ISO 200, 35mm, f5.5, 1/250 sec

Here’s my darling mother last week. The sun was just about to disappear at this moment and so I took some quick snaps of mum with the last of the light. Note the reflections from the glasses disturbing the eye, lesson learned there! Our walk hadn’t been very successful, some places I thought would be cool turned out to not be cool – I literally ran up the hill in the last 5 minutes of light to try and get a memorial cairn photo, only to find the cairn was too fat in any good shots. Stop building big memorials, think of the photographers, people. Except when I die of course. Then I’m going to have a massive memorial that you need to photograph from space.

The sun started to go. When the light’s low, normally this will happen:

Although the background’s alright, my subject’s gone dark. I could have increased the ISO here (or fixed it in Lightroom) but I wanted to try fill flash to solve the problem. I’ve not tried it before so it would be good practice, and help in my quest to blind my mum. So I forced the camera to fire the flash and experimented with different settings as it got darker and darker outside. The background was too dark in my first shots but upping the ISO to 400 solved that and I got a fairly balanced shot (the other settings were the same as the daylight one):

Try to ignore my mum’s grimacing…

Of course that’s far from perfect but it’s about as good as I’ll get from a standard flash. Pros use flashes on cords, tripods, softboxes to diffuse the light and so on. Again the glasses are a big problem, even worse with flash reflections. I didn’t want to make mum doubly blind so I didn’t make her take them off. A bit of post-processing in Lightroom brings the image out nicely with some contrast boost:

In fact I had to darken the picture overall for this, so originally I should have underexposed I guess. I’m looking forward to trying fill-flash a bit more on my travels! Any further advice on fill-flash and exposure balancing welcome, just leave a comment.

ISO 160, 18mm, f/10, 1/100 sec

Once again I donned my backpack and went walking to practice golden hour photography. Walking is very low on the list of things I want to do after eating three plates of food – but this is the best time for outdoor shots so I forced myself out. After all, for the past 3 months in Scotland most evenings have been spent staring at a dark grey sky or at windows dripping rain (I like to think they’re Susan Boyle’s tears), so we have to make the most of it – and I need the practice!

Earlier in the week I’d gone on the other side of the valley at this time, only to be disappointed. For all my preparation, I hadn’t factored in the sun dipping behind hills on its descent and casting a huge, ominous shadow across half the valley. Proof you shouldn’t rely just on golden hour calculators, you need to figure out what the sun’s going to be hitting in its path when it’s so low!

“Hssssss” trans: “You’re cool”

Although I was just passing this scene to head further up the hill, the loch was so still that the reflections caught my eye. I had no interesting foreground, but then the swan family swam the whole loch to come and say hello (“hissssss”?). Swans aren’t known for their kind manners but even with a signet in tow they just doddled around nearby, didn’t hiss and my life didn’t become a low-budget Birds climax as I’d feared. I had to work very fast before A: I was attacked or B: they sodded off.

Rapidly setting up my tripod turned out to be a waste of time; it wouldn’t go low enough to get the foreground in. So I whipped the camera off and got some handheld shots before the swan decided I wasn’t a threat, or didn’t have any lovely bread – and swam away with its family. One of those unexpected but good photo moments.

ISO 160, 45mm, F/11, 1/20 sec, Tripod

I charged up the hill with the light ticking away. Ultimately I got the kind of valley landscape I wanted and this starburst effect also appeared when I shot above f11. Some other things I learned:

• Take a fleece – it gets cold quickly after the sun goes down up there!
• Although in landscape photography I’d been told to use maximum aperture (f22), my f22 pics weren’t the sharpest. I researched this and apparently diffraction affects the image at this level, making it soft. Each lens has a sweet spot for sharpness and for mine it’s around f11 – even for large distances.
• Don’t keep your mum hanging around in the twilight too long, she gets grumpy.