Here’s a selection of a recent trip to Scotland for Christmas. This year we decided to go to the east side of scotland to see if we could find something new, however we found ourselves gravitating to the west side again and again to be able to find some of these incredible views.
I purchased the Canon RF 15-35mm f2.8L for this trip which is a nice, sharp lens, but I have to say, 15mm is wiiiide, and in some cases really not useful for the types of places we ended up stopping at, instead I ended up using my RF 70-200mm f2.8L instead for a lot of these shots, especially the ones with rolling mountains in the distance. Maybe next time I need to get a little bit more creative with the super wide angle shots.
First up is a shot from the side of the road overlooking the snow-covered mountains, I’ve always wanted to shoot some landscape photos with some wind turbines in the shot, I think it’s a great juxtaposition, in this case they’re quite far away on the horizon, but I like it.
Believe it or not the next two shots were taken in some pretty cold temperatures, there’s no snow but it was very cold, the ground was frozen and there was even sadly the carcass of a cow (I think) which had succumbed to the temperature.
I just love the seeing layers of mist around a mountain or covering trees, it has an eerie look and feel to it that reminds me of a movie scene.
This was an example of where the 15-35mm was both great to be able to capture the breadth of the view, but not so great because it’s so wide you can’t really appreciate the size of the mountains in the distance, overall though I like the moody sky, and the light is just something else.
This next shot of a duck skating (not walking) on the ice was a tricky one to shoot, there was a bitterley cold strong wind, coupled with a completely icy surface meant that it was very trecherous to get onto the ‘beach’, this shot was taken whilst bending over with the camera screen flipped so I could see whilst trying not to skate away myself on the ice.
Finally, these two shots of rolling mountains at before and during sunset. What you can’t tell by looking at them was just how dangerous of a position I was in. After taking some shots of the frozen lake above we decided to drive a bit further and up to the top of this part of the mountains. We stopped in a large gravel car park and got out of the car, it was even windier than it was on the lake. Once away from the shielding of the car, the wind was so strong that it was almost impossible to stop myself from being swept away with the wind. By itself that isn’t too scary, the scary part was trying to avoid slipping on the icy gravel with a backpack full of lenses whilst realising you are fast running out of runway to regain some control, the edge of the carpark (the photo below was taken whilst being pinned against the fence) was a pretty steep drop, with only a wooden fence preventing you from gliding head over heels over the ledge.
And that’s it for now, if we return to Scotland it will definitely be to the west side again though, it’s hard to beat Glencoe and we found ourselves driving in that direction in order to get any good looking shots.
Posted in: Photography