USA really did set the standard for black and white photography of that genre. Photos like `Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico‘ have a kind of magnetic power to draw your eye around the frame. The sharpness, depth, tonality and composition of such photos remains unsurpassed. The fact that many of his great photos were taken in the early part of the last century does sometimes seem hard to believe.

Folks in the UK now have a great opportunity to see a wonderful selection of his own hand-printed photos at the `Ansel Adams - A Celebration of Genius’ exhibition which is now on display in the centre of Edinburgh. If you stand at the east end of Princes Street and look south across the top of the station you’ll see a big poster proclaiming ANSEL ADAMS. The exhibition is on at the City Art Gallery, which is right below the poster.

I’ve been twice, and it really is absolutely fantastic. It’s also a very rare chance to see the real thing, hand-printed by the Master and simply incredible to behold. Well worth the trip from Glasgow, Fife or anywhere in the UK really.

The photo in the first link above link is a horrific JPG version of the original. If you go to the exhibition and see the original you will be truly amazed at just how good a hand-printed black and white photograph can look.

Have a look at the (slightly poor) promotional website here.

Included in the exhibition is a display by a Scottish photographer called Lindsay Robertson. I hadn’t heard of him before, but his photos are also wonderful. He shoots using large format black and white film (like Ansel), and some of the prints are more than 5 FEET wide. You stand in front of them and truly feel like you could step into the frame and feel the cool breeze creeping across Rannoch Moor. His contribution to the exhibition is really excellent.

What else can I say? GO!

At the moment I’m getting more and more interested in photography. My new dSLR has really opened my eyes, and now I’m photographing more with my old manual gear too. During my internet browsing I’ve come across a few great photographers, but Bruce Percy has stood out as particularly excellent. Have a look at his site here. He seems to be based in Scotland, but his photos are from all around the world. Well worth a look.

It was one of those sunsets tonight. The light crawls right through the cooling air and onto the skin. No longer was I a passive observer of a distant photograph. The light fell onto me and everything around. Deep orange and red, oozing across south Edinburgh and coating everything. It’s the kind of sunset impossible to capture on film or pixel, for the light is everywhere except inside my camera. I snapped away gleefully, but I hope the feeling will last longer.

People say: “they don’t make stuff like they used to”. I say this, my pals say this and my dad certainly says this (though I secretly think he’s referring to people as well…). It was rather nice this evening to see that in some quarters, at least, they actually DO make stuff properly, like they used to, good and hard.

I’m always on the look out for a hook to turn a bad situation into something positive, and hopefully something to write on the blog, and this momentous event certainly falls into this category. This afternoon I bought (or rather, WAS bought) a rather cracking bottle of fine single malt whisky. Having taken a good while in the shop carefully sifting through a few malts, I decided on something I hadn’t tried before, from the west coast of Islay. It was a Bruichladdich, and mighty fine she was too.

As I climbed out the car this evening, I put the shining silver case on the roof of my car. Unbeknown to me it was upside down, so after locking the car and turing to gather the whisky and other faff I hoisted her briefly into the air only for the bottle inside to quietly slip out and roll off the roof. I’m sure the scene was comical: a bottle of fine malt careering off the roof, with a stupefied punter moving in comical slow motion to try and grab it whilst simultaneously grasping a large potted plant and two cameras.

The bottle hit the deck with a bone crunching, slightly eye watering `ting’ before quietly rolling up against the pavement. I dashed over, picked her up and cradled her in my shaking arms. Unbroken, just slightly chipped. That is some hard-ass glass man shit. It’s nice to see something made good and proper.

I raised a quiet toast this evening to a fine malt, a solid bottle and good the old fashioned tough stuff spirit. It’s important for fly fishing too, of course. Not long to go now…

There has been some incredible weather this winter. Wild rain, freezing fog, bright sunshine and snow. One of the most memorable days was the 12th of January. I drove up through the central highlands, and took loads of photos. I thought I’d share my favourite one.

I recently got a new camera, and it’s been a bit of a beauty. Photography provides a nice distraction from winter fishing blues. I suppose taking photographs of rivers is about as close as I can get at the moment..

Last night I finished reading a book. I’m not a particularly fast reader, so this was a relatively rare event and worthy of mention. Rather more worthy of mention however was the book itself. Isolation Shepherd by Iain R. Thomson is now among my favourite books. It’s a wonderfully simple premise: the life and times of a shepherding family who lived in one of the most remote and beautiful glens in all of Scotland. From Strathfarrar in the east, up the great expanse of Loch Monar and into the upper reaches at Strathmore, this is a book set in the finest of Scottish landscapes. Great mountains lie all around. The fantastically remote Sgurr na Lapaich and An Riabhachan to the south, Sgurr a’Chaorachain to the north and the Bowman’s Pass to the west are just a few of the many fine hills and valleys. There are rivers and lochs as well. Monar itself, the Gead lochs to the south west and the myriad streams and burns running off the peaks. A little piece of isolated perfection nestled into the far north west of this island.

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I love the hills.

When I was a bit younger I used to go on holiday to various bits of Scoland with my family, and the older I got the more I noticed the hills. For a long time they seemed far off and unatainable. There they would lie at the end of huge valleys and across boggy moors, quietly beckoning. None of my family were real hill-walkers so I felt bound by the seat belt of the car and the rain drumming on the B&B bedroom windows.

Near the end of my school days something happened which changed everything. I went on a Duke of Edinburgh Expedition, as part of the Gold Award. The expedition was a 50 mile walk over 4 days through some of wildest Scotland. Up to this point I had always dissapointed the Scots half of my family by demonstrating apparent indifference to their side of my heritage. Those 4 days changed a lot. A seed was sown and that seed has grown.

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