1st November 2003

Thank goodness for Winter!  Early mornings are now a much more acceptable 6:30am as it was on this fine October morning.

I had just the morning before received a new lens from ebay.  All the recent photos on this site have been taken with either a wide angle or a short telephoto lens - no zooms I'm afraid, so you have to take certain kinds of shots that suit these lenses.  This was a great chance for me to use my new 'standard' lens which portrays things as your eye sees them - ie. neither zoomed in nor zoomed out.  This makes scenes look very natural, and you have to work with this as you don't have the extra excitment of wide sweeping angles or really tight crops.  Here I have chosen a viewpoint to show really dynamic diagonal layers which draws your eye across the scene to the hill in the background.

I had planned to go up the Pentlands for dawn and couldn't decide which hill would give me the best vantage point for the rising sunlight.  I decided to climb Turnhouse hill (one I hadn't been up before) so it was a gamble that it would afford a good view.

350 metres later (upwards) in the pitch black and almost a broken wrist later I found I had made the right choice.  I couldn't believe that there was snow on the hills!  The view of the sun appearing over the local towns from such a high viewpoint was stunning.