Some mighty large horse heads in Scotland!

I have seen pics of The Kelpies online over the last year, and have wanted to visit them and see them firsthand (and photograph them, of course!) ever since that first viewing. So on my recent trip to Glasgow - and having a free weekend to do just such a thing - I decided to go for it.

I was joined by my good friend Mike Murphy, who took the train up from London for the weekend and joined me in my shooting expeditions around the area. As I detailed in my last post, I took quite a few photos around Glasgow - about 2000 in total. So here's the first batch of them - and there are plenty more coming!

Per Wikipedia, The Kelpies are 30 meters high, which to us Americans is about 98 feet, or as we say in Texas, pretty damn big. They are part of a local parkland development effort, and sit at the intersection of a couple of historic Scottish canals.

A little more from Wikipedia: The Kelpies name reflected the mythological transforming beasts possessing the strength and endurance of 10 horses; a quality that is analogous with the transformational change and endurance of Scotland's inland waterways. The Kelpies represent the lineage of the heavy horse of Scottish industry and economy, pulling the wagons, ploughs, barges and coalships that shaped the geographical layout of the Falkirk area.

We stayed here for a good hour or so, dodging a little rain here and there and generally just enjoying this interesting sight. That's one thing about travel - you can come across the most interesting things when you get out and explore. That's what I love about it.

As you can see from the pics today (and truthfully, I have plenty more that I haven't had time to process yet, so perhaps I will share those another time), I walked all around The Kelpies and shot them from a lot of different angles. All of these shots were taken with my Olympus 12-40mm f2.8 Pro Lens, which gives me plenty of versatility to zoom out for a fairly wide shot or zoom in for a closer one. I love having one lens that is so flexible. And these were all taken handheld. I left my tripod at home on this trip (and no, that was not an accident). :-)

We hit the sight as our first stop that day (the second being the Falkirk Wheel, which I will detail in a future post), and I was very thankful for the cloudy, moody skies. That is always way better than direct sunlight. Sunny skies make for a nice picnic, but they stink for photography. I love the moodiness that stormy skies can give a photo. It's way more interesting to me.

Well that's it for today. Tune back in next week for another round of photos from my recent trips to Europe. There's a lot more coming your way!