Not much longer left of this trip to Northumberland. One more day and then it’s time to head home. It has been a great trip though with the light and weather being  just superb.

One aspect that has changed for me is the focus away from mobile images. I have taken photos using the phone, mainly to add to this blog, but not the quantities of previous years. There is a good reason.

It has been eleven months since I posted to Instagram. I don’t miss it. It’s given me time to concentrate on creating images with the main cameras, rather than use the phone to feed the voracious Instagram algorithm.

Phone images will still have their place. That place is here on this blog. I can shoot images for specific posts, scrapbook type posts and more. I’ve been trying that out over these last few days. It works nicely. Back to quality over quantity.

Best of all, it brings back a role to the Darker Skies blog that it lost some time ago.

Let’s fly a kite! I got the Cheeky Monkey kite last week, but the opportunity to fly it didnt come up until today.

A quiet Northumberland beach, a decent breeze and the little monkey soared away. It was very relaxing.

I might just check out what other kites the shop had again… and get another :)

A photograph straight from the camera… well mobile phone camera. It didn’t need any help. The light was just great yesterday.

Craster is a favourite location along the Northumberland Coast with the impressive Dunstanburgh castle in the background.

One of Craster’s strengths is its compact size. Just find a seat and watch the world go by with your camera at the ready.

More photographs from this location will be published on the blog after I get back at the end of next week.

There is nothing more peaceful than coming across a sleeping dogs. No wonder we have the saying let sleeping dogs lie. It almost seems a crime to wake them. It certainly gives paws for thought :)

The first signs of summer arrived for the UK bank holiday. A hot day which reminded me of an image I’d come across during a spring clean of the main website a couple of weeks ago. The photograph was taken on one of those summer days that seem to stay in the memory. The kind of day you’d like to visit again.

My ankles always ache when I see this photograph. I’d badly bruised my ankles in a fall on a mountain the day before and so my mobility was rather limited. Looking back I was lucky I didn’t break an ankle. Another lucky escape. Time to find a seat and see what wanders into view.

The image was taken at Armadale on the Isle of Skye in September 2014. It was a hot and humid day, so much so that it was quite hazy and misty looking across the water. That day just seems to have stayed with me. Warm and peaceful.

Even with the aid of a walking stick and painkillers, being on my feet was very uncomfortable so I decided to sit down down by the harbour and watch the world go by. This image was taken while i was there.

Everyone seemed lost in there own thoughts. The young men fishing were concentrating on that, observed by the other two and a the dogs. The man in the foreground seemed caught up in his own thoughts looking down at the light glinting on the very blue water.

I need to do more of this type of photography. I’ll have to see what i can come up with when visiting Northumberland later this year.

Post number seven. It’s bee a fun week of posting some of my images from the visit up Moray, Scotland at the end of last year. It’s also great to be using a blog that I’ve had for a long time now. Darker Skies started in 2009 around the same time that I signed up to Twitter, and there were times when I wondered if the blog was really needed. It turns out that it was!

I’m so glad that I didn’t delete the blog. The positivity we had towards social media has taken a severe battering over the years and has largely eroded away. I’m currently thinking over what to do with my Instagram account and whether I should invest any more time, effort and images into that platform. Social media seems to be casting longer and longer dark shadows.

As for the blogs, well they will carry on with Darker Skies coming up to 17 years of age. Even my Tumblr blog celebrated its 14th birthday at the end of last year. I just need to write more and post more often.

It’s been a birthday week for me. Some more sand through the egg timer as my Mum would have said. Each year seems to go faster and faster. Each birthday starts to take on a new meaning when you realise that some of the images in your photo archive are now reaching the age that you were when you took them. A sobering moment.

Tourists walk along the path at the Culloden battlefield site, The flag is one of many that marks where the government forces were placed on the field. A set of blue flags at the other end of the field marked where the Jacobite forces were located.

I haven’t posted a Luna pic for quite some time. Here she is watching the world go by on a sand dune at Lossiemouth, Scotland.

Simply the Best?

My favourite or best image seems to be a popular theme with the photography blogs. I enjoy seeing what photographers pick and it seems to fall into two categories. An image from early in their career or a recent photograph. I’m not going to be too ambitious and I’ll go with a recent photograph and one i just regard as being a favourite from last year.

Better than all the Rest?

Well, no. Not better than all the rest. Although I love the idea of the ‘my best photograph’ article, I do have some problems with it in that I don’t know whether its good to dilute all your work down to one photograph. I tend to divide my own work into decades because I don’t consider myself the same photographer that I was when I was twenty years on, or even ten years ago. We move on and age… like a good wine. Comparing and competing across eras is not useful. Too many variables.

Culloden Moor

So the image I’ve chosen was shot on Culloden Moor near Inverness in Scotland. It was the site of the final battle between the Jacobites led by Charles Edward Stuart and the government forces of King George II led by the Duke of Cumberland. The battle (dramatized in the TV series Outlander) ended any chance of Bonnie Prince Charlie restoring the Stuart monarchy under his father to Great Britain.

Its a site I’ve read about a lot over the past decade or so, and I finally got to visit last year. It was surprisingly busy with coaches full of tourists, but the interaction between them and the place was fascinating to watch. I would like to visit again when its quieter but I did enjoy seeing the moor and seeing people taking an interest in such a remarkable part of British history.

Back Again

It’s been a while since I posted. Time flying by and a dose of ill health didn’t help, but time to post a few images from last year’s Scotland trip.

Sadly the visit was curtailed slightly by catching flu which always ruins any exploring for photographs. No visit to Inverness, or Fort George, or any place for that matter during the second week of the visit.

Everyday Image

Some of the images have been sitting on the computer for too long. Time to put some out on the blog, so all this week I’ll be posting a new image from that trip every day.