OTHERWORLDLY SCOTLAND

JENNIE BLYTHE

// Jennie is from the United Kingdom, based in London. She has been a keen amateur photographer for around four years, experimenting across a range of genres and techniques. We continue our exploration of infrared photography with a feature of beautiful Scottish landscapes in infrared.

As a full-time ecommerce professional, Jennie finds that photography complements her job nicely. “I enjoy the process of learning and creating, and applying this to new projects,” she says. Although she started taking pictures on a DSLR camera back in 2002, she did not really dive into photography passionately until 2018. Travel photography remains her first love, but she has blended different styles to include street and portraiture as well, always trying to remain sensitive to the environment she finds herself in.

“Wherever I wander, wherever I rove; the hills of the highland for ever I love.”

Robert Burns

What draws you to the arts?

“Art in all varieties gives me inspiration to stay creative and make new art. Photography is my passion, and with my work I want to capture the beauty of life. On the other hand, art is my driving force to improve and to find new ways to express myself.”

What do you like best about producing infrared photos, such as the images you have shared with us?

“The Scottish landscape is oft-photographed but it is a harsh environment. Infrared strips it back to what it is, creating drama and making the viewer think about what they are seeing in a different way.“

Jennie experimented with a different take on landscape photography in Scotland last year: infrared photography. She explained to us that to shoot in infrared you have a couple of options. “The first is to make the changes in post, which (for me) defeats the point of doing it. But the other way is to get a camera that has been converted with an IR filter – this strips out some specific light and as such creates quite dramatic effects. Because of this I thought it would really suit the landscape of the Scottish Highlands, as it is so rugged and beautiful.”

When one shoots in IR the “raw” files come out with orangey-red tones, which then need to be converted by switching out the RGB levels in an image editing tool. “Some of the images I shot I decided looked more compelling without the additional RGB conversions, especially those shot on the mountain-scape of Skye’s Old Man of Storr. These give an otherworldly, Mars-type effect. For some of the treated conversions I deliberately played with the RGB levels to create different colourscapes and palettes. The weather also plays a part: we were mostly blessed with (unusual) Scottish sunshine, which amplifies the IR effect, but those taken on the remote and (now ) uninhabited Hebridean island of St Kilda are more muted in tone (it’s common not to be able to moor there due to bad weather, let alone expect sun).”

Scotland´s landscapes are certainly beautiful, and this “arty” effect of using Infrared makes them seem quite otherworldly. Here we can only show a small selection, but if you head to Jennie´s website, you can find many additional beautiful examples of her infrared photo art.

Click on the photos to see a larger image with its title.