Day 16 - Inpendling Boom

This is one of those shots that was just for fun, but ended up being better than I expected. It's shot from one of the cannon apertures of the castle, as we took those usual funny shots where we pretended to shoot the cannons ourselves and stuff. No trip is complete without some silly pictures haha.

The shot is a bit hopeless though, since it seams to slope a bit no matter how you rotate it. Either the horizon is level but the top is no or the other way around, and either way things don't seam quite right. I ended up going with the clouds, but I don't know if that was the right thing to do either. Tricky indeed...

/MrsHjort

Day 15 - The Dome

Sorry this will be a short one. I've been working after work, editing pictures I took of my coworkers for the company's webpage. I couldn't help myself, it was so much fun to do portraits for a change, and especially of wonderful people like them. After I was finished with that, I ended up editing this shot very fast, since I just can't wait to rush down to the kitchen and grab a bite to eat haha, my tummy is rumbling :P

Oh and by the way, if anyone knows the name of the building in the shot, I'm very interested in learning it. I shot it from Edinburgh Castle, but I cannot remember from what direction :)

Cheers
/MrsHjort

Day 14 - Robert the Bruce

This is an ancestor of mine, or at least he may be, genealogy can be quite tricky it seems. You see, a relative of mine researched the family tree a while back, and for a long time, we were sure that we stemmed from the Scottish royal family. Later, he found out that somewhere along the line two people with the exact same name crossed paths, and we could have stemmed from either one of them. So, either I carry a bit of royal blood, or a little dash of blood from a certain tailor. Funny huh? Anyway, we're definitely sure that there's Scottish blood in there, and that's pretty cool no matter whom it came from. That connection makes Scotland special to me.

/MrsHjort

Day 13 - Edinburgh's Folly

I've always enjoyed the story behind this monument. You see, you'll find these strange solitary pillars on the top of Calton Hill, not far from Princes Street, and if you haven't heard the story you'd probably be a bit surprised to find them there. They're actually part of an unfinished construction that was designed back in 1823, by Charles Robert Cockerell and William Henry Playfair. As you no doubt have guessed, it was based on Greek architecture. It was actually modeled after Athens' Parthenon itself. They started building it in 1826, though unfortunately, it proved too expensive, and so they left it unfinished. It's really just these front pillars on a base of stone, though it was supposed to be so much more. The people of Scotland have several nicknames for it, such as "Scotland's Disgrace", "Edinburgh's Disgrace", "the Pride and Poverty of Scotland" and "Edinburgh's Folly". Today, people enjoy sitting at it's base or climbing the foundation to pose for pictures. So, despite being unfinished, it's still a very interesting and beautiful part of Edinburgh's heritage, and in a way, it has fulfilled its purpose, despite everything. It's a nice thought, don't you think? Isn't it wonderful that "failure" produced something so interesting and beautiful :)

/MrsHjort

Day 12 - The Gate

This is an other shot of St Mary's Cathedral and its marvelously detailed architecture. I love the Gothic style... All those pillars and archs are so beautiful! Like I wrote back in day 9, it's a wonderful subject for photography.

If you've been around Daggerbay you may recognize this. You see, I've used a crop out of this shot for a contest held there. As I was working specifically with the contest in mind, I didn't bother editing the whole thing, and therefore the editing is a bit different in the two versions. This one is a bit brighter, and the stone is a bit more colorful. I don't know which one I like best though. I guess they're just different. There's just one thing that bothers me a bit - that I couldn't shoot this with the cross above the door smack right in the middle of the window behind it. A street lamp was in my way, so I got as close to perfection as I could without sacrificing other elements of the composition. Sometimes I wish I had a "vanish ray gun" that could remove distracting stuff haha.

/MrsHjort

Day 11 - Royal Scots Greys

This is an other one of those shots with a blown out sky.... Gargh! I hate it when that happens! An overcast sky is hard to manage, and sometimes I forget to think about that... especially when I've been walking around all day and can't wait to get "home" to where I hung my hat that particular day. Thankfully, I've made progress with my "sky-fixer technique" using the "clouds" function under the filters menu in Photoshop. I figured I could use the perspective transform tool in order to create the correct distortion, and as you can see, it worked out quite well. It may not given me the natural details of real clouds, but at least it brings me a close enough approximation and it looks much better than it did before. So, I'm happy... at least for the time being. I'm thinking hard on how to make the effect more life like; maybe I could add some kind of ripple effect selectively, but I'll have to think on that some more before I start experimenting. No doubt the solution will come to me during the night...

Sleep tight :)

/MrsHjort

Day 10 - Scottish Landscape

Mr and I usually don't travel to large cities - it's nature that peaks our interest, and we usually do a lot of trekking on our trips. Unfortunately, we were only i Scotland for the weekend, so there simply wasn't time for that, but boy, seeing those Scottish hills sure made me want to climb them... I guess we'll have to go back and do that an other time, and, it's the perfect excuse stop stop by Edinburgh for a day or two :).

/MrsHjort

Day 9 - St Mary's Cathedral

This is the beautiful Cathedral of St Mary. I never got the chance to go there during my last visit to Edinburgh, so this time I just had to. It didn't disappoint, going there was like love at first sight. I absolutely adored the architecture and I could have spent hours there, just experimenting with camera angles and composition. Unfortunately, we only stayed in the city for two days, and Mr was anxious to move on to see more things, but I managed to get a shot or two... or 50 haha :)

I have waited with this shot deliberately because I had to think about what to do with it. As you can see in the original below, the light areas of the sky were totally blown out and I had to create a (to me) whole new approach to deal with that. As usual the solution came during the night. That's when I came up with using the Clouds filter, and it worked! Yey!

On an other note, I'm happy to tell you that our work in the garden is nearing the end. A day or two more, and our garden will be tucked in and ready for winter. Yey! That means more free time for Mrs!

/MrsHjort

Day 8 - Fifteen O Four

I like taking pictures of clocks. It's like a visual time stamp of when you shot the picture, a little something to jog your memory of that exact moment when you where right there, fiddling with your camera with the wind in your hair. I often get a blast of memories from pictures like that :)

/MrsHjort

Day 7 - Castle Courtyard

Edinburgh Castle is lovely. There are so many things to look at there and so much history. Mr was very happy the day we spent there, the history lover that he is, and I marveled at the beautiful stone buildings and the rolling landscape. It was a great day.

And now for something completely different, a Scotsman on a horse! Nah, just kidding, though I do love Monty Python hehe, but I wanted to say that I'm sorry to Craig and Kim, for not keeping up with the commenting. I'll try and catch up soon, I promise.

It's a very busy week. Autumn is here and we have to prepare the garden for winter while the weather is good and there's still daylight in the evenings. We've been redoing the strawberry plantations completely. We're replanting all of them from the traditional sort of plantings to plantings in pallet collars. It's a lot of work, but we're half-way there now, and I love what we've accomplished so far. It's much easier to manage and it looks great too. Yey!

/MrsHjort

Day 6 - University of Edinburgh

Editing this was a bit of a pain. It was hard to find a good balance between the dark bricks, the sky and the green foliage. It took me about twice the time it usually does, because I had to do a lot of small adjustments in order to get things right. Not many steps, mind you, just a lot of tweaking of the steps themselves. I love that the Nik collection gives you so much control though. I haven't used it for very long, but already I can't imagine going back to what I used to do.

This shot is of the University of Edinburgh. Last time I was in the city, I spent a lot of time at the university. Sadly, I didn't get the privilege to see the inside of this building - I was at the newer university, further down the hill. It was a very interesting time though, I got to meet so many smart persons and listen to many interesting lectures. I'm so glad I took the chance and went there, that fist time. It made me fall in love with the city, it's why I came back, and I loved to get to share it all with Mr this time (and to get to shoot it for real).

/MrsHjort