Scotland Blog

We visited the area around Loch Tay recently and while the weather was less than perfect the scenery was brilliant and the view of Ben Lawers was still visible through the mist. This is a great location to visit and can easily be driven to from Glasgow, Edinburgh, Perth or Fife. 

Some of the roads are single track, especially up Glen Lyon so you need to take time and drive carefully.

Picture of Loch Tay taken from the Ben Lawers hotel.

Ben Lawers hotel serves food for tourist and hill walkers as well as providing accommodation.

Larger pictures of Loch Tay and Hotel photo

If you are a climber or hill walker you may find this munro map useful of the area around Ben Lawers

I love taking snapshots of anything, I especially enjoy taking photographs of scenery and Scotland. I recently came across a website that sells pictures commercially and the site has a section on Scotland.

Why mention this, simple really, one of the things I would like to be able to do is photograph skylines and clouds. I just think clouds make for a beautiful photographic subject and there is something magical about them. I am not very good at explaining what I mean, just that when you look into the sky you can see art in the sky that changes with every movement. Sorry I am not much of a poet, nor am I very good at photographing clouds.

Well Paul is very good at taking photographs of clouds, and many other pictures of Britain, so drop into pk4 images - landscape photography by Paul Gaythorpe and have a look at the Scotland pictures,

The Glasgow 3D Model is certainly worth having a look at. This is a 3D computer generated model made by SkylineGlobe for Glasgow City Council. You will need to will need to download the terra Explorer software (7.5MB) then go to the Glasgow Urban Model page and click on the 3D model link.

If you are using Windows Vista you will be prompted about accessing the software in Windows Browser protected mode - it does not work otherwise so I guess you just have to say yes to that one. It will take a few minutes to download the model depending on your broadband speed, if you are on dial-up then go visit a friend with broadband!

Glasgow a fantastic city and has a number of companies offering tours of the city.

We have been out and about with the great spring weather and I have added a few pictures I have taken of Dunkeld, hope you like them.

Hill walking in Scotland is an all year activity, although many people like myself will go walking in Scotland during the spring and summer, often when we are on holiday. I recently came across a website that has loads of information on hill walking in Scotland and on the site is a Google Mountain Map of Scotland showing many of the mountain areas including munros, corbetts and grahams - if these terms are new to you they are mountains of a certain height, munros being the highest and are over 3,000 feet.

The BBC has reported a massive discovery of sea monster fossils: The 150 million-year-old fossils were uncovered on the Arctic island chain of Svalbard - about halfway between the Norwegian mainland and the North Pole and you can read more about this on the BBC website.

And back to the old fossil that writes this blog - yes I won the “photo” competition the other day at work, not bad for an amateur up against two far more serious photographers. The BBC also have photo competions as well as daily photography sites and if you use this search link you will find some of the pages on the BBC about this. Maybe one day I will be good enough to enter these!

It has been reported that September has been one of the warmest recorded and it did feel like an Indian Summer, that is one that has come late in the year. Certainly it has been a fantastic summer this year and it takes me back to how summers used to be in the 70’s.

At work last Friday I entered into a small competition with another 2 avid photographers. I hate to admit it both are better at taking pictures and I was envious of the pictures I was shown. Interestingly the pictures were in a 16×9 Aspect Ratio, a format I had never used. I have of course seen prints in this format and have thought they looked interesting. Anyway the competition is where we put in £2 each (for a bottle of wine) and the winner gets all. So the theme is Water and I went off snapping some photos with this theme. In the process I also experimented with the 16×9 picture format and while it does not look that cool on a blog (where the size is limited) it does look pretty good on an ordinary web page where it is sized to 1024 wide. Below is a couple of the pictures.

Larger picture of these flowers for wallpaper

For a larger picture of the hoverfly on flowering ivy

And the spider web and the “water theme”

If you want it for wallpaper

I have over the last couple of years taken hundreds of pictures of swans and this morning was no exception.  As I was passing Lindores Loch in Fife I noticed a group of young cygnets on the loch so I stopped for a couple of minutes and snapped off a few pictures.

