Photos from a trip to Mull

Tobers

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Those who have long memories may recall a trip by myself and 3 others to Skye a few years back. I enjoyed it so much that I took a week off last week to go up to the Isle of Mull of the west coast of Scotland and do primarily landscape photography. I had a pal called Mark with me this time, and we hired a rather lovely little cottage in Lochdon for the week. Aside from the low doorways (head still badly bruised!) it was just right.

I thought it Mull was a cracking location - lots of variety from waterfalls to cliffs to mountains. Lots of wildlife too. Weather was predictably variable - I was hoping for snow or at least heavy frosts which didn't materialise, though it was cold at 0-4C. It's a much bigger island than I expected, and with all the roads being single track with passing places it took quite a while to get around, and we covered about 300 miles driving all over the place.

The problem with going somewhere new is that we didn't know any of the locations at all. I arranged a wildlife tour for the first day, primarily to get a guide around some of the good photo locs, but also to get a look-see at some eagles and otters, more of which later.

With lots of studying of OS maps, plotting sun angles etc, we probably got 50% of our locations right. It was a fairly random process though, and I'm sure if I were to go back now I'd be a lot better prepared. A lot of the time we walked into our locations - good kit is essential. I was geared up with v.good walking boots, gaiters, tough trousers (Fjall Raven - excellent), merino wool thermal leggings, layers of tops, gore-tex jacket, gloves, hat & neck buff thing. Even in the pre-dawn cold I was plenty warm enough.

More blurb later - I've just started going through my pics. I took 536 shots using a Canon 1D mark IV and a Panasonic GF1. Lenses varied from a 400 2.8 with 1.4x extender (for the eagles) to a more usual 17-40 on the Canon and a 20mm and 14-45 on the GF1. Out of those 536, I kept 148, numerous of which are "snaps" of location setups and general mucking about. I've got 10 pics which I really like and that I'll put significant time into working on, and maybe another 10 that have "made the grade" for additional processing - and I'm quite pleased with that haul for the week.

Here's the first couple of pics. I'll put more up as I go through them and add some more narrative.

#1 some nice low skimming light at Loch An Eilein. This was a tough one as I got there at about 8am for dawn which was nice, but I struggled to find a good spot with a strong composition of the tree. Wherever I went it just didn't look right. In the end I waited about three and a half hours for the sun to move around to the right spot and side-light the tree and the grass in front, whilst keeping the hill behind shaded. I had plenty of time to think about the composition of the shot, and in the end elected to have the tree just sticking above the far hillside to give it better definition. The side lighting is odd - Mark thought I'd flashed it with some remote flashes and pocket wizards. Great idea, but swimming over to the island wasn't on the agenda. Canon 1D mark IV, 24-105 @ 45mm, 1/5th sec at f/18, ISO 100.
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Setup shot for #1. You cant really see it but the ground was boggy and very wet. Scottish walkers will know the sort of thing - ankle snapping grass tussocks surrounded by disguised gaiter-deep sucking bog. #1 was actually taken just to the left of where the camera is here, but you get the idea of the location.
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#2 this was a cracking location on the south coast. And finally a characterful sunset as well. There were so many interesting features on this bit of coastline that I hurried a lot of my shots as I tried to fit as much in as possible. Important lesson - take your time, less is more. Canon 1D mark IV, 17-40 @ 17mm, 1/40th at f/16 ISO 1250 handheld.
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Some more shots to come as I go through them.

Tobers
 
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Nice "tasters" - love #2 but have to say I prefer the wider view in the "setup shot" but obviously with a bit less foreground :)

Jim
 
Fantastic stuff. It's nice to have a background to the photos and a bit of a story to go along with it!

Would love to have a 'Photo Holiday' myself.

Loving shot number 2 and looking forward to seeing some more.
 
Nice "tasters" - love #2 but have to say I prefer the wider view in the "setup shot" but obviously with a bit less foreground :)

Jim

+ 1:cool: best so far imo and bet it was with the Gf1?
 
Yep, as said, looking forward to seeing the rest. Like #2, great lead in and the small reflection of sky in the foreground pool.

Also would love to do something like this - just the matter of finding the time !
 
Fantastic shots, love them all.
 
Nice couple of shots Tobers. I like the rock detail and cloud reflection in the second shot but the first is more my own personal style preference. :)

I see what you mean about the odd side-lighting of the tree though. Definitely looks like a speedlight on full power, excellent!

How do you find the GF1? I keep thinking about trading some of my gear to get one but can never decide if I really need one at the expense of my Canon gear and whether I'd find more use in the 20mm lens as a portrait shooter or the 14-45 as a potential landscape alternative?

Cheers
Steve
 
Thanks for the feedback so far. It was a real luxury to have a whole 5 days just photographing things. Quite a few questions about the GF1, so here comes a shot from it.

For this one, we had decided to get up early and have a location with Ben More, the biggest mountain on the island at 3000' or so, in the background with a nice feature like a river or tree in the foreground. Judicious study of the OS map and reading of contour lines revealed a promising looking location in a river valley not too far from the road.

