Slains Castle

Many places have an association that colours how they are thought of and viewed by people. For me, Slains Castle is such a place. I had never heard of it until a few years ago when I read a piece that suggested that this castle helped inspire Bram Stoker to write Dracula. There was a picture with the article, of the ruined castle and I could see why that might be the case. It did have a slightly unsettling look to it and I made a mental note to visit it someday.

That day finally arrived in early August. We stayed in the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel in Cruden Bay which was the same hotel  that Bram Stoker stayed in during his many visits to the area, the first of which was in 1984. The hotel has in interesting account of Bram Stoker's connection to the area here. 

The castle is not a visitor attraction and is not signposted. It is in a state of near collapse and is probably dangerous so visitors are discouraged by a fence, which stops nobody getting in but probably absolves the owners of liability if someone hurts themselves. The castle is located here and there is a car park on the main road. 

The castle lived up to my expectations and we stayed for a couple of hours with me photographing and Elaine sketching. The weather changed quite a bit too which provide some appropriately dramatic skies. I made a short video slide show of the best images and added some music which will be familiar if you have seen Werner Herzog's film "Nosferatu the Vampyre".

The YouTube video is in 720P HD which you can select when it starts. 

I plan to go back one moonlit night and do some night shots. I only hope someone else doesn't decide to do the same thing at the same time as the shock of seeing a figure lit by my flash going off would definitely release the brown adrenaline. 

Here are some of the pictures from the video that are also posted on picsmap. They are all back and white as it just felt like a black and white sort of place.

Posted at 05:35PM Oct 08, 2011 by Norman Bews in Scotland  |  Comments[0]

Momentum

Oxcars Light, Firth of Forth 

The previous time I went on one of Bruce Percy's workshops, I came back home feeling that I had made some of my best pictures ever and this intimidated me in a strange way. I felt that anything I did after that would probably be not as good. Consequently I did very little landscape work for the rest of the year.

After the workshop I attended a couple of weeks ago, I came back feeling very different. I felt I was making some good images and wanted to make more. I was also getting used to getting up very early and going out photographing regardless of the weather. I had learned on the workshop that bad weather often means good photographs. I intended, therefore, to make sure that I did not lose momentum and try and get out once a week for the first few weeks and then at least once a fortnight after that.

So last Saturday was the first time opportunity to try to do this. The weather forecast was not promising but I decided to get up at 4.30am, have a coffee and head up to the Lomond Hills in Fife. It's not too far but still a nice location. Well, what a waste of time. There was fog everywhere on the hills and nothing promising round about either. I made a couple of "trees in the fog" type shots but I knew they were not good while I was going through the motions.  I had fallen at the first hurdle in my plan to get up early once a week and make photographs.

Posted at 03:11PM Apr 03, 2011 by Norman Bews in Photography  |  Comments[0]

Skye Landscape Workshop

Skye Landscape Workshop

Last week I attended a Workshop run by Bruce Percy in Skye. I had been to one of Bruce’s weekend workshops in Glen Coe before and really enjoyed it and I felt I got a lot out of it so I wanted to go back and do a 5 day one. I chose the Skye one as it is not a part of Scotland I am familiar with and there are only 4 students on this particular course so I felt I would get lots of Bruce’s time.

Staffin Bay from the Quiraing 

Posted at 10:04AM Mar 25, 2011 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[7]

Afraid of the dark?

 The heart of darkness

As children, most of us are afraid of the dark. However, as we get older we lose that fear, particularly if we do not believe in the supernatural. We learn that there are no scary monsters waiting to get us and that darkness is merely the absence of light not the presence of evil. The intellect overcomes the irrational.

Yesterday I was in the darkest place I think I have been in my life and it was very unsettling. My rational side was fighting a losing battle with the small boy inside me. Indeed, had I been on my own I would have turned round and gone back such was the feeling of foreboding when looking into a wall of blackness where the beam of the trusty maglight just vanishes into nothingness, where the blackness seems to actually absorb the light. However, not wishing to lose face with my wife, I continued on and covered up my fears with a stream of inane chit chat.

Posted at 11:26PM Feb 14, 2011 by Norman Bews in Scotland  |  Comments[1]

Indecision

I haven't submitted a picture to Picsmap for several months now and it is not because I don't have any to add. For example, I took over 1000 pictures in the Orkney island of Westray last year and have added only 2 or 3. Now I know you are thinking that it's because the rest were rubbish but that isn't true. Well not all of them anyway. 

