Morar

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Ya know when you see those posts and people are talking, like, the light was epic man and it all came together. Well, this not one of those 🙂 The light was ordinary and flat when I walked out here, it must have been about 9ish at night and I really wanted to see what Scotland had to offer in terms of seascapes, particularly since this the first night at a spot near the ocean and all. I walked past here and took a bunch of shots and thought, that looks really cool with those buildings over there, but the light is pretty crap, so I kept walking around and along the Morar River towards the exit of it into the sea. I did not really see much of any interest but did find some cool sheep and neat hills which I climbed 🙂 That brings me to another point.. how the hell can the very top of a darn hill be boggy and wet ? it seems everywhere you walk in Scotland its either rock or boggy! I mean my shoes were soaked anyway, but to add insult to injury, i stood atop a hill, and sunk up to my ankle in tasty bog water 🙂

I digress, so after all this and jumping the occasional barbed wire fence (lucky I am tall or else I coulda had some problems if ya know what I mean) I walked back to this spot and the sun was almost about to go behind the clouds on the horizon for the evening and for a brief 10 minutes of so the sun found a gap and lit up the little town of Morar with some nice light (note .. thats not epic light.. just nice light 🙂 ) So, the key message, the light is often a slow burn from crap to nice 🙂 but also on the flipside sometimes just continuously crap 🙂

So there you have it, a nice little panorama of a cute little town on the seaside / river side, if you look closely up in the right side you can see a large cross on the hill, dunno what that is about but still neat 🙂 Its a 4 shout panorama image, stitched in PS via Lightroom and its Thursday one more day to the weekend 🙂

D750 coupled with Nikkor 70-200 mm f2.8 @ 120mm Aperture: f5 and Shutter Speed: 1/125s
ISO: 400
out front: neat little town of Morar

Who's protecting who ?

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Neist Light House

Following on from the previous image where you can see the top of the cliff (taken from about the same level way back on the mainland bit) this is shot is taken from pretty well the lowest perspective without being dead on the rocks below or in a boat 🙂 I can only imagine how this would look in the middle of winter during a storm, I am sure that the cliffs don't end up like this from sunbathing in the summer sun (non-existent sun at that 😉 )
All the little white specks on the cliff, they are birds 🙂 all the green and yellow stuff, thats bird poop, smells tops too.

Sheep

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of the other kind – i thought i would not climb up there.. but i did eventually 🙂 pretty nice view and certainly a sheer drop off the edge 🙂

3 shot panorama
D750 coupled with Nikkor 70-200 mm f2.8 @ 200mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 1/200s seconds
ISO: 100
out front: just another Scottish cliff 🙂

Jumble-tastic

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So at a little church just outside the Trossach National Park there is a grave (or allegedly 😉 ) of a dude called Rob Roy, a outlaw, a hero, and probably a whole bunch of other things, however he is immortalised in hearts and minds of most Scots and probably half the world thru various movies 😉

Anyway, I could not find his grave there, but that was because there was this little neat creek running down the hill behind the church, which I chose to check out instead. It was a mess of rocks, roots and branches, quite a challenge to get a consistent, coherent composition, well one without balancing on the edge of a precarious rock and falling bum over chin 😉

The brilliant greens is just something to be seen over there, its not like in Oz where you will have the occasional patch of sweet green-ness, but instead its just that any piece of foliage is nuclear green 🙂 and thats before I take a picture of it 😉

This was a 3 shot panorama, I just could not leave out that cool bank with the awesome ochre colour.

D750 coupled with Nikkor 16-35 @ 16mm Aperture: f16 and Shutter Speed: 30 seconds (and it was the middle of the day!)
ISO: 100
out front: just another sweet Scottish Creek

William Wallace Monument

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The Scots don't mind the odd Monument it seems, It does seem alot of effort just for a building which is not particularly functional (happy to be corrected here ) – I guess one could compare it to the Centrepoint Tower in Sydney, not overly functional and mainly a tourist attraction – that said, the WW monument is a tad older, built in 1861 🙂
Its a pretty impressive sight, at 67 metres high it certainly stands out, we first saw it when visiting the Stirling Castle, looking out from the castle its a distinct landmark across the landscape, we did also visit the actual monument but did not climb up it (too late in the day). When I first saw it at Stirling Castle I thought, yeah gotta get a shot of that, i'll do it when we leave… it then rained 🙂
‪#‎stirlingcastle‬
‪#‎williamwallace‬
‪#‎scotland‬

3 shot panorama
D750 coupled with Nikkor 70-200 mm f2.8 @ 200mm Aperture: f4 and Shutter Speed: 1/250s
ISO: 200
out front: just another Scottish Monument

Hjalma

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We must have past hundreds of these creeks and rivers flowing down off the snow covered mountains,each cutting a path through the rocks and forest. This one, Hjalma was a short walk from our airbnb farm house (thanks Trygve) so after the girls had gone to sleep and the petti-coat government was planning our trip to a 600 year old monastery i wandered down for a look. It had just stopped raining and it was getting pretty late, however as with summer in Norway the light lasts for ages (this was about 10pm), coming back to oz and having the sun go down at 5pm was a bit of a rude shock 🙂

Just another typical Norwegian Scene

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same old same old 😉 nothing to see here
but if you do view it, view it large 🙂

some boat,. floating around on a icey cold large lake (they call 'em fjords over there) and a few snow capped hills in the distance…
Behind me was this pretty cool campsite, if we had known about this spot we would have definitely stayed the night here, imagine sunset over those hills 🙂 Its a spot about 20 minutes (a hour if you stop for photos 😉 ) out of Olden.

