The Mighty Isle of Arran - #1
Last week I spent a wonderful week in the gorgeous Isle of Arran.
Now I feel I need to preface this with an admission that this was a holiday of recharging and relaxation, so I did not consciously aim to take photographs. This being the case I was still out almost every day taking advantage of the wonderful surroundings and great weather that we had.
For anyone who has not been to Arran, it’s an island off the west coast of Scotland, with a mountainous northern half and a flatter and more forested middle and southern part. The island is not big, you can drive round the coastal road in just over an hour and circumnavigate the whole island, however there is a wealth of different landscapes and sights to see, from brewery tours, to castles, mountains, forests ,waterfalls and beaches, this island has them all.
Last year when we came in April we arrived in snow showers and the peak of Goatfell was white. This year even though we are here the same time of year its much warmer and drier, so much so that the week prior to our arrival had seen some of the worst wild fires in years on the island - more of that in a while.
You can see how much drier it was this year as there was no white water to be seen compared to the cascading waterfalls in 2024!
I began our journey with the intentions of filming the whole thing and pulling video together for it, however that soon fell by the wayside as I was just enjoying the trip and focussed on relaxing.
Something I want to be very careful of is making sure that I don’t turn photography into a chore. I want to enjoy it and actively look forward to roaming around with the camera and capturing some images.
So I quickly settled on this holiday being about the two of us (and Ghillie, our Border Terrier) just relaxing and enjoying things. I would use the camera when the mood hit rather than forcing it.
Ghillie our Border terrier loving the coastal walks around Arran
To my delight this approach actually enhanced my creativity. I was seeing compositions that I would otherwise maybe not have seen because I would have been planning too much and looking for a specific shot.
There were some wonderful evenings where the light was soft and I just got up and went for a walk to try and find wildlife or a particular landscape image that I had thought about earlier that day. I truly was enjoying the environment and how it was making me feel.
And I have tried to put that across in some of my images too. I want to share some of what we say and will split it into 3 main areas:
Wildlife
Landscape
Observational
Because each of these represents a different challenge and mindset to me. As a result I’ll try probably cover each one in its own weekly blog.
Classic example of challenges - to get a clear ish shot I needed a shallow depth of field so only one cormorant is in focus - Iso 640, 600mm, f/6.3, 1/1000s
Wildlife:
This is an area I am just starting to really get into and am rapidly appreciating the challenges of balancing the need for a fast shutter speed, a long zoom and the inevitable higher ISO that comes with it.
I have definitely fallen into the ISO trap that I think lots of us do, sticking to 100 for the sharpest of images and being almost allergic to going higher than 400. If this is you, try and capture some birds in flight. It gives you a great appreciation for the flexibility the higher ISOs provide and when editing the relatively low impacts that noise actually brings.
There are lots of sharpening tools out there and the ultimate presentation of the image is also key here - if all you are looking to do is post it online then a cropped image at ISO 10000 can look surprisingly sharp!
After some previous experimentation with settings I now have a memory preset on the camera which automatically sets the camera to 1/1000 shutter speed at F6.3 with a variable ISO all the way up to 32000. Along with some specific tracking focus settings and a burst shutter mode, this makes for a quick switch into wildlife mode, specifically wildlife in motion. incidentally these were the settings used in the above image
Now some of the images I have taken may well have been better with some different settings and I did try some, however I was on holiday so I did not want to spend ages faffing about with settings and experimenting, that’s probably something to spend an afternoon at a nature reserve for!
I managed to grab some hand decent shots os a local Heron that had its fishing grounds just by the gold course we walked along each day. Then there were the cormorants that were fishing out in the harbour - these images required the full 600mm and then a crop to get into them. Finally I managed to capture some local Robins in the hedges alongside our home for the week
At the famous Brodick Castle there are some fabulous gardens within which is a secluded hide from which you can view the red Squirrel population on Arran. Thankfully due to its island nature grey squirrels have not managed to gain a foothold here so the smaller red continues to thrive.
For these images I altered my settings slightly so that the shutter speed was reduced to either 1/400 or 1/640 as the subjects were not moving as much as birds in flight. The ISO was the automatic variable so range from 4000 to 100. Balancing that depth of field with the ISO and light is by far the trickiest thing, however , my experience so far is to sacrifice the ISO as too shallow a depth of field can potentially leave part of the subject out of focus and too slow a shutter speed will introduce movement blur. A little grain is something that can be worked on.