We got there well before dawn (which isn't too early in January thankfully). The problem is that it's dark, and when you're trying to walk into an unknown location things can be quite tricky. We could hear the river but not see it (or anything else for that matter). Head torches on, we headed towards where we thought the river was, through squishy grass bog as is the typical terrain on Mull.

As the sky lightened a bit we managed to find the river but figured we were about a mile too far upstream. We went back to the car, drove down a way, then walked in again and found a superb spot. The river had cut a nice mini-canyon into the black rock, and led nicely to Ben More in the background. Unfortunately, the weather wasn't playing ball and it was fairly overcast, but some pink did come into the lighter areas as the sun came up.

After messing about with some interesting locations, I decided to turn around and found an even better composition facing upstream, and that's the shot I took below.

#3 GF1, 14-45mm lens, 6 sec at f/11, ISO100 on tripod with cable release.
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I'd left all my Canon gear in the car, and just took with me my GF1, 14-45 and 20mm lenses, cable release, filters and tripod. The whole GF1 kit fitted into a weeny belt bag leaving me just carrying a light carbon fibre tripod. The freedom this gives is fantastic - no more heavy backpack straining at your shoulders. I felt much more agile and able to nip down steep rock faces like a heavy and useless mountain goat.

I have step-up rings for the GF1 lenses bringing them up to 77mm allowing me to fit my polariser, ND110 and Lee filters that I use on the 1D. The Lee ND grads I use are soft grads, which aren't really ideal for the GF1 as the graduation is much too gentle for the smaller lenses. Hard grads would be much better. Or better still the Lee Rangefinder kit but thats more money again.

The shot above was taken with the 14-45mm lens, mega-OIS switched off. I've been very impressed with this lens. It's very sharp, and the RAW files from the little GF1 are great. Obviously composition is via the rear screen in this case, which is quite nice anyway as it lets you get into awkward angles.

If anything, the 14-45 is too long for landscape work at an effective 28mm. I'd really like something much wider like an 8mm or 9mm prime. Panasonic do a very wide 7-14mm zoom but you cant fit filters to it which is a real shame. There's an 8mm fisheye, but again no filter fitment, and I dont want a fisheye for landscape work.

I chose f/11 as I didn't want to close the lens down too much and get refraction issues, and at 14mm with a smallish sensor, f/11 is fine for good depth of field. Focusing was on the big rock in the lower centre. I used aperture priority and the GF1 handled the exposure very well indeed, which is impressive considering the dark rock and relatively bright sky and water. I had two grad filters on, a 0.9 on the top for the sky, and an "inverted" 0.6 on the bottom to stop the water blowing out.

I like this shot as the composition works nicely, with lots of dramatic angular boulders and surfaces, and the little tree clinging on for dear life. I put it in monochrome as the sky was quite dull, and mono helps to accentuate and draw attention to the rock shapes & textures. I'll work on a colour version pointing downstream with Ben More in the background in a bit.

Funnily enough, I took another shot which I really liked. It was only when I got back to the car that I realised I had triggered video mode instead of taking a still, so I had about 6 secs of a nice video of the river which was lovely but not quite what I was after!

So for those considering a GF1 - it's a great little camera for this sort of thing. If I didn't have the luxury of a 1DIV and a bevvy of L lenses I'd use it a lot more.
 
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Thanks for the comprehensive reply tobers, much appreciated (although probably not by my bank account!) The idea of the light landscape shooter is definitely appealing although I could also personally see it replacing my 40d on family days out etc although I'd miss my 70-200 for zoo days!

Cheers
Steve....potentially even more skint!
 
Right down in the south-west of Mull is a little place called Uisken. I think the OS map team were just trying to ensure there is plenty of writing on the map as Uisken is just 3 houses so not really a village or even a hamlet.

I drove down there after working out that the beach sort of aligned with sunset, and that it looked very rocky and probably had some good foreground interest to go with a good sunset.

Unfortunately, when I got there what I found was fairly drab photographically, although undeniably very tranquil and Scottish. With the tide out, the beach was a bit of a mess, and it wasn't pointing quite the way I wanted.

Here's a quick snap of the location.
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Having pondered for a while, I thought I'd walk westwards a bit as another tiny beach was showing on the map just over the headland.

Bingo! It's amazing what you find if you go out looking. A couple of tiny bays with the most superb rock formations (shot #2 is the same location). It looked like sedimentary rock in that it was very layered in quite thin strata, but I think it was actually a basalt of some sort and probably the result of successive lava outflows layering on top of each other.

With the tide having just gone out, the rocks were nice and wet, and the sun was setting more or less in the correct direction. A bit of wandering found these cool little pools which an amazing blue colour (combination or the rock and the darkening sky I think). The sky perked up with a bit of underlighting of some cloud that had rolled in as I set up. I tried a few compositions, and liked this one the best. I could have done with a wider angle lens TBH.

#4 Canon 1D Mark IV with 17-40, 0.8sec at f/18, ISO 50, Lee 0.9 ND grad.
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I spent quite some time at this location, and revisited it again with Mark the following day, and got some of the best shots down there. Lovely spot.
 