The problem is one of indecision. Let me explain. In traditional film based landscape photography, most of the decisions are made before you press the shutter release. Film costs money so you evaluate the potential shots, decide which are likely to be the best, then work out the exposure, focus and take the shot. You are now done and move on to the next idea. Now it is true that if you do your own printing, there is a fair bit of scope for changing the results at that stage but this is still from a limited set of negatives.

With digital photography though, it is very different. There is no incremental cost every time the shutter is pressed. This means that in the field, there is a tendency to take images and sort them out later. By that I mean, rather than decide which of 3 or 4 potential compositions is better, then take that picture, with digital you take them all then decide later. You may well also take another 2 or 3 of each with minor changes. So rather than having the one exposed negative, there are now a dozen or so digital files. Actually it could be far more than that if exposure and focus bracketing is done but that is a subject for another day. 

Since there is no cost, the urge to experiment also comes into play and this also results in far more images being made than with film. The end result is that all these deferred decisions have to be taken at the computer i.e. which of the images are best.

 So I select the best ones from the 1000 or so. But the decision making has only just started because what I am selecting is really the ones that are worth "developing" i.e. doing some work with them on the computer. That work is itself a series of decisions given that every aspect of an image is capable of being changed.  I am not taking about faking anything, I am taking about what a good black and white print maker would do in the darkroom. How light or dark to make the image? How much contrast should it have? Should dodging and burning to lighten or darken parts of the image be used? Should it be cropped to maximise the effectiveness of the composition? These are all decisions that have to be made.

 It is said that it is often better to make a poor decision than make no decision at all and in this case it is true because I have submitted no images recently. So when my day job permits, I will make some decisions about my photographs waiting in the queue. I will probably choose the wrongs ones and then make bad choices in Aperture and Photoshop but at least I will be getting the pictures out for public viewing and they will still be better than the zero photographs I have uploaded in the last 5 months. 

Posted at 11:27PM Sep 10, 2010 by Norman Bews in Photography  |  Comments[0]

New Maps

If you have been looking at the map facility on the main Picsmap web site, you may have noticed that the maps are different. I am now using the free map data that the Ordnance Survey have released. These include the 1:250,000 raster maps and Miniscale maps though not, unfortunately, the 1:50,000 Land Ranger maps.

The main benefit of the new maps, apart from cost, is the addition of contours and relief information so the nature of the terrain can be seen. This is particularly helpful in the more hilly parts of Scotland. 

 I have been using the maps from Collins Bartholomew which cost over £500 per year for licensing  so this is obviously quite a saving. However, I would like to thank the people at Collins Bartholomew for providing the map data over the years since this site could not have been created without them. When I first started work on Picsmap in 2005 the only options for the map data I wanted were Collins and the OS. OS wanted £25,000 per year so as a one man company, that wasn't an option. The Google maps API didn't quite do what I wanted and is not free for commercial use. So Collins £550/year was very reasonable and allowed me to start work on designing and developing the code for the website.

 The OS have also released 1:25000 scale maps which I am looking at putting on the website but that requires more work. These maps are not as detailed as the explorer series but still show individual streets etc. I am not completely convinced that this level of detail would benefit the site. Any feedback either way would be helpful. 

Posted at 04:14PM Aug 29, 2010 by Norman Bews in Picsmap  |  Comments[0]

Glencoe photography workshop

On the weekend of the 5th-7th of February I attended a photography workshop in Glencoe with Bruce Percy.  In case you read no further and just look at the pictures, I will give you the executive summary. It was excellent! So much so, that I have decided to go on one of his 5 day masterclasses when funds permit rather than replace my venerable Canon EOS 350D.  I think that upgrading the photographer will be of much more benefit than upgrading the camera.

Posted at 06:31PM Feb 21, 2010 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[4]

Ardnamurchan - Way out west

My unusual method of getting to the castle island on Loch Leven in my last blog entry got me to thinking how the method of travelling to a place changes how you feel about it when you get there.  For example, if you took a plane to Barbados, your feeling on arrival would very different from someone who had spent 40 days in a small yacht to get there.  This reminded me of the times I have been to the most Westerly point of the British mainland, Ardnamurchan ( see map ).  I have been to this peninsula three times by small boat and once by car.  Each was different and varied, from the deeply scary to the utterly wonderful.  The boat trips covered the extremes. The car trip was, unsurprisingly, the safe middle ground.    

Castle Tioram ( taken years later ). Our anchorage was round the other side of the castle.

