B&W in Orkney

All very nicely done Wim.

Very nice BWs, much more expressive than colour images, imo. Many thanks for posting.

Hi Wim,

Thanks for posting. Love Scotland, and the B&Ws are little different......

Cheers, Rod

I like 3 and 4 the best... the menacing clouds -- and especially the DOF with the up-close old house and fence in the 4th picture. There were some really good shade gradations in the others, as well, too, though. I like the way you highlight verticals, as well.

Jeff

I like them very much. What PP did you do? I gather from your comments that you shoot in B&W on these trips as opposed to shooting in colour and converting to B&W in pp. They are very nice. I really need to do some B&W shooting. I keep forgetting how much I really like B&W. Thanks for posting.

Nice shooting, love the B&W, the last is my favorite - thanks for the muted tour.

Nice ones, Wim!

I've been to the Isle of Skye, but not to the Orkney Islands. But I like Highland Park a lot.

Do you have any pics from the interior of the distillery?

Cheers: Phil

Wim, these are alll very nice. Superb composition IMO, and you handled the high dynamic range very well. B&W was the right choice.

I like them a lot. B&W is definitely appropriate.

Really enjoy B&W.

Number three is especially appealing - well done.

I like the composition in both 1 & 4 very much.

Raw and wild landscape - those Orcadians are a hardy lot! Thanks for sharing.

BTW, I love Highland Park - it's the quintessential Scotch whisky IMO, and my favorite single malt.

A really nice series. Initially i liked the first one, then I thought no the second is better, then the third. In the end I think I'll have to say they are all well done and nicely composed.

JeffAHayes said:

I like 3 and 4 the best... the menacing clouds -- and especially the DOF with the up-close old house and fence in the 4th picture. There were some really good shade gradations in the others, as well, too, though. I like the way you highlight verticals, as well.

Jeff

Click to expand...

Tx Jeff,

There is sth about a square crop that brings out both verticals and horizontals in an image. Obviously they get treated "equally" because of the same FoV in both dimensions. But it's more than that IMHO...

Wim

Bob Corson said:

I like them very much. What PP did you do? I gather from your comments that you shoot in B&W on these trips as opposed to shooting in colour and converting to B&W in pp. They are very nice. I really need to do some B&W shooting. I keep forgetting how much I really like B&W. Thanks for posting.

Click to expand...

Tx Bob,

I actually always shoot RAW, but I vary the JPG mode depending on the subject. That way, the in-camera previews are closer to the end result I pursue, and I get more useful feedback.

So yes, I do shoot colour and convert to B&W in PP, though it doesn't feel like that to me, since I never get to see the images in colour.

After importing into Lightroom, I select the first image, select LR's B&W mode, up the contrast dramatically, bring out shadows and recover highlights (more than I do for a colour image), crop it to square and add vignetting. That gets synched throughout the entire collection of images, so that first image is the only one I'll see in colour.

After that it's down to tuning the various settings such as clarity, adjust the colour mix to brighten/darken the sky/water, and add various masks to darken/brighten parts of the image. I do go into detail for every image.

Some images (such as the 4th of this series) are multiple exposures that I combined using the LR/Enfuse plug-in, which allows for bringing out those dramatic skies.

Finally (not represented in these four images) I sometimes bring out tiny bits in colour in my B&W series, esp for the whisky trip shoots. Originally, the reason for this was the colour of the whisky. Though I've done this for other subjects as well since. For this I don't convert to B&W in the same way, but use LR's masks with the saturation slider all the way down to get as much colour out of the image as possible except for the subject. The last bits are desaturated using the adjustment brush. Here's an example from last year's trip to the Speyside:



Wim

--
Antwerp, Belgium, GMT+1

philzucker said:

Nice ones, Wim!

Click to expand...

Tx Phil! Sorry for the late reply, been away for the week-end.

philzucker said:

I've been to the Isle of Skye, but not to the Orkney Islands. But I like Highland Park a lot.

Click to expand...

You should go there. It's a beautiful region, well worth visiting. Our whisky trips are only short 3 days trips, and I always regret not being able to stay longer in the area we visit. This year we saw more sights and less distilleries, but the regret at not being able to stay on was more than previous years. I am hoping to return to Orkney one day for a longer walking holiday!! Of course, we were lucky with the weather, which is not a given in that part of the world...

philzucker said:

Do you have any pics from the interior of the distillery?

Click to expand...

Here you go:


Our group at the gates of Highland Park


Malting floor at Highland Park


Drying the germinated barley at Highland Park


Burning the peat at Highland Park


Alcohol vapours come out of a washback at Highland Park (with Brand Heritage Manager Patricia Retson)


Still room at Highland Park

Hope you enjoyed the tour! ;-)

Wim

--
Antwerp, Belgium, GMT+1

Jim King said:

Raw and wild landscape - those Orcadians are a hardy lot! Thanks for sharing.

BTW, I love Highland Park - it's the quintessential Scotch whisky IMO, and my favorite single malt.

Click to expand...

Tx Jim!

Needless to say, our group likes Highland Park as well, otherwise we wouldn't have selected Orkney as our whisky trip destination for this year, there only being one distillery that can be visited, and the remote location not being the easiest/cheapest to get to for a short week-end trip. The distillery tour was splendid though (see pictures in reply to Phil's reply), and the tasting sublime. My favourite turned out to be the 21yo. The oldest we got to taste was a 46yo which is not available commercially unfortunately (or fortunately, because I wouldn't be able to afford it anyway...).

Wim

Thanks everyone for the nice comments!

Wim

I have only had the pleasure of one trip to Orkney which was on business and lasted just two short days. I remember being the only passenger on the plane on the way up from Edinburgh! Whisky certainly got drunk and my faint memory is that it was naturally Highland Park. The hangover early next morning was dissipated by the ferry ride across Scapa Flow to Flotta on a perfect summer's morning. Just sublime! ( A Para Handy reference there)

My first visit to a distillery was as a schoolboy while doing a project on the chemistry of distillation! Ballantines in Dumbarton very generously gave a few of us an extended tour of the distillery with lots of technical background, no samples though! We made our own in the chemistry lab, purely for research purposes of course.

In the 90's I took part in a Scottish project investigating new ways to make whisky barrels. There was a threat from a proposal in the US to allow re-use of Bourbon casks which would have caused serious supply issues for the Scottish whisky industry. Alternate sources of oak were investigated along with heat treatment of barrel staves to "cook" them giving custom flavours. A lot of the current trend for specialist barrel finishes for whisky flowed from that project.

I have a very catholic taste in malts and enjoy them all, Highland, Isles and Lowland styles. Current favourite is one from close to where I grew up - Auchentoshan 21yo.

And thanks for the lovely photos too before I forget what stirred these memories.