Janne & Marcus in Scotland - The Grand Prize Trip III

We had done quite much mountain climbing in couple of days, so had little heavy legs in friday morning.
There was no mountain climbing scheduled on friday, only hide photography, looking for capercaillie and traveling to Alladale… so nice little recovering day.

The day started with hide photography. It was little quiet at first, but after an hour the birds came. All at the same time! Same pattern was repeated at the whole morning.
All birds always came at the same time. So there was really quiet times, but also times for real action. We got good pictures of Great Spotted Woodpecker, treecreeper, Chaffinch etc…

After we had our dinner, we went to find the capercaillie. We had been quite lucky since this, but you cannot always win! So we didn’t found capercaillie this time.

When we came back to Pete’s, we started to pack our bags, because it was time to move to Alladale. After couple hours driving, we arrived at Alladale, and all those landscapes looked quite nice when looked through Finnish eyes. Nice rivers flowing between beautiful cliffs, and mountains one after another. The Ghillie’s rest looked very nice and the landscapes around it too, but there were some clouds on the sky.

In saturday morning, we decided to try first with red deers. Our guide Munk came to pick us up, and we headed to another glen where the red deers should be. Suprise suprise, it was raining again, but we got many nice red deer pictures. We also photographed wild boars in Alladale, and got quite a many different kind of pictures about those beautiful animals. In Alladale we also saw couple of elks, and got pictures of those too. Unfortunately, the time goes fast, and it was time to head back to Pete’s in sunday afternoon… luckily with some of thousends of pictures richer.

We didn’t found the capercaillie last time, but we decided to try one more time before we went back to Pete’s. In this time we were more luckier, and we did managed to find that capercaillie.

Lots of pictures and many new species for us to photograph, but it was sunday, and it was time for us to move back to southern UK for the Epson UK printing day. After we had played billiard championchips of the Ballintean, Pete drov us to the Kingussie train station. We had sleeper tickets for night train, so at the monday morning we woke up in London.

Scott Frankham from Epson UK was waiting us in Apsley train station, and we walked with him to the new Epson UK office building. First we studied how people see colors, color management, and things like that. After that, we printed some of our pictures with Epson Stylus Pro 3800 series printer and tried learned things in real life. We had many different kind and size photo papers available, but as everyone knows, the bigger is better… so in A2 size we printed. Those new Epson printers can deliver such a breathtaking image quality! Of course the imagefile has to be very good also, but that wasn’t the problem because we both had Nikon D3s DSLR-bodies that can produce very good image quality even at the low light! With the D3s’ Nikon had also loaned to us the very best of their lenses like AF-S 14-24/2.8, AF-S 70-200/2.8 VR II and AF-S 500/4 VR. We both used those equipment in really a hard weather conditions, and they worked like a dream! After a week of hard wind and rain, I can say that those new Nikon professional equipments are really really weatherproof.

After Epson printing day, we both headed to the airports to catch our flights to home.
- It’s always nice to travel, but it’s also great to come home!

Janne Heimonen & Marcus Valeur / Wild Wonders of Europe

Please note that blogs reflect our photographers' opinions and not necessarily those of the directors of Wild Wonders of Europe.