OMG!!!!

Look who we saw, and somehow the only picture i got is grainy and faded, hmmm isn’t it funny how they are always like that?

An overnight in Inverness and a stop at the Loch Ness visitor centre, with walls of nessies:

Poor photo, it must have been the monster influence again :(

Then we met some other creatures, we’d seen quite a few but none as close to the road with a convenient stop nearby. I like to imagine that these guys are called Hamish, Gordon and Bruce, since I don’t know their actual names. I shouted ‘oi, hairy!’ and two looked over, though…

I do wonder how they can see through that hair. Bet it’s lovely and warm though.

Our final overnight stop was Stirling, a night in a lovely hotel that used to be a school (where my great uncle went apparently!) where they serve haggis for breakfast, much to Ryan’s delight. Thankfully you can opt for a continental breakfast.

Our companions wanted to ‘visit braveheart’ so we popped over to the Wallace Monument before starting the long journey home. I swore I’d never climb the hill from the car park to the foot of the monument again, but somehow I found myself doing it in my bike gear, ugh. It was much easier on the way back down though…

A quick shot of the monument with some dramatic skies before getting wrapped up and packed up for the road to Ayrshire:

Then we made our winding way back down via Duke’s Pass in the Queen Elizabeth forest park, all the way to Stranraer Cairnryan against some serious wind, to enjoy a fairly calm sailing home and a nearly completely dry journey from Belfast to Dublin. Phew!

If you leave Skye via the bridge and head north, somewhere along the road you can stop and see this.

I took the opportunity to shoot my latest knitting project on location :)

The bikes had a wee rest,

And quite rightly so because we were heading for a road unknown previously to me, but apparently very well known to bikers all over the world. It’s the only road that leads in and out of a tiny village called Applecross. And it goes up, and up and up and up. In a twisty way. And you are treated to an absolutely magnificent view at the top.

I’m so glad I was on the back of the bike and able to crane my neck to look back at that, rather than having to concentrate on the road. Just when I start to think that Scotland maybe can’t be as beautiful as I remember, it gives me a smack upside the head with a view like that.  Can you believe, though, some people didn’t even stop for a look?

Mind you, when you come down the other side you’re brought in to a lovely wee bay with a row of houses and a cosy pub serving tasty lunches. With games!

And a very pretty outlook:

Seeing that blue sky, you’d be forgiven for not wearing ski gear for the trip back across to Inverness. But you may regret it.

Yup, sleet and snow. Very glad of my heated glove liners. And all the other layers I’d been sensible enough to wear.

Looks like there’s going to have to be a part III, eep!

Well, that was quite a trip. I’d been hoping we’d get over to Scotland on the motorbike this year but we hadn’t really managed to make it happen until some friends said that they were going over and wouldn’t mind doing it as a group. So we had a bit of a chat over google maps (and an old fashioned printed map book!) and chose a route that would get us to all the good bits in a few days. It was 5 days in total including those spent travelling to Belfast for the ferry, and ended up covering about 1100 miles. But I think we made the most of it!

That there is the road back to Fort William, where my birth was registered (even though I was born in Inverness) and home to Ben Nevis – or as I’m sure I remember my mum calling it “the Ben” – which is the highest mountain in the UK. It may or may not be the one you can see there – I’ve never been very good at identifying it, because it doesn’t actually look that big when you’re right there next to it! The observant amongst you may notice that there’s snow on the top, which I thought was very pretty. More on that later…

Just after I took that photo, we got separated from the group who had made it out to Mallaig to get the ferry to Skye. We saw a sign that said the ferry was cancelled and headed back towards Kyle of Lochalsh for the bridge instead, then discovered that the sign was a lie and the ferry was on after all. Never mind, though, since I think that was my favourite part of the trip! We stopped for a picture of the Skye bridge:

As far as modern bridges go, I think it’s quite a pleasant shape. And probably bigger than this photo would have you believe (I only took the 50mm lens).

First stop on Skye itself was a place I visited on our previous trip in 2010 and neglected to photograph properly. This time I asked if I could take a few pictures, and the owner was quite happy so I worked away for a good while, long enough for Ryan to come looking to se if I was buying the entire contents. The place was this:

However, I shall be saving my pictures of the stuff inside for a whole post of their own, for they are numerous.

It’s right next to the water in the tiny village of Broadford, just a few steps away from the water. Pretty enough to keep him busy outside for a while, anyway…

Our home for the night was Portree, pretty much the only town of any size on the island. There was a lovely restaurant in the hotel where we stayed so we didn’t go wandering around, but I did grab a shot of the harbour in the morning sun before we left the next day:

I could have hung around there for quite some time with my camera, but there were matters to attend to.

