Lochside House at Loch Culag in Lochinver – 360° Panorama

Kein Kommentar Autor: Jürgen (jdo)

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This panorama was created during a holiday in Scotland. You can see the Lochside House at Loch Culag near Lochinver. It was our home for about two weeks.

360° Panorama of Lochside House / Loch Culag / Lochinver

Normally I shoot panoramas with my Canon EOS 7D and a Tokina Fisheye. This one, however, was created with my Sony RX100 III. The lense of this point&shoot camera has a focal length on the wide angle side of 24mm. Therefore I had to shoot more than two rows. For this panorama I shot four rows and nadir and zenith were still missin. But not a huge problem as this can easily be corrected using Hugin and GIMP. The point is that you don’t need a fancy DSLR with a ultra wide angle lense. While more work it is possible to do panoramic shots with simple point&shoot cameras. A tripod and a panoramic head are highly recommended.

In the 360° pnorama you will find a couple of hotspots. The house itself is quite remote but there are several visitors every day. I start with the left hand side hotspot on the balcony and turn to the right.

The pine marten we were able to take a picutre because every night we put out a handful of nuts. At a certain point we put a camera very close and put it in timelapse mode. Next time I would try something like this I would probably take a Raspberry Pi and motion plus gphoto2. In this case the camera would only take a picture if there is movement. That saves the wokr to go through a few hundred pictures the next morning.
In the Lochroom (conservatory) you have a wonderful view over Loch Culag. From here you have the chance to spot several animals. A zoom lense or binoculars don’t hurt.
Every morning there were a couple of blue tits and great tits on the balcony because we put some bird food out there as well.
The three next hotspots show pictures taken in the Culag Woods. The middle one show a beautiful beach (sea side). You don’t have to walk far to reach it from the Lochside House. If the weather is not as sunny as in this picture and you do have a macro lense – go for a strawl in the Culag woods. There is plenty too see like the tiny mushroom or the drop of resin.
On the tree next to Loch Culag every evening a few herons were resting.
One day a few deer showed up in the opening next to the heron’s tree. But we were lucky to spot them and you definitely need binoculars or a zoom lense.
In the last hotspot you see a tiny tiny spider. The picture was actually taken in Culag woods as well but I found it too crowded on that side of the picture. The spider was not bigger than a pinhead.

If you ever plan a holiday in the northwest of Scotland the Lochside House can be highly recommended. There are four bedrooms and a room for children with bunk beds and toys and so on. The Lochside House is ideal for families. We have been six persons in total.

Tip for the 360°-Panorama

If you use your right mouse button within the panorama you can change the view. One of the views is the so called Little Planet. The Lochside House would look like this: