Photography lesson: mountains, waterfalls and suiseki
For my birthday I got a full day with a private photo teacher (Simon Larson, Skye). I had discussed what topics I wanted to focus on for the day beforehand, and our first goal was the hill behind the house and my favourite motive of Mossytop. Me being a complete novice in the noble art of photographic terminology and having happily used the point-and-click method hitherto, after a quick theory lesson my pace up the hill was kept down by trying to juggle shutter priority, aperture priority, ISO settings and manual or automatic focus. The day was perfect for the purpose, though, blazing sunshine on the snowpowdered peeks of both Mossytop himself and the Cuillen behind him. 
Despite the light dust of snow, it was surprisingly warm walking up the rather steep slope towards Allt Mor na Dornie (Dornie large creek). Now that’s a tiny creek and runs through Dornie a few steps from our offices. But it does have a couple of nice little waterfalls, and that’s where the second lesson for the day was planned. In particular, one majestic waterfall, where the water cascades down from a height of probably over a meter. It turned out that photographing waterfalls was almost too easy: a small tripod and an ND1000 filter made the camera spend half a minute collecting the few photons coming through the filter for what I consider a quite spectacular photo. (ND means neutral density, i.e. it filters all wavelengths equally much, and 1000 means that it only lets one photon of thousand through, I learnt. Half that would have been fully sufficient and I’ll get a variable filter to see how even less factor will look.) Compare the silky water on the left with the photo without filter on the right , and the filtered picture looks very professional to me.
On the way back down, I got to try manually setting the focus halfway beyond the foreground, to get focus both on the foreground Rohan tree branches (lower left corner) and the “infinitely distant” castle and Mossytop background. This seems to work as well! Now, I have been collecting and displaying suiseki (Japanese viewing stones) since too many of my bonsai efforts died, and thus I also wanted to take some “indoor mountain photos” (a great alternative should there be rain – something that occasionally happens in Scotland, though not today). We thus spent quite some time with my different stones, slave flashes, light stands, softboxes, “barn doors” and a “snoot” and among many other photos I got this delightful ghost of a Scottish heather branch hiding behind a limestone rock from the Burren in Ireland.
