Skip to main content

Last Day Full Day

We left the B&B around 9:00 AM to make the hour and half drive to Edinburgh to check into our last hotel before our flight home tomorrow.  Since the drive was only an hour and half, we were able to stop at Stirling Castle and the Kelpie sculpture.  

The Kelpies (cell phone)
Stirling Castle was nice. It was fairly large castle and definitely less crowded than Edinburgh castle. I liked the wood carvings they had and the grounds were nice.  We did not stay for the noon gun firing (large artillery), which was kicking off a D-Day memorial.  From there we headed to one of the things I really wanted to see, the Kelpie sculpture.  The sculpture is of two horse heads coming out of the water.   The horse heads are several stories tall and made of formed silvered metal around an interior scaffolding.  It was easily visible from the M9.  I thought it was an impressive sculpture.  

From there it was on the hotel to drop off our bags, then over to the rental car place to drop off the car. This is the first time I’m glad I paid for the extra insurance on the car, since we did slightly nick the paint backing into a fence on the second day of driving it.  Once, we got back from the rental place we walked over to the TKMaxx (equivalent to TJMaxx) to pick up an extra piece of luggage.  I packed one extra bag with me but we ended up by a few bulky items like a wool blanket from the wool mill co-op and needed an extra carry on size bag to check.  Thankfully British Airways lets you check two bags per person for free.


While the trip was nice, I’m ready to go home tomorrow. I’m ready to sleep in my own bed and see my doggy.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

2025 Year in Review and Looking Forward to 2026

This year was a bit interesting especially since during the day, I’m a government employee, which resulted in a lot of stress and a 42-day furlough.  I didn’t attend as many cosplay events with the D.C Cosplay group, now Costume and Camera, as I normally would have, due to schedule conflicts.  However, I traveled up to Poughkeepsie, New York for two photo events, one of which I was a featured photographer.  I attended two conventions, one of which didn’t turn out as expected and the other just confirmed my decision to take a break from it.  Though happily I did a lot of studio work this year, which I enjoyed.  But on the other hand, I lost my dear “studio supervisor”, my dog Teddy.  He liked to great clients and then “supervise” while lying/sleeping in his bed. I also started to work on the business side of my photography work, by investing in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) site to manage bookings, schedules, and payments. No more trying to juggle...
Post a Comment
Read more

Cyber Blue

On October 11 th , I worked with Dayvon on a cyber concept shoot. This shoot was designed around a pair of contact lens with a circuit board pattern. This inspired me to think about things like “Blade Runner”, “Tron” and cyber punk in general.    For this shoot I used: Canon 80D 2 Speed lights 2 Phottix strobes 2 Phottix Rectangular Softboxes with a grid 2 C-stands Blue gels Silver garage insulation Backdrop stand Black backdrop Connectable foam workout mats For this shoot I started out using four lights. The first two were small speed lights with blue gels attached placed on the floor aimed at the backdrop.  The backdrop was silver garage insulation, which looks like silver bubble wrap. The backdrop reflected the blue light forward providing a bit of rim light.  My main two lights were the strobes is rectangular soft boxes with grids attached. For this shoot I kept the lighting very low key, styled along that of a photo of Ryan Gosling i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Return to the National Portrait Gallery

On February 28th, I attended the  Costume & Camera  (previously DC Cosplay Photoshoots) event at the National Portrait Gallery in DC.  I have a love/hate relationship with shooting at the National Portrait Gallery; it is a beautiful location due to its architecture, especially on the third floor, and I’m thankful that you are allowed to do portrait photography there as long as you don’t use flash.  What I get frustrated with is the varying colors of light throughout the building and the need to use natural or continuous light.  (I’m a flash girly.)  For this event, I used: Canon R6 24 - 105mm lens Neewer 12-inch LED light Assistant Camera Settings: This shoot was inside the Portrait Gallery, which has a no flash policy, thus I was using a mix of natural and continuous lighting, which affects settings. My ISO ranged from 100 ISO to 3200 ISO with the most common ISO being ISO 1000.  My aperture stayed between F4 and F5, with the most c...
Post a Comment
Read more