Kilchurn Castle watercolor

Another in the series of castle photos that are being turned into digital watercolor paintings. This is Kilchurn Castle on Loch Awe, near Inverary, as seen from the south across the lake. Like Urquhart Castle on Loch Ness, this castle lies in ruins, having been abandoned in 1760. It was a Campbell stronghold from the 1500s until about 1690 when Fort William was established by the government as the main barracks for troops in the area.

I used basically the same technique to convert the photo to the digital painting, although due to the different colors in each shot, some adjustment in the process is required to obtain a pleasing effect.

Loch Castle

Another image to art conversion. This photo was taken out of the car window while driving by at about 60 mph. It's just a snapshot, and not a very good one at that. But after some rotation and cropping and special treatment, it turns into something nicer. Check out the larger version on the flickr page.

Duart Castle Digital Watercolor

The lower image is a digital watercolor of a photograph of Duart Castle, on the island of Mull in Scotland. It was cropped from the larger image (top) that was pretty washed out due to my having to shoot into the sun from the deck of the ferry to Craignure. I played around with it a lot trying to save the colors, but I just couldn't get enough contrast without ruining the photo, so I decided to convert it into a painting instead. I was trying to achieve that look of an old painting that you sometimes see in an art book or something. Don't know if I succeeded or not, but I like the final result.

Barak Obama wearing a kilt

Is something you will probably never see, but look here for another story featuring men in dresses.

Grandfather mountain games

See the blog on New River Journal and some pics on Flickr for info about the Highland Games this past weekend.

Edinburgh Schoolgirl

This is a random shot I got walking back to the hotel near James Heriot's School in Edinburgh. You probably remember that Heriot wrote the "All Creatures Great and Small" books.

Anyway, it was actually kinda late in the afternoon-evening when I walked by the school. Summer in Scotland means long days and twilight nights. I don't know why this girl was apparently standing in front of the school waiting for a ride at this time of day. It had to be after seven local time.

I saw her ahead as we turned the corner, and decided to try to get a candid shot of her. I set my lens to 18 mm and just pushed the shutter release as I walked by. The original image is a bit wider than this, but has an extraneous person in the frame that I had to crop out. I liked the angle of the shot, however, so I preserved it in the final cut. I also applied some softening. The image on Flickr is found here.

Photography services web page

My photography portal is located at http://sites.google.com/site/newriverphotography/

digital art

I have been playing around some lately with digital art. I am not an artist by any means, by which I mean I can't draw. But with digital tools I can at least experiment with filters and techniques that make photographs look more like paintings.

This is a photo I took recently of a girl at a family reunion. The image on the bottomis the original photo and the one on the topis the processed image. I'm not totally happy with the processing, but it is a pleasing effect. I think the hand has too much detail, but I like the way the face turned out almost flat.