Some quick photomerges from Celticsoc’s 2010 trip to Pitlochry. I haven’t bothered altering the levels on any of the individual photos before the merges, as I wanted to try & get them up quickly. (Edit: 6 months is quickly, right?) Click for bigger versions. The one above was actually from the 2009 trip, but I don’t have an entry for that so I thought I’d put it here too – scroll down to the bottom to see the 2010 version, though the weather wasn’t so good for that particular shot.

Walking the longer route from Moulin back to Pitlochry.

In stark contrast to last year, there was ice all about.

Down by the loch. The branches at the top sort of ruined this one, but I didn’t notice at the time. Fairly noticable chromatic aberration of the branches against the sky, but I probably had the apeture set to auto instead of stopping down like a sensible person. Possibly a candidate for content-aware fill.

Don’t think we went past this bit last year. Still ice floating out on the loch in places.

Looking back from the dam. Took one looking the other way toward Ben Y Vrackie last year that I’ll dig up some time.

This year’s version of the photo at the top of the page. The light wasn’t quite as nice this year, but I couldn’t really control that!

This is going right back to October ‘09, literally days after I’d taken delivery of the K20D. All of these were shot on the 18-55mm kit lens whilst trying to get to know the camera.

The Reading Party is an excuse for the entire junior honors year group to go to a lovely old 18-bedroom house on the bank of the river North Esk, to give presentations & drink wine. Lots of wine.

The house sits in 190 acres of beautiful woodland, but unfortunately for us it rained for the entirety of the second day, when we had the afternoon to ourselves & could otherwise have had a nice walk.

Nothing of any particular photographic merit in here, just really shapshots with copious application of the rule-of-thirds when cropping.

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Trying to get bokeh & retain subject sharpness with the kit lens…

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Gorgeous interior decor in most of the house.

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The taps in this bathroom were particularly nice.

I would quite happily have taken some of these home, if they hadn’t been attached quite so firmly…

Took a trip with my parents on Monday this week up the coast to Dunnottar Castle.

Precarious approach to the castle.

A different angle from the same spot. Sun was out a bit more for this one too.

The view from the headland where you can see the people on the right in the top photograph. No fence at the edge of the cliff, so remember where you are whilst you’ve got your face pressed to the camera!

A better look at the cliffs on this side of the headland. Can’t imagine they got many visitors from across the sea.

Beautiful weather whilst we were there. Sea level is over a hundred feet beneath this photo, so that water can’t be a well & must be collected otherwise.

Nice doorway into the chapel. Wonder what the door would have looked like?

Lovely lichen covering all of the stonework.

Nice thick walls to keep you warm during the Scottish winters. And guess what – they all have a sea view!

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t would have to be a brave army to try to scale the cliffs at the back of the castle!

Nice spot to eat lunch. This wasn’t originally a garden, as it is actually ‘indoors’ if you see what I mean.

For the return trip we took one of the old military roads that climbed up to around 1500ft at its highest point. The clouds had rolled back in by this point so there wasn’t much to see from Cairn O’Mount except for grey scenery as far as the eye could see. We passed through Falls of Feugh before we started up into the hills, which is a prime location to watch salmon jumping upstream when it comes to the right season. Because of the recent heavy rainfall, the falls were a bit more violent than usual & had taken on a ‘Coke’ colour as my mother described it!

My parents are in town for a few days & this morning we went for a walk along the coastal path heading out of St Andrews from East Sands. Took a few photos of rocks & such & a few panoramas, but haven’t stitched any of those together yet. We were quite surprised at the number of butterflies about though, considering the weather – in fact, one of the reasons that they stayed still long enough to photograph was because they were too cold to fly! This was taken with the Pentax Optio A30 in automatic mode – didn’t want to risk it flying away whilst I was setting up the shot manually! Not bad macro capabilities for an ultra-compact.

That’s right, I’ve finally updated the site after more than 2 years of inactivity! I also have a new, more memorable URL – www.imagesofeden.co.uk!

I learnt from my mistakes with the previous site, which was completely statically coded making updates & changes very time-consuming, building the new site on WordPress with the Yet Another PhotoBlog (YAPB) plugin & the YAPB-specific theme Phloggin’. I’ll be adjusting & tweaking things for a while to come yet, so don’t be surprised if the appearance changes or if things are still broken – (in fact, considering letting me know if you come across anything that doesn’t work? Feedback on the site design is of course welcome.

This new implementation not only makes updating & altering much quicker & easier, but also adds a host of new features such as categories, tags, comments, RSS feeds & more. Layout is 960 pixels wide, which should be fine even for dinky netbooks with their 1024×600 screens.

With this month heralding my 21st birthday I will soon be the proud owner of a Pentax K20D, a 14.6 megapixel digital SLR that is compatible with all of my existing Pentax film lenses. I will be shifting over to digital for the majority of my photos, mainly for how better suited it is to the Internet-centric lifestyle that I live, however I will still be shooting film on occasion & digitizing negatives with my Epson Perfection V200.

I have some 50-60 rolls to scan & archive, so updates of old film shots will intersperse the new digital ones for quite a while to come yet. I’ll also be re-digitizing all of the film shots from the old site, as they were done using a far inferior scanner & aren’t of archive quality.

I’ll be updating on a wider range of subjects, but they’ll all be nicely categorized, so you can ignore what you’re not interested in. Updates will hopefully be on a much more frequent basis too!