Dunalastair House

 

Dunalastair House lies in remote Perthshire, hidden within a woodland which is gradually reclaiming the building. It's been a target of mine to visit for years, ever since I first saw Sir Simon Marsden's iconic images of it.

I visited on what started as a really foggy day but as I walked down to the house the fog lifted and the sun began to burst through.

The crumbling towers and beautiful design of the place give it an extra air of gothic mystery and the glowing summer foliage is a nice counter to the dark structure of the walls.

I didn't go in the house, it's probably not that safe but to be honest, the best images, I think, are of the outer walls. It's a great place and I hope to return in winter for a different take on this special.

Duffus Castle, Moray.

 

Duffus Castle is my kind of castle, ruined, devoid of tourist tat and best of all free. perched on a small hill surrounded by arable fields it also has a nice atmosphere. It's a place I keep returning to but I don't think I've taken my best shot here yet.

I used some of the bushes next to the car park as a framing device for the first shot. This also conveniently hid the sun and allowed me to add more detail to the clouds. The layers of texture this created are good but it's all a bit nice?

For the processing of the second shot I went for a more grainy IR film look. The health and safety gone mad spiky fence that HES has erected is impossible to avoid, luckily it looks dangerous enough to almost be an historical feature!

The last shot gets more of the IR film look with my "Marsden" preset being applied to make the rugged walls even more rugged!

Luckily the castle isn't too far from home so I can keep returning for the perfect shot!

Elgin Cathedral

This 13th C cathedral has seen it's share of fighting, death and destruction, there's a story in the stones which is one of the thing that draws me to sites like this.

I was watching the forecast to find a day with some decent clouds and Thanks to windy.com I managed to time my visit with some lovely, wispy clouds. Of course, there was still strong sunlight and that caused some issues shooting into the sun, but the Olympus 9-18mm is a cheapo marvel, controlling contrast and avoiding hotspots (something that I struggle with on the more expensive 12-40mm when shooting towards the sun).

Technically you could argue that there are blown out highlights on the second image but the histogram shows there is detail there and I quite like the overexposed flare behind a building. It's something Simon Marsden used to great effect.

 

Ruined Cottage, Highland.

 

I'm always on the lookout for old building while driving about. I found this one just off a main road near Kiltarlity in Highland. I was immediately taken by the white walls and red rood which I knew would make for a nice contrast in IR.

There weren't too many choices for composition as the vegetation was quite extensive and the back of the building was pretty boring. I like the fern in the foreground and was lucky to still have some clouds in the sky.

A slightly wider shot with more surrounding foliage.

These buildings are fascinating but sad at the same time. This would have been a family home for generations and now it will either decay or be demolished to make way for a new build. Capturing images of these places is important as they may be lost soon.

Daviot Church

It was a really grey day so not much inspiration for good images but I thought about the church at Daviot which is pretty close to home and decided to give it a go. This is a well know, iconic church that can be seen from the main A9 when travelling to Inverness.

All the images were processed in lightroom and then I took them into Nik Color Efex where I have a preset simply called Infrared Marsden, which tries to emulate Simon Marsden's grainy, high contrast and glowing images.

 It's remarkable how much detail you can pull out of the clouds, really emphasising the mood of a dull day in a graveyard. Here's the unprocessed version of the above image so you can see the difference!

Unprocessed version

Welcome to the Blog

 

Thanks for visiting my new blog. I'll be posting new images, Infrared Photography tips and other useful stuff here regularly, so please sign up for notifications.

For prints or to purchase digital images please visit my website at www.infrascot.com

Cheers

Colin