If you would like this as wallpaper then I have a larger image located here  I did have hundreds of pictures on a photo gallery using Coppermine however I was constantly getting spammed and I decided to drop the software. I do think it is excellent photo gallery software and it is possible I just have not figured out how to stop comments being added. I did set the length of the comment to zero, however it did not stop the twits trying to leave url links and I just got fet up with it. I am now in the process of adding the photos to my site using ordinary web pages and I am also experimenting with Google Picasa2 and Simpleviewer - I just bought the Pro version of simpleviewer to allow me to play around with the layout. The free version is great and I am impressed with this Flash based photo gallery software.

Well I should start by saying that their is no problem with Photographs other than the amount of space they take up on your computer. My 4 + year old Dell desktop (or is it 5 years?, not sure as time seems to fly) has been struggling for a while and compared to the new computers at work they make my main machine feel like something out of the ark. The machine was bought with 1GB of RAM and a fast processor (at that time) now it feels like a 2CV going up a hill with 3 passengers. Now that does show my age, and most people will not even know what a 2CV is, well it is a fantastic car and you can read about it on wiki.

So what has an old computer and a 2CV got in common, well other than I used to drive a 2CV and I now have a slow computer, not much. Both were/are slow. Yet yesterday I got around to shifting about 25GB of pictures off my main hard drive and then ran the Microsoft Windows Disk Defragmenter on the C: drive and low and behold my computer is now running approximately twice as fast as it was yesterday morning.

So if you have a computer where you constantly add / remove files - such as photographs, then it may be worth remembering to (a) empty the recycle bin (b) run Disk Defragmenter at least once in a while, this tool is found in Start - All Programmes - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Defragmenter

And if you are taking lots of pictures with your digital camera then it is worth investing in a portable hard disk, they are not that expensive and can reduce the stain on your computers hard drive.

Last thought for the day, Microsoft tends to stuff everything into My Documents - sub-folders I suspect this can slow down your computer considerably, this is based on intuition and not any science. Sure it is a handy location for storing and locating documents, personally I am old fashioned and prefer to create folders on the C: drive (or other drive if you have more than one hard disk).

This is all pretty irrelevant if you have a nice new computer with 320GB of hard disk space, unless of course you find it getting slower and slower, try the defragmentation tip and if that does not work check out that you don’t have virus or spyware clogging up and killing your computer, that however is another story.

Well I just thought with all the mess that the Scottish Executive is getting into with Audit Scotland that RelocateScotland.com would be a cool name to snap up to help all the poor civil servants move to Inverness from their jobs in Edinburgh, or worse still to Glasgow. Now before you all get annoyed at me saying “or worse still to Glasgow” lets get something straight, I love Glasgow, it’s my home town. What I get pissed off about is some stupid politician making a decision to move people out of their homes and communities due to some form of political correctness.

It is nearly as bad as white British males not getting jobs in certain police forces, just because some ****** said they need a propotion of black police and if you are white, male and British (or Scottish) then you are simply not good enough.

Lets start getting real.

Another thing that is really annoying me at moment is the advert on Scottish Radio about celebrating the lives saved due to smoke free Scotland. Some person (well I would actually say twit) thought this one up. .. let us play a recording of an actor making out they are dying from cancer and the sound of patriotic Scottish music and say they are celebrating the lives saved from Cancer. Well I have news for you, the last thing I will do is give money to the Cancer Charity that pays out good money to piss the majority of Scots off. If you want our money just say so don’t give us crap adverts.

Wow I am really in a bad mood today so let me lighten things up a little. I was at a meeting in Stirling the other day and I noticed a photo opportunity, no, not some hot Scottish girl, a picture of the Wallace Monunent and a pear.  A bit of a strange combination I know.

Picture of Wallace Monument and a Pear

Wallpaper