Photography: Dunseverick Castle and Rathlin Island

Another Batch of photos from my Northern Ireland Trip. These are from the tiny, ruined Dunseverick Castle, and Rathlin Island, just off the coast. Some of them are HDR and some aren't.

 

Photography: Berwick-upon-Tweed Beach

Are you going somewhere that's good for photos but the weather is just not on your side?   Never fear!   Just HDR the crap out of it and pretend the light was interesting!   We went to Berwick-upon-Tweed beach because my auntie wanted to go to a honey farm.   Us being us, we left too late to go and settled for a trip to the beach instead.   These are the best shots:

Berwick-Upon-Tweed

I had a very enjoyable daytrip to Berwick-upon-Tweed a few months back and I, of course, took my camera with me.   The weather was great and I used my ND grad and managed to get a couple of decent landscapes.

Berwick-upon-Tweed beach is lovely.   Pretty wild looking.   In the second photo I tried to use lead-in lines.   The idea is to have lines in the frame, leading the eye from the bottom into the heart of the picture.   I think it worked pretty well.   the second photo certainly has more impact.  

I also quite like this picture of some swans that I snapped.   I didn't realise swans went onto the sea; I've only ever seen them on fresh water before.

   
                            I like the contrast of their white bodies against the brown water.


And now I shall leave you with one final picture.   Nothing special about this photo at all technically, but the name of this place made me giggle.   A lot.

St. Andrews

I went to St. Andrews for a look around and to take a few pictures.   I had a very nice time looking round the pretty town and had a very nice lunch.   The wintery light was quite harsh, but I managed to get a few shots of the sea that I liked.   I didn't really do anything special to get these, just used an ND grad filter to keep some of the colour in the sky.

                                             Taken on the beach, with the town behind

                                          See the seagulls sitting on the darker rock behind?

North Berwick

Back in November I went to North Berwick for the first time.   It's a very pretty little seaside town very near to Edinburgh.   My colleagues and I had a lovely time frollicking on the beach, eating fish and chips and climbing the Law.   The weather was pretty horrible for most of the day, but the dramatic skies did allow me a few good shots.

 I experimented for the first time with my new ND grad filter.   It's a great little filter for landscapes.   One half of it is darker than the other, which means that if you position the divide between dark and light over the  horizon of your shot you can darken the sky.   This is great because often with landscape photos you have to choose between correctly exposing the sky or the land.   The most usual choice is the land, leaving the sky looking washed out and featureless.   But with a graduated filter you can keep the drama and colour in the sky.   Neat trick.   The mounting system is very clever.   Firstly there's a ring which screws into the end of the lens.   You can buy different sizes of rings, meaning than you can use the same filters for all your different size lenses.   Next there's a mount which slots onto the ring.   And finally the filter slots into the mount.   The mount has three slots so different filters can be used in combination.   Very adaptable and clever system. 

Anyway, here are a few of my favorite bad weather photos from North Berwick

                                                                         Rainbow

                                                   Bass Rock.   Gorgeously dramatic skies!