Autumn - Steall and Nevis Gorge
We've returned from another couple of weeks vacation in Scotland, one of which was spent in the beautiful location of Glen Nevis. One day I took the walk through the narrow gorge at the end of glen and up into Steall Meadows; it was a great feeling to be able to look around and know that I'd been to the top of every Munro summit that I could see. It was dull October day and the mid afternoon light was very flat, the effect of which was to draw my eyes to the many silver birch trees that had colonised the lower, very steep and rocky sides of the mountains. It was beautifull and breathtaking in a very quiet sort of way; no vivid lighting, but a pallet of subtle shades and hues of autumn vegetation and rock all harmoniously distributed on the hillside. Nature's poetry that just needed to be absorbed.
During our week in Glen Nevis it was views like this that I seemed to be noticing most. The weather was quite wet and the atmosphere meant that the scenery had low contrast and muted colours, quite different to anything that I would have sought to photograph and show anyone 15 years ago. I do believe though, that many people pass by this sort of view without appreciating what beauty is before their eyes and that is a shame as they miss out on so much. I am filled with wonder at how nature produces such harmony: the white of the birch trees is followed through by the striations of the cliff and the shapes and colours of the trees that even mirrored on the rock faces. It's wonderful.
Additionally, I also saw the opportunity to post an image of an unsaturated (photographically speaking) leaf on a rock. Well, many leaves on many rocks in fact and that made me chuckle in the friendliest way of course!
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6 comments:
I looked at this and thought it must have been from Australian travels.
how interesting
Colin, this is a wonderful autumn landscape - I could literally dive into these soft colors. And I like the form and the framing of that solitary rock formation. Truly outstanding!
obakesan: Australians don't have sole rights to such scenery :) . Seriously though, the cool western maritime climate that this area is quite literally doused with makes it very special.
Markus: Thanks for the kind words. Soft colours needed to be treated with utmost respect, at one time I'd have trying to increase contrast and saturation in order to make an "interesting image", when in fact the better one was already there waiting to be noticed!
Earl, Mike and Obakesan: Please accept my apologies, I read your latest comments and thank you very much for sending them. Unfortunately, I accidentally pressed the "delete comment" button instead of the "publish comment" button. There was a moment of panic as the comments evaporated before my eyes and I was unable to do anything about them. And now I feel really bad. Google ought to put some significant real estate between the buttons to make it a very conscious decision to choose one or the other! I'm sorry.
Colin, marvelous job of recognizing that this was something well worth looking at "as is" without "improving" it. I think recognizing that subtlety can be more persuasive than exaggeration can be a sort of craft epiphany that changes your whole way of understanding the medium. It also fits in with my long-standing distrust of Darkroom Wizardry (which began long ago in the chemical darkroom, but is just all the more tempting with the dark arts of the digital image available). If you look for things that you realize will make good pictures you don't *need* elaborate transformations to make them work. Or as the inimitable David Vestal put it many years ago, "good pictures are easy to print."
Carl: than you for the comment, I really appreciate the time you took. When I look back at some of my earlier work I can see that I was always always on a mission to produce Velvia style landscapes. It was a case of reading magazines and books (before I knew about the internet) and wanting to copy what I saw but in my own style. I really don't get turned on by that sort of thing any longer.
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