The Name's Bond.

Menstrie Bond.

The clouds were reluctant to unwrap themselves from the Ochil Hills today so I stopped for a bit by this bench to watch them crawl along their slopes. This is a great vantage point to watch the hills changing through the course of the day and through the course of the year, and I'm thinking there's maybe a series of shots to be had here.

Down in the hillfoots the warehouses between Menstrie and Alva store thousands of barrels of whisky (though not nearly as much as the nearby complex at Blackgrange). The laboratories to the left used to kick out some strange smells years ago (when Dr. Magnus Pyke was tinkering with his test tubes down there) but all that seems to be well filtered out now by the time it's released to the atmosphere.

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Before I uploaded this image I looked back at the original straight from the camera and realised how much post-processing I'm doing with some of these shots nowadays. I know some people have a bit of an issue with this but for me the process doesn't start and finish when the shutter's clicked. I spend as much time tweaking the shot in the digital darkroom to bring back as much of the atmosphere of the location and situation as I remember it. If you're interested, the original untouched version of this is posted here for a comparison.