I took advantage of a decent day today to get out and do a little bit of photography.  The view of Skye was taken using focus stacking and HDR techniques to try and optimise the focus/depth of field and the exposure.  It looked quite good in colour but I prefer the black and white.

The reflections were inspired by and Ansel Adams photo I saw in a book I got for Christmas, not quite up to his standards but nice colours and textures.

These will be my last photos of 2015 so next year (tomorrow onwards) I embark upon my daily exercise of taking at least one photo, watch this space for more....  Meanwhile, have a Happy New Year.

When I took the photo of the sunset on Loch Alsh earlier this evening I tried doing a series of exposures at different focus points to merge as a focus stacked image.  The result is shown above.  This was a bit rushed and it was pretty hard to see what was in focus due to the failing light but it does appear to have achieved a sharper foreground.  Unfortunately, because each exposure has to be set up manually it takes a bit of time and you will notice that the boat from the exposure in the previous post is missing.  This is because there were five of them in a neat row in this merged image.  I removed them using Lightroom and the photo works fine I think.

I was out for a walk at Lochalsh Woodland Walks with the dogs and my daughter, Eilish, in very wet conditions when we saw this surprising sunset to the west.  I got back tot he house as quickly as possible for the camera and returned to try and get a decent shot.   Canon EOS 5D 28mm (28-300 mm Tamron lens), f/8, 1/2 sec at ISO 100.

With the not so lovely weather we have been having I have had little chance to get out with the camera since Christmas, so I decided to experiment with focus stacking using still life images.  The idea is that instead of using a small aperture to get decent depth of field you take several photos with different parts of the image in focus in each then merge them using Photoshop or similar software.  This way you should get all parts of the image in focus and really sharp.  It took me a while to get the software working and getting the focus right is a bit of a challenge but these are the results....  I am sure I could do better with the focusing on every part of the image but it is surprising how little you need to move the focus ring when zoomed in like this.  Now all I have to do is try it out on a landscape.

This was the fantastic moon that we had last night.  Not a very sharp image because we had light cloud obscuring things a bit but I think it came out quite nicely, certainly a bit atmospheric.

We woke up to heavy wet snow this morning and it just got heavier.  A lot of it has melted now but let's hope for more tomorrow.

This male Blackcap was feeding on our bird feeder today.  This is the first time I have seen one of these guys outwith the summer time.  I gather they do pop over from mainland Europe sometimes when it is cold over there, but I haven't seen one at this time of year before.  I also got a few photos of it on the feeder with Great Tits.

These photos are not quite as sharp as I would like having been taken in poor light through a window to avoid disturbing the birds.  They were taken handheld with my Canon 5D at 1/160s at f/6.3 ISO 500 - 500mm zoom with a Sigma 150-500 lens with Optical Stability switched on.  I had to slightly increase the exposure in Adobe Lightroom as they were a bit underexposed but that was all.

A busy day at work, apart from the Christmas lunch which was very nice, meant I missed the break in the weather when the sun came out today, briefly I should say.  So what to post is the question?  Since I took so many photos for the Higher Photography assignment recently many were not used so here are a few of those that didn't make it or were changed from colour to B&W, either because they didn't match the genre/brief of I felt they were not good enough.  I think they were pretty much all taken on the Balmacara Estate.

It has been a bit of a grey couple of days and work has meant there have been no opportunities to get any new shots so I thought I would look back at a few of my older ones, some of which have been scanned from slides, so that is going back a while.

This old photo of Suilven in Assynt was taken when I was still a student, one fine evening when the light was special.  We were camping at Achmelvich and had been up Quinaig that day.  During the evening I went for a bit of a walk, nearly 6 miles in the end, what it is to be young when going up a hill like that doesn't end up with you knackered for a couple of days afterwards, never mind going for a walk in the evening.  The shot was taken on a 35mm film camera, I can't remember for sure which one but it was probably my old Praktika.  I usually used Fujichrome or Kodachrome slide film.  This digital image was created from the original slide using a lens attachment on my Fuji Finepix S5500, which is no longer working.  Not bad for such an old slide.

I may do this a bit with some of my favourite shots from time to time when I haven't got any new ones.

The map shows where I took the photo from, not the location of Suilven.

We had a wonderful aurora this evening and a fantastic starry night.  very very cold though.  These are my first ever shots of the aurora on camera.