Just a quick visit to the shop, and the bike cases got ever so slightly heavier ;)

One more photo-stop on Skye before heading back over the bridge. Biker shown for scale…

I think I’ll have to split this into two posts, because there’s still a few miles to go!

Apart from those of people who I ‘know’ (in an online sense, who I would interact with), I don’t spend much time browsing photography blogs. Well, not for the photos anyway. What I do love is reading people’s thoughts on the process of photography – not what happens when you press the button but what happens in your head.

Ground Glass is a wedding photography blog about that stuff, but to be honest you could take the weddings out of it and it’d still be a damn good read for anyone taking photos of anything, I think. And here’s a snippet from one of those posts that just nails it:

“There’s a certain “itness” to photography, which is to say that great pictures show not so much a thing or a thing happening as the nature of that thing or thing happening.”

(Read the rest here, I’ll wait…)

I got into a bit of trouble on twitter the other night when I expressed some disappointment – okay, I sulked – after Darren posted this. We’d been bluebell hunting at the weekend and although I wasn’t presented with the sea of purple I’d been hoping for in Curabinny woods, I certainly had lots of fun getting in about the bluebells we did find with the macro lens. I was inappropriately attired:

Blue suede not ideal for crawling about in a forest – but I got down there, and I got mucky, and I was happy. But when I got home and emptied the photos out onto the laptop, I was deflated. The pictures I thought I’d taken weren’t in there. I make a pretty conscious effort not to be arrogant so it’s slightly at odds with my high expectations but I really thought with such a lovely subject and some cracking light, I’d have it down.

So what happened?

I went there like a hunter going to shoot a tiger. I wanted to get particular shots ‘in the bag’. I went with a preconcieved notion of what the pictures should look like, and didn’t just let the subject talk to me. I didn’t pay attention to the ‘itness’ of the subject when it was right there in front of me, so what I expected in the pictures was something else, and I got stuck with something else.

That’s not to say they were awful pictures, with a bit of space I can see something I like in them now.

I think this is definitely one of the ones that I got soggy trying to take…

I was actually kind of distracted by the lovely fresh unfurling green ferns that were waking up all around. It was the perfect light for those, I thought.

What can I say, lesson learned. Even if I don’t think of it consciously next time I’m shooting, I hope I’ve internalised the concept enough for it to affect my process.

It’s all getting a bit philosophical round here today, isn’t it?!

At the fairly respectable age of 32 I’d like to think I’m some way towards understanding what it is to be ‘grown up’.

While there’s lots of boring stuff to do with paying bills, and making sure you’ve got clean clothes, there’s also something that’s small but hugely important which I’m finally waking up to. We get to be comfortable, being who we want to be, and show it in little ways. And we get to choose who we share our lives with, beyond who lives next door, or is in our class, or whose parents are friends with ours.

Those things might be easy to miss in the ‘bigness’ of grown up life, but they worth stopping to appreciate. I suppose you all know that already, maybe I just wanted to remind myself…

Another weekend, another couple of photorally points, another few hundred miles, and a few rows of knitting. I better start doing a bit more knitting at each point if I’m going to make any attempt at having a scarf that’s longer than 6 inches by the end!

I suppose since the photorally has been going for 30 years or so, the locations start getting rather more obscure as they try to find new places. More obscure, and possibly more interesting – this was a forge, complete with a fairly intact set of bellows next to the fire, and lots of rusty iron stuff. Photographers like rusty iron stuff, especially if light is filtering in onto it through leaded windows…

It was a bit mucky to be putting knitting on, but I thought it was worth it :)

On Sunday we headed west from Cork, and although it was slightly damp we had those heavy brooding skies that I think can be even more beautiful than sunshine.

Another point, this time a boat house beside a lake – although the boat house isn’t actually in this picture:

Then a nice ride through the mountains, a stop for pancakes (if you’re ever near Moll’s Gap, go there, nom) and some more twisties. And the odd photo stop. i could tell the sheep weren’t impressed with us playing tourist though.

We’d been organised enough to bring a couple of sammiches and a bit of cake so we made a stop for a mini picnic, at a favourite spot. It looks idyllic, but that’s because I managed to frame a shot without all the rest of the people scrambling all over the place…

I’m not really a landscape photographer, those sweeping vistas just don’t want to land in my camera so you’ll have to wait for Ryan to post his if that’s what you’re into ;)

I took a wee trip to the Dublin SPCA today, to take a few pics of the kitties playing with some knitted toys from Pawsitive Knits, apparently we’re heading into kitten season and they are expecting an influx, sadly. What’s not sad is that the ones who make it in to the centre are looked after incredibly well, I really was amazed by the facilities, you can tell that the welfare of the animals really is their absolute priority. And it was also lovely to see so many stickers on windows to say that the animals inside were reserved already for families to adopt. This wee one was actually about to go outside to meet one of the dogs to see if they could be rehomed together!

