I think, in fairness, I have hardly had the time to look at the photographs I took, since I returned. There are a few that I rather liked, from the trip, so I will post them all up here over the next few days.

This was taken in the “Crystal Castle” alternative lifestyle / buddhist gardens, which were near Byron Bay. Totally amazing place to spend the entire day, just chilling out and getting back in touch with what’s important in life.

I’ve just realised that the soft-focus effect on this buddha has completely hidden the sense of scale there was. Well, the buddha statue was easily about 5-7 metres tall (15 to 20 feet, or so, I guess). Really quite unbelievable.

Taken last summer, whilst out in Byron Bay, Australia. Light was completely “non-existent” for this shot…. could barely see my hand in front of my face when taking it. However, with a sufficiently long exposure, you begin to build up an image from tiny scraps of ambient light, with the advantage that you also get some stunning starscapes as well.

Hope you enjoy. I think updates are going to remain sporadic for the foreseeable future. Sorry folks, just a bit too busy.

It’s a cracking place, and continues the totally awesome trend around Glasgow of having huge mature woodland estates that are freely open for all to use.

Anyway, the house itself is suffering massively from subsidence, so I have performed some mild perspective correction on this shot using Photoshop, as well as some levelling and curve manipulation etc. The original shot just looked outrageously wonky.

Sadly, this will be my last shot using the Nikon 24-70 f2.8. It goes back to www.lensesforhire.co.uk tomorrow, having had a thoroughly busy week. At some point I’ll need to consider buying this lens, as it truly is amazing to use.

The Cathkin Braes Country Park is being trialled as a possible venue for Mountain Bike races. We completely forgot the race was on when we went walkies with the dog, however it was great to see a wide range of folks using the park.

This chap just appeared up the hill at the right time. Quite happy with the result, although I feel it’s difficult to display portrait-orientation images using the current format of the blog. Any ideas?

This one’s from Melbourne.

As the place is actually still a building site (they are currently constructing turbines just to the right of the shot) access is a little restricted. I drove for miles down a single-track road, which led to the “National Turbine Centre” (a promising-sounding place!). However, although there were some spectacular views of the turbines, it was difficult to stop anywhere, and it generally didn’t fit in with the ideas I had.

Deciding to take a different approach, I went out onto Eaglesham Moor, and followed a small road leading to Dunwan Dam, as well as a really awesome farmhouse perched on the side of the reservoir / wind farm. The reservoir banks would have given an amazing shot of turbines, sunset, and reflection on the water, however the whole area was thoroughly fenced off. However, I found that if I hiked up onto a hill beside the farmhouse, I could get the shot I wanted.

The light this morning was phenomenal - so soft and crisp, it seemed the countryside was alive with detail. I took this as a casual snap, but was really happy with how it came out… so it’s here!

Anyway, the side-effect about all this is that I had hours to kill before I could really start proper work… ideal for a spot of photography!

This is an old mill building in Paisley’s town centre. I remember driving past it as a kid and it being absolutely derelict… but like many old buildings, it’s been converted to “luxury accomodation”.

As many of you might realise, I’m continuing my on-again off-again romance with HDR imagery…

It was 5pm on Sunday before we got out, and we started hiking up the side of Conic Hill as the light faded away.

After some words of wisdom from a descending walker (”it gets dark up here at night”, no really?) we stopped just short of the summit to take some shots looking West over Loch Lomond.

I think the lights in the distance are either Greenock or Helensburgh, but neither of us could care, really. It was just good to be out again!

It seemed that, within minutes of this shot, we were in almost complete darkness. The descent was actually quite tricky, lots of slippery rocks and muddy slopes - however we had our trusty iPhones to guide us. I’ll bring a proper head torch next time.

Merry Christmas everyone, and all the best for 2009…