‪#‎norway‬
#‎landscapephotography
‪#‎norway

3 shot panorama, each shot was bracketed
D750 coupled with Nikkor 24-70mm f2.8 @ 27mm Aperture: f9 and Shutter Speed: 1/30s (normal) 1/125s (underexposed for teh sky) 1/8s (over exposed for the shadows)
ISO: 125
out front: just another Norwegian fjord.

Cycle

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The important thing to note in these series of images.. is not the fact that I have taken pictures of two ladies from behind on bikes (note I balance it out with a dude on a bike too 😉 ) but the fact they are riding on dedicated cycleways (with no helmets too 😉 ) and seemingly getting along with other road users…

I never did get a shot of the sea of bikes parked outside the train station, however the word sea is correct, I have never seen so many bikes in one spot! how the hell you would find you bike in there after work has got me stumped 😉

Australia, we have a lot to learn when it comes to bikes – the culture in Denmark and Sweden in regard to cycling is polar opposite to sydney, there is no road rage, no agro .. cars and bikes get along and there are ample cycleways…there is none of that hatred that exist in Sydney between cyclists and motorists..

In Album 2016-08-04

København

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This place is a street photographers dream, I wish I had time to just cruise and explore the back streets of Copenhagen (and thats coming from someone whos not keen on cities) just about every store, cafe and corner we past just screamed to be photographed, this was one such spot, where all the bits of the image aligned as I walked past, gotta love those shots 😉

I love the way the the two people standing are looking at each other and are engaged in some conversation and the dude in denim is checking out the blokes shoes and the fitness fanatic is looking inquiringly at him.. all the while set on a roadside with a bunch of fruit and veg crates ..perfectly normal for Copenhagen 😉

#København

Singular

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Wind Turbine

This was one the largest wind turbines I saw in Sweden, even from a distance you could tell it was a thumper, perched up in a wheat field, slowly turning.

Yep, and they be birds over there and they flew on past the turbine without getting turned into mince pigeon 😉

Tricky shot to take, its 4 shot panorama, but with the blades of the turbine moving and the birds there was a lot of manual blending to make sure the turbine still had 3 blades rather than 4 or 5 and that the birds did not get cloned all over the place 😉

Max IV

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We make the invisible visible

Cheers to my mate (David Brodrick) for getting a ticket into the opening of the MaxIV x-ray, particle accelerator, electron zoomer thingy-a-ma-jig…
Now, these guys and gals that design and make these kinda places are pretty cluey I think, makes what we do with planes look a bit agricultural 🙂
Have a look at that section of beamline, its that big chunk of steel that sits on a bigass chunk of concrete wrapped up in a electro-magnet with a little pipe in the middle (straight pipe btw) where the little electrons get zoomed on down.. there are a whole bunch of these straight sections aligned in a big circle that is the x-ray collimator – now these individual beamline bits are alittle bit precise when it comes to positioning and aligning, about 3 decimal places (metric that is) to be exact.. thats pretty cool i reckon. I guess if these are not aligned correctly then the electrons probably go bouncing down the tubes making all kind of a ruckus (thats kinda bad I think) rather than heading straight down the middle and spitting out at each of the instrument stations, which are basically a hole in teh wall with a whole bunch of expensive equipment to try and utilise these x-rays.
I am sure all you scientist types are cringing at my bogan description.. but hey 🙂
Also check out the thickness of the wall and the door plug, i wonder if thats to stop stray x-rays if things go pear shaped 🙂 the way they move the doors is pretty neat, basically looks like a air cushion which moves them around…
‪#‎maxiv‬
‪#‎sweden‬
‪#‎xrays‬

In Album 2016-08-01

Geiranger

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The southern perspective. These should give a bit of a idea of the drive out of Geiranger, one of the most popular spots in Norway
The one without the cruise ships was at sunset, 11 pm 🙂 with tickles fast asleep in the back of the car 🙂 and was in fact only 100 metres from where we were staying, however our airbnb spot (the worst we had for the whole trip) did not have any views

In Album 2016-08-01

Isolated

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All over Norway you see houses/cottages perched in the strangest places, for example driving along one side of a fjord you will often notice a building on the other side, my first thought, and kinda never got answered, was how the hell do they get there (to build it or even visit it), there is no road and often its way out in the middle of nowhere. I did see one place on the otherside of a river which had a cool zip-line( flying fox for you aussies 😉 ) with a big bucket across it.
So, here is one of these places, there was one road on this side of the fjord and I pretty sure there was not on the other, definitely no zipline across here either, this one was pretty neat since it was nicely position with the mountains, you can also see a little kummune way over the lake and of course, that rather large flow of ice down a hill, sometimes referred to as a glacier.

#‎landscapephotography
‪#‎norway

3 shot panorama, each shot was bracketed
D750 coupled with Nikkor 70-200 mm f2.8 @ 70mm Aperture: f8 and Shutter Speed: 1/1.6s (normal) 1/13s (underexposed for teh sky) 5s (over exposed for the shadows)
ISO: 100
out front: just another Norwegian fjord.