Three Witches

Published

11th December 2024

Modified

11th December 2024

A last hurl up to Scone for a while, and arriving too early as usual, I parked up on the lay-by along the road to kill half an hour before the Three Witches Cafe1 opens.

The lay-by along the road is one of those places I have come to consider a kind of mini-sanctuary, offering a place to think, open the window or get out of the car and just breathe in the nature of this part of Scotland (in between the thrump-thrump of passing vehicles). I might check email, sketch a bit, or reach for a camera to try to capture the never disappointing light that falls on the fields, hedgerows, fences and copses.

My Fuji X-T5 was to hand, still wearing its 50-year-old Nikon 85mm portrait lens, too long for landscape really, so I rotated it 90 degrees and composed a six-frame Brenizer image of the copse along the road. The lens goes much wider than f/2.8 but I thought it might make a nice square pano that draws the eye in to the trees. Click the image for bigger if you want to see that. The full sized image is 135 Megapixels, which would make a decent sized print (about 40 inches square). This one is obviously smaller2 for quicker loading in your browser.

A sketch of the same woods from a few weeks earlier. Fountain pen in a PaperBlanks midi journal.

A sketch of the same woods from a few weeks earlier. Fountain pen in a PaperBlanks midi journal.

Winter light. Fuji X-T5, Nikon Ai-S 85mm at f/2.8. From 6 images using Brenizer method.

Winter light. Fuji X-T5, Nikon Ai-S 85mm at f/2.8. From 6 images using Brenizer method.

The whole point of photography, like all art, is that it makes the viewer feel something. For me, understanding the technical aspects helps me get towards producing something that invokes your mental imagery and makes you feel that something. And therein lies the heart of my current research.

Footnotes

  1. They don’t have a website, unfortunately, but they don’t need one. The people and the food are fabulous and if you can get a window table, it’s just a heavenly place to soak up the Perthshire sunshine. They’re on Facebook.↩︎

  2. It’s 2048 pixels square but you may be looking at it much smaller than that, depending on your browser and screen.↩︎