EILEAN DONAN CASTLE

By Margary Maskell (Area 13)

During the summer of 1998, Kevin and I decided to spend 10 days up in Scotland, on a camping and bed and breakfast basis, depending on the weather, and the time we were staying at a place. After camping at Glen Coe for 2 days, we slowly made our way up the west coast of Scotland. First stop was Dornie, for one night at a B & B place, which was directly opposite the Eilean Donan Castle. Great!

This picture was taken the following morning, whilst waiting for breakfast to be served. I had already taken some images the evening before, but the tide was out, and the reflections weren't so good.

Once home again, after a coastal tour round to John O'Groats, (where it was foggy), and back to Fort William via Loch Ness, all the Sensia 100 ASA films were sent off to be processed. I scanned the slide into the computer and produced a straight forward colour print. As I had previously been playing around with colour negative film to produce grainy black and white prints in the darkroom, I thought I would convert the colour image to greyscale, up the contrast, and then increase grain via use of the unsharp mask filter, to produce a digital version.

Whilst I had the two versions up on the screen, Kevin came into the room, had a look, and suggested I try overlaying the two images, as they were the same size, and change the opacity of the black and white layer, to let the colour come through. I quite liked the effect, as it gave the impression of a tinted black and white photograph.

I have since found that this technique doesn't work on all images - greens come through very well, but blues and reds come through as a muddy grey.