Buachaille Etive Mor is an iconic mountain in the #Highlands of #scotland . The name is Gaelic for great herdsman of Etive .
Over 50 photo gifts are available from the still photo from the same day , including greeting cards, prints, t-shirts, phone cases, mugs and lots more.
The Kelpies in the Helix Park have been open to the public for over 6 months now .The project has been very successful , bringing in over 1 million visitors to the area . For anyone planning to visit Falkirk , the Kelpies are a must see . The Kelpies are positioned in between the old and the new , the Forth and Clyde Canal on the left and the M9 motorway on right. They were inspired by the Clydesdale horses that used to pull boats full of freight along canal. In the 19th century , the canals were the motorways of Britain .
Each Kelpie is 50 metres high and made of steel plates welded onto a framework , like armour plating. More than 600 tonnes of steel was used in the construction of the The Kelpies and more than 10,000 special fixtures are used to hold them together. The two sentinels guard the canal , the first Kelpie looks calm, looking straight ahead and focussed on its load , the second is rearing its head into the sky as if angry or unhappy with its load. Sculptor Andy Scott has spent 8 years on the project and a couple of times he thought the whole thing was going to be scrapped due to its cost.
The original aim of the project was to transform waste land between Falkirk and Grangemouth into a thriving urban greenspace , “The Helix”. This includes a performance area, on which large scale events can be held, facilities for watersports provided by a large lagoon, all surrounded by play areas and high quality pathways. Access around The Helix is provided by 17 miles of cycleways and footpaths.
Questions continue to be raised about the return on investment for the project . The Kelpies have proved themselves a major tourist attraction in the same way the Falkirk Wheel is , but with no visitor centre the fear is visitors may spend little or nothing in the area .Falkirk Council has asked the Falkirk Community trust why a visitor centre was not included in the plans , but the Trust were unable to explain this . There are rumours about concerts being held in the performance area next year , which would bring in revenue to the area just like the recent concerts by Elton John and Rod Stewart across the road at the Falkirk stadium . Callendar Park used to host the Big in Falkirk music and arts festival . The final element of the Helix is a giant playpark. A set of giant wooden tepee-like structures have been built in the adventure zone.
Hundreds of Kelpies gifts are available on Redbubble.
Sony’s reputation for producing top quality full frame cameras is coming on in leaps and bounds with cameras like the A7R . So how could it invent an image sensor which exposes different parts of an image differently, not by using multiple shots , but all at once on a per-pixel basis ? That’s what Sony have dreamed up in a recent patent.
Discovered by SonyAlphaForum, the patent was published on October 30th. It shows a sensor that can expose individual pixels differently depending on where the darker parts and lighter parts of the scene are.
So dark shadows would become ‘long exposure pixels’ while bright highlights would become ‘short exposure pixels,’ essentially spitting out a high dynamic range image without the need to take multiple exposures and combine them.
The big problem is that taking a picture of a fast moving object could be difficult if not impossible when some pixels are exposed longer than others. But Sony addresses this issue in the patent.
They have suggested using a ‘sensitivity-specific interpolation process’ to come up with a final image by combining an entire short and entire long exposure version and to avoid blur , similar to traditional multiple exposure HDR.
You can take a closer look at the technology by reading the full, not to say fairly obscure to the layman ie me and you , patent by clicking here.
