A wander along Buchanan Street

A lunchtime wander along Buchanan Street with some of my work colleagues.

A wander along the River Clyde

A lunchtime wander exploring the South bank of the River Clyde with some of my work colleagues.

A wander to the Clyde Tiger

A lunchtime wander exploring the Clyde Tiger on the North bank of the River Clyde with some of my work colleagues.

Clyde tiger

The Clyde Tiger is a very impressive mural to promote the Chines Year of the Tiger. It was created by The McFaul Studio and forms part of the Tiger Beer’s “Tiger Lucky Eight” promotion. The mural can be found along the Clyde Walkway on the North side of the Clyde just East of the King George V Bridge, and can be spotted from any train crossing the Clyde on their approach to Central Station.

Although I had walked along Clyde Street a few times in the preceding weeks, I would not have spotted this mural if it wasn’t for a tweet from a fellow photographer. So after checking it out on Thursday with a test shot, I headed back at lunchtime on Friday with my tilt and shift lens and tripod. The main image is constructed from two images, one shifted left and one shifted right, using my tilt and shift lens, then stitched into the letterbox format measuring a massive 30 million pixels.

I will add a page to my Insight pages soon with the detailed steps I went through on site and in post processing to get this great image.

Convert virtual reality of the Clyde tiger to html and insert

This virtual reality hopefully gives you a good appreciation of the location of the mural and it’s size. Below are a few more images, noting that the second one was taken with a fish eye lens, and the last one similar to the first one, but with some titl to attempt to blur the foreground and background. Unfortunately, I didn’t get it quite right, as it hasn’t worked out the way I wanted it to be, so I’ll have to get back there next week to try again.

Walking the edge

Our usual Saturday afternoon walk is always and eventful time for our little Lola. People and dogs galore, and with a bit of luck she can steal some bread from the children feeding the ducks in the river. Nothing is better than splashing in the river, fetching sticks, running circles around ‘slow’ friends and chasing or getting chased by ‘fast’ friends.

The weather was dry but very overcast this afternoon. Trees are budding, but strangely enough and lots of blossoms coming out in the West End gardens, but no blossoms out along the River Kelvin yet. So I just spend an hour throwing sticks and shooting Lola running into the river and clambering back onto the river bank. Then Cara, a bouncy Visla, joined us for the usual dog chases.

Man, this is way too difficult

While out playing in the back lane with Lola, I tried to get some action shots of Lola jumping for the ball. So I tried to throw the ball with my left hand and shoot with my right hand. Man, this is way too difficult. I kept throwing the ball against the wall or in the bushes.

The one above and the four below are the best one of about a dozen I took.

Fun in the mud

Our first walk along the River Kelvin after our two week holiday in the sun and Lola’s 18 day sleep over in Largs. Lola has lost a little weight (and is looking in good shape!), but has not lost her interest in fun, running and ripping sticks to bits. Although it was overcast, it was still a very nice afternoon for a wander along the Kelvin Walkway. The heavy rain overnight had turned the place to a mud bath, but all the more fun.

Lola was having a ball, running with dogs, running circles around other dogs, splashing through the mud and waters, fun digging in an existing hole and ripping reeds and sticks to bits.

While Lola was having fun in the nud, I spotted this little dipper flying from stone to stone on the side of the river. I managed to take a few shots, albeit not the best, as I had to crop a tiny portion of the original taken with my 70-200mm. In fact these are at 100% size, by cropping 800×533 pixels from the original 21mp image. Quite pleased. Need to keep my eyes peeled and bring my bigger guns the next time.

In the end… home to a warm shower.

A dog’s Christmas

You may wonder if Christmas is any different for Lola than an ordinary Sunday, or in other words, is it possible to spoil Lola even more than normal? Indeed, she was spoiled rotten, ripping her own presents open, ripping through the leftover wrappings of our presents, playing with deafening squeeky toys before lunch and getting lots of treats.

The wrapped presents were much more successful than the two soft squeeky toys. The Christmas sock and Santa lasted minutes before the stuffing was being pulled out. Someone suggested that whippets would make excellent dog toy testers. I completely disagree, as no single toy would pass quality control any more. One tiny fault with the stitching and it is ripped open before you can blink with the stuffing scattered all over the house.

All in all, a great morning with a lot of fun. And we got some nice presents ourselves as well.

Waehae, it’s snowing

When we got up this morning, it was to a very big disappointment. Even with all the warnings and predictions, still no snow in Glasgow, when the rest of the country is covered by inches. Life’s not fair! A short ‘do your business first thing’ wander through the back lane and then quickly back to our warm and cosy beds (with Lola’s cosier and warmer than ours!) for another hour of well deserved sleep. A much needed extra hour after a little bit too much red wine last night.

An hour or so later, we got up to go to Churchill’s to get the Sunday papers. When we opened the front door, surprise, surprise, an inch or two of snow had fallen since our first outing. Lola loved it and went into a bouncy, snow snorting, playing mood. Fun with snow all the way to the newsagents and back. As usual, Lola’s good nose sniffed out the treats along the way. Lola reappeared from a hole in hedge with a complete smoked sausage in her mouth.
After reading the papers in bed with a cup of tea, it was time for a play out the back. As you can see from the images, Lola’s a happy bunny in the snow.