There's something magical about being out & about before dawn. Everyone else is still in their beds, and you're exploring and experiencing the strange quietness that comes before people start moving around. Not that there are many people on Mull in the first place, but you know what I mean.

This is my favourite shot from the trip. In truth, we were in a bit of a panic as, although we'd left early enough, the roads are so narrow (this was down a rough track), it took us a lot longer than we thought to get to the spot we were after. The sun was coming up and we spotted this pier and decided to have a go at making a few shots work, abandoning plans to get to our main chosen dawn location. I think the calm muted colours, though still dramatic on the mountains in the distance (which I wanted some snow on!) suits the scene. It's not over-saturated. I tried to move about and get a composition which had a lead-line, interesting foreground, a mid-distance subject, and nice depth through to the background. A touch of frost in the foreground helps as well.

#5 1D 17-40 @ 34mm, 0.5 sec @ f/18 ISO 100 0.9 grad
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Here's another few views of the tree in #1. As I had a while to wait for the light to come around where I wanted it, I "worked" the location and looked for different & alternative compositions.

#6 This was from just before sunrise. There's a nice pink in some of the clouds which perked things up a bit, but the far hills could do with a bit more light. Compositionally, it probably works better than #1, with more depth and layers to the shot, and a little movement in the foreground grass. 1D, 17-40 @ 24mm, 1 sec @ f/18 ISO 50, 0.6 Grad
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#7 Here, a very different composition which also works quite nicely, but you'll see that the sky has lost its colour and become a bit drab. This if offset by some nice skimming light on the mountain in the distance which perks things up a bit. 1D 24-105@55mm, 2.5 sec @ f/18, ISO 50, 0.9 grad
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#8 And lastly, a longer shot with more light on the distant mountain. You can see that the lone tree looks a bit drab which is why I was waiting for it to be lit. I had planned to move back up to this spot after taking #1, but by the time I was done with #1 the tree was shaded again. Frustration! 1D 24-105 @ 73mm, 1.6 sec @ f/16, ISO 50, 0.6 grad
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I do like having time to work around a location like this. It can often result in pics that you hadn't expected to get in the first place, but which still work well. It also shows how frustrating this landscape lark can be, with the light you want not being in the right place at the right time, requiring patience and the ability to return to a location a number of times to get things done right.
 
All nice but love 5 and 7 from the last set and 7 especially works better for me than the original of the tree compositionally :smashin:

JIm
 
Still with me here? This shot is from Uisken - the same place as #4 but further around the corner. Honestly you could spend a whole weekend just in this one location. By now the sun had set, but it was still just adding some pink glow to the sky which came through the slow moving clouds very nicely.

With very white sand on the sea bed, the water was an amazing turquoise colour, contrasting really well with the stark and angular rocks.

#9 Canon 1D IV, 17-40 @ 17mm, 129 sec @ f/14 ISO 800, 0.9 + 0.6 grads

Uisken by Tobers, on Flickr

It was quite tricky moving around this area. With all the rock strata sticking up into the air, and many of them being quite thin and sharp, we had to take a lot of care. Add to that carrying about a bag of kit, tripod and then trying to find somewhere to put it down, fiddle with filters and take a shot, it was all a bit awkward. Worth it though - a top location for sure.

You might wonder why the ISO is up at 800. I didn't want the exposure to be too long as the clouds would have just blurred into nothingness. For the speed they were moving, just over 2 mins was about right. To get that shutter speed with the light I had available, and with 2 stacked graduated filters on, I had to pop the ISO up. No problem with the 1D IV though, but the GF1 would have been a different story as its much noisier than the 1D (unsurprising at £3000 cheaper!).

I'd taken my 400 2.8 lens up with me as we were doing a wildlife tour on one of the days. It's somewhat unwieldy (!!) but a super bit of kit. I had a 1.4x extender on it as well making 560mm, as birds tend to be a long way away and quite small. However, it's also useful as a somewhat specialised landscape lens. I took this shot from a few hundred meters away. I really liked the way the bare white/grey branches stood out against the purplish brush behind. Just shows that it's not all brown in Scotland in the winter. Just after I took this, I golden eagle flew directly overhead, more of which later.

#10 1D IV, 560mm @ f/4 1/1250th

Trees by Tobers, on Flickr
 
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Another good shot there - and loving the write ups too :smashin:

Jim
 
Lovely and interesting set of photographs Tobers and thanks for adding the story line, it brings the photographs to life, :thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:
 
Great stuff - enjoying the narrative. No. 9 is a cracker.

I have to admit to being a little confused by the ISO 800 - I understand the reasoning, and agree that the cloud detail may have been lost, but at 17mm, I suspect you could have afforded to open the lens up a few stops and retained focus across the whole scene, while dropping the ISO. Not that it appears to have had any negative effect on the quality of image. :smashin:
 
Yes, good point about opening up the aperture a bit. I was happy with the aperture so decided to leave it alone knowing that ISO 800 is no challenge for the 1D.

Also I'm not massively familiar with the 17-40 for landscapes so was a bit wary to open it up too much and lose some depth of field, though I'm sure you are right and it would have been fine.
 

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