Doo View

Drylaw Doocot, East Linton. Towards the end of an afternoon cycling and photographing I did a bit of exploring to try to get an angle on East Linton with Traprain Law behind. My original idea was to get the church steeple and I detoured through Smeaton to see if the view was there. It wasn't - you'd need to be about 50 feet above Preston Mill to get it I think - but I followed a path round the fields to the cottages and this Doocot at Drylaw. Getting this angle involved scrambling through thick brush on the little rocky outcrop and I'm quite pleased with the result.

I spent the morning reading about HDR techniques and downloading various packages for Linux to process the images. The basic idea is to take a range of photos with different exposures, then process to get the "best" of them all combined. Being able to do that with free software is fabulous and I'll be playing with this more. My camera doesn't auto-bracket and I didn't have a tripod, so this could have been a non-starter. But with careful aiming and disciplined button-pressing I got 3 exposures that were able to be aligned and HDR processed successfully.

A couple more on Flickr.

After this shot, I stopped in the Linton for a pint of Harvieston Bitter & Twisted and a read of the paper. Very nice.

Music: I gave in and bought Radiohead's "King of Limbs" from their website. It's the first download album I've bought - I usually get the CD so I have something - and I listened to it as I rode about. I very rarely do that, so it was all a bit surreal. With the image processing after I got home, I wonder if today really happened at all or if it was just a Matrix-style illusion? Either way it's tired me out!