The Kelpies

These are Andy Scott’s magnificent Kelpie sculptures in Grangemouth by the canal. They have been there for more than a year now and I have never seen them. Today we took little HB to see them and naturally cameras were packed. The sky was very largely grey and overcast, so the focus really had to be on shape and form in the first instance, and then bold post-processing to emphasise contrasts and to make metals sparkle where possible. I had some fun just going-for-it I confess!

Most were taken with the Sigma 10-20 at f6.3 You get a lot of Depth of Field with such a wide lens anyway.

The lock-arm balances the foreground nicely in this one with the arm being parallel to the Kelpie’s head.

Emphasising the foreground plates is fun too.

One of the real challenges for Kelpie photography is the ugly cement and electrical furniture everywhere; I tried to make that stuff more of a feature in this one. The pylons have always had the connotations of darkness, horror and even dystopia, so a dark approach brings out the scarier side of the Dobbin duo here.

For this one I used my 70-300 IS handheld and got a bit of distance between myself and the Kelpsters. The compressing effect of the long telephoto has squeezed the Kelpies together, almost into one beast, and set them in the landscape without local furniture distracting from them.