articles/Landscape/Kintyre-page1

Mulling Around Kintyre - part 1 of 1 2 3 4

by Paul Gallagher Published 01/04/2014

There is a link to the previous feature in that across the 16 miles of sea from Antrim, the rocks resurface and run seamlessly along the length of the Kintyre peninsula. Seamlessly, though, is a misnomer, the geology around these parts is as complex as any in Scotland. Indeed Arran, on the left of the headline image is made up of rocks from more than eight periods of continent building and volcanic activity compiled as the rocks formed hundreds of millions of years apart and the donor super-continents wandered about the surface of the globe. It was finally completed 65 million years ago as America tootled off to open the Atlantic and a resulting volcano burst forth to form the Goat Fell complex. Kintyre itself is less complicated, most of it being compiled during the Cambrian mountain building phase when the super-continents of Avalonia and Laurentia collided. Even so, the club foot at the southern end of the peninsula is different and separated by a granite dyke which runs across from sea to sea between Campbeltown and the airport. The area is small, for 50% of that distance is occupied by the airfield's runway! The rock seam which runs across to Antrim is the north-western side of the Highland Boundary Fault. To the north-west are the Dalradian, Grampian Highland group while to the south-west the rocks are part of the Midland Valley group. Arran is in the middle of this and contains a mix of 400-million-year-old Old Red Sandstone, 260-million-year-old New Red Sandstone, with a huge intrusion of granite in the middle - it is little wonder that the scenery is so varied and spectacular!

Kilbrannan Sound

This image was shot from the beach at Skipness looking south-south-west down the sound; Arran is to the left, the Kintyre peninsula to the right. The image was shot on a Nikon D800E using a 24mm PCE lens at f13 for 61 seconds' exposure. Camera filtration was a Big Stopper along with a Lee 0.9 Grad filter to control the sky. The Big Stopper induces a blue cast and Paul took a reference shot without the filter to obtain a marker for colour balance. Accordingly the blue was dialled out with a change from 5750°K to 6950°K. Other adjustments were made to control a small level of highlight and shadow clipping.

Now this feature was started to answer a question about sharpening images from D800s, which have more than 7,000 pixels of width to play with.

Claims have been made about the new sharpening engine in Photoshop CC and so this too needed exploration. We usually follow the workflow of the PixelGenius group in one form or another - that is to pre-sharpen a Raw file (or 'capture' sharpen as they call it) followed by an inkjet-specific sharpen ahead of printing (usually to around 20x16-inch size). The inkjetspecific sharpening is the PixelGenius variant of High Pass sharpening,

allied to both sharpening and adjusting the actual High Pass layer to control

• Mulling Around Kintyre page 1
  
• Mulling Around Kintyre page 2
  
• Mulling Around Kintyre page 3
  
• Mulling Around Kintyre page 4
  

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