There were also a couple of kittens called Starsky and Hutch, I’m not sure which this is but what a wee character…

After a couple of mad fits of attacking a cardboard box they both needed a bit of a snooze:

But it wasn’t just cats and dogs they had – oh no.

They came over and stuck their heads out the fence so we could stroke their velvety noses. I love donkeys. But there was another distraction…

One of five different coloured baby bunnies, this was definitely the fluffiest! It’s all I could do not to bring them all home with me…

There was a wee guinea pig too but it was very shy indeed, so I didn’t get a picture. And there was a very friendly goat, who seemed to like a good nose rub.  It’s awful when you think about the horrible stuff that people do to animals, so it’s hugely important to support places like these. So if you’re not a knitter, or you want to do even more, see how you can help here.

I may have mentioned before how much I love blossom. Doesn’t it just make your heart sing when you see that burst of beautiful pale delicate gorgeousness, unashamedly doing its thing every year, showing us that stuff is alive after the dark, miserable coldness of winter? And it makes me so happy every time I see it that I want to catch it with my camera, take a slice of it home, celebrate it’s fantasticness.

But I’ve been doing this camera thing for quite a few blossom seasons now and it can feel like I’ve already taken all the pictures. I don’t want to go out and do the same thing again and again. But because the subject inspires me, it makes me to go out again and take more pictures, and really push myself to find out how to show what it is that it makes me feel. To try and dig beneath the surface.

I’ve got in close with my macro lens before and marvelled at the impossible beauty of every tiny individual bloom. But this time I felt like stepping back, trying to put across the pure confection that is the view of a tree laden with pink petals against a backdrop of blue sky and fluffy white clouds. Step up, holga lens, and take a bow.  I like how the softness of this lens takes you a step back from a literal representation of reality and leaves a bit of room for your mind to interpret the subject rather than it being right there, in your face, you know, all sharp and well exposed…

Yes, it’s fluffy and pretty and insubstantial. Or is it insubstantial, or shallow, to take a bit of time just to enjoy something so lovely for what it is?

They’ll be gone soon enough and we’ll be forgetting the long dark nights and thinking about beer gardens and packing for holidays and keeping cool in sticky offices. And hopefully when they come around again next year I’ll be ready to meet them with my camera again :)

It’s St. Patrick’s day weekend and since the day itself fell on a Saturday, we got a long weekend here in Ireland. I might not care much about him driving the snakes out of the country but I certainly am thankful for a day off work!

I hadn’t planned a whole lot of anything, except for a bit of knitting, and reading, and pottering about in the apartment in my pyjamas. And that’s how it mostly went, except I had this niggly idea in my head for a good while now that I wanted to make some knitting themed bookmarks. I have quite a few yarny friends who are particularly voracious readers and I always wonder how they find the time to do both, as they don’t seem to go together naturally to me – unless you’re talking about audiobooks!

Anyway, I did a little series of pictures with my trusty prop-project (you’ll probably see it in quite a few photos in the future, since I don’t have enough of the yarn to actually make something with it, and it just photographs so well!) and tried to keep the 3:1 ratio in mind. It’s trickier than you’d think. But I came out with something I was happy with and put it into production. Today, partly just for the sake of being able to say I left the house at all over the weekend, we headed to the War Memorial Garden with the cameras and I decided to use it as an opportunity for a bit of location shooting and brought some bits along.

I’m not quite sure what to do with them yet, but it feels like I had a productive weekend anyway :)

…and she does it again!

Had a wee shoot with Aoibhe yesterday in the grounds of Dublin Castle, and I knew exactly which spot to head for when I saw this beautiful tunisian crochet scarf in the pale and delicate colours of blossom, it’s been made with hand dyed Blue Faced Leicester lace weight yarn by Hedgehog Fibres (which I think I shall have to be purchasing soon).

Isn’t it just perfect with the blossom and the brick wall? Seems I’m fairly notorious in some circles for taking copious amounts of pictures of blossom every year although so far this year I hadn’t got any, besides the polaroids that are a bit of an aquired taste. Hoping to get up to the War Memorial Gardens before the blossoms are blown away til next year, it’s a lovely spot that’s a bit out of the way so it’s usually nice and quiet.

Anyway, here’s some more gratuitous crochet:

I’m able to crochet but only very basic stuff, it’s less the stitches and more reading patterns that I struggle with but I think this one deserves my attention and determination. If you’re up for it too, head on over to the Ravelry pattern page and sign up for the pattern – this one is a freebie! I know, I can’t believe it either!