Posted at 11:49AM Jan 27, 2010 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[4]

Walking across Loch Leven

Since I am a modest sort of chap, it had never occurred to me that I could walk on water, even in a metaphorical sense. However, when I heard on Friday (8th) from a colleague, that Loch Leven was frozen and that it might be possible to walk out to the Castle Island over the ice, I was intrigued.

I drove up to Kinross in the early afternoon and walked out to the park by the Loch. Sure enough, it was completely frozen although I wasn't sure how thick it was. I saw the boat used to ferry people to the castle island and there were footsteps leading out to it so decided to give it a go.

Posted at 02:28PM Jan 20, 2010 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[0]

Port Appin, Loch Awe and Kilchurn Castle

Two entries in two weeks! Can you deal with this torrent of information? I am sure I will be back to my slothful ways soon. This entry is about a trip to Argyll on St Valentine's Day weekend. 

Posted at 10:40PM Feb 24, 2009 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[0]

Bridge of Orchy and Loch Tulla

I admit it, I am the worst blogger ever.  I still haven't finished writing up the Orkney trip as well as a couple of other trips from the summer.  I will get these done soon but in the meantime, here is an entry that was actually written within one day of the event.  A trip to Bridge of Orchy and the frozen Loch Tulla.

Posted at 11:01PM Feb 09, 2009 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[6]

Orkney trip - part 2: Scapa flow, Churchill Barriers & Italian Chapel

This entry describes Scapa Flow, the sinking of the Royal Oak, the construction of the Churchill Barriers and the beautiful little chapel built by the Italian prisoners of war.

Posted at 03:15PM Sep 15, 2008 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[0]

Orkney trip - part 1: Getting there

At the start of July we went on a holiday to Orkney for 10 days and so I thought I would share my experiences of the Islands in a number of blog entries. Orkney is a group of 70 or so islands off the north of mainland Scotland, 17 of which are inhabited. It has a population of about 20,000. I should stress that they are indeed off the north of Scotland as many maps show them in a little box along with Shetland to the east of Aberdeen. Orkney is 250 miles closer to Bergen in Norway than it is to London. Even the coast of Iceland is closer than London.

I should start by declaring an interest. My Dad is an Orcadian from Westray. I still have relatives in Orkney. I spent some of the best summers of my life on my Uncle's farm on Westray as a boy.  My surname, Bews, is an Orcadian name and my Christian name Norman was chosen by my parents as it means north man. In short, I am hardly going to tell you that Orkney is rubbish. However, Elaine reads my blog so if I over egg the pudding, she will add a caustic comment I am sure.

We decided to spend 3 days on Westray which is one of the more northerly isles of the group and then 5 days on the Orkney mainland. I was concerned that there would not be enough to do, particularly on Westray, but as it turned out there wasn't time to do everything I wanted to.

Posted at 01:04PM Sep 01, 2008 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[2]

Four Inches yacht race

Since I sold my boat a few years ago, I haven't had many chances to go sailing. One of my friends has a boat he keeps on a mooring less than half a mile from my house which he races. Unfortunately I do not like yacht racing. I have never understood why anyone would buy the slowest form of transport known to man then race it. To me, the purpose of a sailing boat is exploring nice places at a sedate pace. That is why I kept my boat at Dunstaffnage near Oban. A weekend away consisted of sailing somewhere nice on Saturday, finding a good anchorage either miles from any other human or near a good pub and having a tasty meal on board or in the pub and a few beers and glasses of wine on the boat and watch the otters playing and the sun go down.

My friend finds this a bit boring and is more interested in tweaking every single bit of rope on board at least once every minute in order to make the boat go 0.00001 knots faster. It tires me out just watching the whole thing. 

However, once or twice a year our sailing interests coincide, i.e. there is a race which involves going somewhere I would like to see rather than racing in circles round buoys, not one of which is more than half a mile from where you started. On these occasions I get to go along as navigator and movable ballast.  It is a win win situation because I get to play with charts, tide tables, hand bearing compasses and the GPS which I love and the skipper and the rest of the crew get to fiddle with ropes in the search of the aforementioned 0.00001 knot, which they love. 

Posted at 07:10PM Jul 28, 2008 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[1]

Holiday in Orkney and an apology

I have just come back from a fantastic holiday in Orkney and will be adding photographs and blog entries about this over the next week or two. In the meantime, apologies to people who have submitted photographs for sale and have not had them made available for purchase yet. For security reasons, I have designed the web application to only allow the admin functions to be done on the my local lan which means that I can't do this remotely.

I will sort this out in the next few days. In the meantime, thanks for all those who have submitted new photographs. 

Posted at 02:42PM Jul 19, 2008 by Norman Bews in General  |  Comments[1]