For the past two years I have been studying towards an HNC in Photography with the West Highland College - UHI under the tutelage of the fantatsic Simon Larson.  I handed in my final assignment for the Graded Unit this afternoon and so have finished the course.  Unfortunately, like so many things this year, our course fell foul of the Coronavirus pandemic and most notably in my case this had a huge impact of my ability to undertake the Graded Unit project.  For this I had planned to undertake a photgraphic study of the Celtic Rainforest of Wester Ross during March to May.  I did manage to get out for a few sessions prior to lockdown starting and I completed the process for the course as far as was possible.  As part of my project plan I said I would produce a photobook of my shortlisted images, so I decided to make up a mock version in pdf format and it can be dowloaded free of charge here (file is 18.1MB).

For the course I was required to produce at least ten final images for assessment so by way of a small taster I have included them below.

Please feel free to submit feedback on the images above and the photobook.  Also, if you have any queries please get in touch via my contact page.  I hope you enjoy the photographs.

I took this photgraph of the little stand of globeflower plants at Drumbuie this afternoon when I was out checking one of the estate footpaths.  It was a beautiful sunny afternoon with a light breeze to keep the midges away.  The views to Skye and the Applecross hills were fantastic, especially as I have not been out and about much in recent weeks.  It was challenging to balance the exposure with the birght sky to the west as I did not have my full kit with me, so no ND grad filters.  I'll be honest, I did apply a bit of a grad filter in Lightroom, just to recapture some of the detail in the sky.

This shot was taken from the Port an Eorna to Drumbuie shore path, looking towards Drumbuie.  As a composition it is not a particularly great shot but I liked the view and the range of textures and shapes in the landscape, and the bright blue sky with fluffy white clouds set it off nicely.

The following shot was taken from the same path, near Port an Eorna.  I was taken by the bluebells, and tried to capture a view of them in the foreground with something of the hills of Skye in the background.  Again the light was challenging but I think I managed to get it just about right.

The last shot was taken near Duirinish Station. This old gnarled tree has often taken my fancy for a photograph but I almost always walk this path in a clockwise direction.  Today I was going the other way, and so the view of this tree was not the usual one.  It just goes to show that you should take time to move around your subject and consider different angles.  For this one I initially envisaged in in full colour (image 1 below), but then felt that it might look really nice in black & white, emphasising the textures in the bark (image 2 below).  That didn't quite work as well as I had hoped, with the bright background kind of making the tree less obvious than I expected.  So, I tried something I did for a few photos during my study of the Celtic Rainforest in Wester Ross for my HNC course recently (more on that coming up on my blog soon).  That was using Nik Collection's Silver Efex Pro II to convert the image to monochrome but selectively colouring some areas of the background, leaving the main subject in monochrome.  I think this really makes the tree pop out and focuses the viewer's eye on the textures and tones of the tree.  Not necessarily to everyone's taste but something a little different.