Light Trails and a Missing Contact Lens
People sometimes say that us photographers are a self-centred lot. Aloof, disinterested, absorbed in other worlds and always looking for places to escape from everyone else are the kind of accusations that get levelled at us at times. So when one of the party (an optician by the way) manages to lose a contact lens and render himself half blind as the dusk gathers around us on a remote hillside you'd expect the others to refuse to lead him to safety until enough traffic had filled the Glencoe pass to provide an unbroken stream of light over the course of a 157 second long exposure wouldn't you? Well that's good, so you're not going to be disappointed then.
I'm not sure which one of us had cooked up the idea of hanging around on a lofty crag on a freezing cold evening when the award winning Clachaig Inn, barely a mile distant was open with its offer of warm hoppy fluids and hearty portions of game pie and chips. But the rest of the party nodded in agreement and waited for the light to fade. You may have seen from my previous post that we decided to make what we could of the oranges and yellows that filled the south western sky while we awaited the blue hour, trying to make sympathetic noises in the direction of our stricken comrade while at the same time cursing his very existence. For a time we all scrabbled around on the ground, looking for a tiny piece of clear silicone that would be barely visible at the best of times, whilst repeatedly glancing along the glen to see whether the sky was doing anything interesting. In time it did, and many exposures later I finally got that light trail all the way down to the shores of Loch Achtriochtan or thereabouts. What I find most interesting in retrospect is that there was still a yellow glow in the distance, despite it being dark enough catch the lights of the cars in a long exposure.
It goes without saying that we never found the contact lens, and we had to lead him down off the hillside in the darkness, much in the way that James Garner once did with Donald Pleasance in a famous film scene. Once he'd found the spare glasses that he'd left in the rental car and checked that his own collection of RAW files had made it through quality control we wasted rather less time in reminding him that it was his turn to buy the first round.
Light Trails and a Missing Contact Lens
People sometimes say that us photographers are a self-centred lot. Aloof, disinterested, absorbed in other worlds and always looking for places to escape from everyone else are the kind of accusations that get levelled at us at times. So when one of the party (an optician by the way) manages to lose a contact lens and render himself half blind as the dusk gathers around us on a remote hillside you'd expect the others to refuse to lead him to safety until enough traffic had filled the Glencoe pass to provide an unbroken stream of light over the course of a 157 second long exposure wouldn't you? Well that's good, so you're not going to be disappointed then.
I'm not sure which one of us had cooked up the idea of hanging around on a lofty crag on a freezing cold evening when the award winning Clachaig Inn, barely a mile distant was open with its offer of warm hoppy fluids and hearty portions of game pie and chips. But the rest of the party nodded in agreement and waited for the light to fade. You may have seen from my previous post that we decided to make what we could of the oranges and yellows that filled the south western sky while we awaited the blue hour, trying to make sympathetic noises in the direction of our stricken comrade while at the same time cursing his very existence. For a time we all scrabbled around on the ground, looking for a tiny piece of clear silicone that would be barely visible at the best of times, whilst repeatedly glancing along the glen to see whether the sky was doing anything interesting. In time it did, and many exposures later I finally got that light trail all the way down to the shores of Loch Achtriochtan or thereabouts. What I find most interesting in retrospect is that there was still a yellow glow in the distance, despite it being dark enough catch the lights of the cars in a long exposure.
It goes without saying that we never found the contact lens, and we had to lead him down off the hillside in the darkness, much in the way that James Garner once did with Donald Pleasance in a famous film scene. Once he'd found the spare glasses that he'd left in the rental car and checked that his own collection of RAW files had made it through quality control we wasted rather less time in reminding him that it was his turn to buy the first round.