Latest - John MacLean Photography

Lanntair 30th and Grinneas

By John MacLean, 23/02/15:

Amazingly, An Lanntair in Stornoway is 30 years old this year. I still remember a couple of the photos I showed in the first Grinneas open exhibition in 1985, in its original location in Stornoway Town Hall.

Grinneas still soldiers on annually, and this year’s exhibition opening (and 30th anniversary celebration) takes place on the evening of 28th February.

Berneray trip

By John MacLean, 20/11/14

Just back from a short November work trip to North Uist and Berneray in unusually mild weather.

After a mostly bright sunny day on Tuesday, it was pure uninterrupted sunshine from dawn to dusk on the Wednesday, making it a pleasure to be working outside on Berneray, but difficult to leave for home the next morning…another day or two staying in Lochmaddy would have been nice, but other work beckons.

Above is a photo of a fiery red cloud just before sunrise at Ruisgarry, Berneray.

Faclan Book Festival 2014

By John MacLean, 03/11/14:

At the end of October I photographed the four-day Faclan Book Festival at An Lanntair, Stornoway. This event has run annually since 2006, and since 2011 in its current Halloween slot.

The theme this year was “The Past is a Foreign Country” and included the launch of Ian Stephen’s first novel A Book of Death and Fish, an account of Dolina MacLennan’s early years, friendships and influences in her book An Island Girl’s Journey, and Robert MacFarlane in conversation with Finlay MacLeod about his multi-award winning book The Old Ways.

The festival opened with Peter Urpeth playing a live piano accompaniment to Theodore Dreyer’s classic 1928 film “The Passion of Joan of Arc” and closed with a Club Night collaboration between piper/singer/songwriter Iain Morrison and New Delhi based audio-visual club act B.L.O.T.

Heb Magazine

By John MacLean, 18/05/14

One of the photographs I took during a cruise on ‘Elinca’ to St Kilda last summer has been used on the cover of the 2014-15 Heb and Skye Magazine, with a short feature on the trip inside.

Artwork copying

John MacLean Photography offers a high quality copying service for artwork, documents, etc., output as high resolution digital files, ready for you to use immediately.

Special care must be taken when copying work for archiving or reproduction: JMP uses powerful daylight-balanced studio lighting for a perfectly evenly lit copy every time. Valuable and delicate works behind glass can also be photographed – without reflections – and without the need to open the frame at all.
Please get in touch for further information.

St Clement’s Church, Rodel, Harris

By John MacLean, 24/02/14

Last week I paid a visit to St Clement’s church in Rodel, south Harris, spending two hours in very clement weather 😉 taking exterior and interior photographs of this striking building (sometimes referred to in Gaelic as ‘Eaglais Roghadail’ or ‘Tùr Chliamainn’).

The church, built from local Lewisian gneiss for the chiefs of the MacLeods of Harris, is in a spectacular location looking out to the south-west over the Sound of Harris towards the Uists.

St Clement’s is considered to be one of the most outstanding church buildings in the Hebrides, the earliest section dating from the 13th century. The church is remarkable for possessing one of the most ambitious and richly-carved tombs of the period in Scotland, that of Alexander Macleod (known in Gaelic as Alasdair Crotach) said to have been the church’s founder.

By choosing to be buried in Harris, Alexander Macleod was breaking with tradition, as the previous chiefs of his clan had until then been buried in Iona. The tomb is dated 1528 and its high-quality carved mural panels depict biblical stories, a stylised castle, a hunting scene and a Highland galley.

[Source: RCAHMS]