Well today is the day, my first ever photography exhibition opens at the Gallery Steadings, Balmacara Square.  The exhibition is open until 3rd June from 10 am to 5 pm daily.  I have a selection of framed prints, mounted prints and greetings cards for sale, but even if you don't want to buy anything please come along and see my work and a chat.

It is another fantastic day here in Wester Ross, looking like a real scorcher so why not come along to Balmacara Square and soak up the sun.  There is also Beth's Café and Andrea's "Home in the Highlands" shop, so lots to do if you fancy a break from the sun as well.

In addition to my exisitng role with NTS I have recently, for a short while, taken on the responsibility for managing the Isle of Canna, one of the four Small Isles just south west of Skye.  As a result I have just spent the last three days on the island.  Canna is a wonderful place with fantastic archaeology, wildlife, especially bird life, and a great landscape, an ideal place for a photographer to be busy.  This being my first proper chance to catch up with the islanders I was pretty busy but we were pretty lucky with the weather and I managed to get some good shots of this beautiful island.  Below is a selecton.

I took this shot this evening at Garramore Beach, otherwise known by Local Hero aficionados as Ben's Beach.  The sky was not that spectacular, being completely 100% cloudless, but the little stream running down to the sea provided and excellent reflection of the receding light, with the rippled sand providing texture.  This was taken with my Lumix DMC FZ200 bridge camera as I am travelling tomorrow to Canna for the day and need to travel light, hence the DSLR was left at home.  That being said I really like this little camera, particularly with its f/2.8 maximum aperture setting across the entire zoom range (24x), equivalent to 600mm in 35mm terms.

The following shot was taken on the Calmac ferry from Armadale to Mallaig as an attempt at something a little bit abstract.  I thought if I removed all the colour apart from the red it would emphasis Calmac's colours and the angle makes it more interesting.

This shot of the moon was taken this evening at about 6pm in bright sunshine.  The moon looked almost transparent with the blue matching the colour of the sky exactly.

The next couple of shots were taken earlier this week, the first at 6am on Tuesday on my way to Duirinish to do a croftland bird survey.  It was a beautiful morning with the early sunshine highlingthing the Torridion hills.  The second was taken while I was up at Inverewe for Occupational Health Testing and I took a short detour to Badachro near Gairloch and spotted this interesting old building.  It looks like it is a bit of amixture of timber cladding and corrugated tin and perhaps served as a school in earlier days.  I really likes the colours with the dark red porch and window frames against the blue-ish hue of the walls.

I had the great pleasure this afternoon of meeting Robin Satow, an old friend and ex-colleague, off the steam train in Kyle.  Along with loads of train buffs I decided to try and capture its arrival on 'film' - digital really.  The images were interesting but I felt a conversion to old style sepia would be appropriate and this was the result.  I also included a little additional grain and a bit of a positive vignette to create that vintage character.  This shot was quite heavily cropped as the closer ones were a bit shaky and blurred.  The train comes to Kyle fairly often but this is the first time I have actually been in the right place at the right time to capture an image of it.  The Kyle Line is ranked as one of the top railway journeys on the world and its last few miles pass along the shore of the Balmacara estate where I work, arguably the best bit of the entire route, especially on a bright sunny day like today with excellent views over the Skye.