Last Friday I experienced one of those wonderful winter skies.  The sun had just gone down and I was driving back to Hatton from Peterhead.  The sky was on fire, the texture of the clouds picked out in reds and orange.   It was one of those days when you just had to stop the car and take it all in.  It was also one of those days I wished I had taken my camera with me.   But the camea on my mobile phone turned up trumps.  I stopped at the lay-by over looking the Longhaven cliffs and rested my phone on the top of a rubbish bin.  The result is better than I had hoped for.  You can even see the headlights of the cars heading for Boddam.

That sky brought to mind two other pictures I look a long time ago.  I was working at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary at the time.  My office looked east and at this time of the year from time to time I would see one of those red skies in the morning.   Digging through my old photographs I came across the pictures, taken long before the days of digital cameras.   Film was all there was then, and you had to wait to see the results when the pictures came back from being developed.

The first one was taken in the mid 1990s on a snowy morning, looking out of my office window, with the spire of Beechgrove church silhouetted against the blazing sky.  I have always loved that picture.

The other photograph was taken on the morning of 31 December 1999 and I call it the “Millennium Dawn”.  It reminds me of the panic there was at that time: would all the computers stop working when the Millennium arrived?  The hospital, like the rest of the country was on red alert and all sorts of emergency plans were being prepared.   But that hogmanay morning all that was forgotten as people admired the wonderful dawn.  and of course the so called Millennium Bug was a damp squib – nothing happened!

Since I am thinking about skies, just a few more pictures of Cruden country skies.  We are so lucky having such a variety in our skies, from the fluffy cumulus clouds of summer to the streaks of sunlight breaking through the grey.

 

And just one last sky, a little further away again.  On the shores of the Cromarty Firth, a couple of years ago on a winter walk with the dog.  You can see the lights of Invergordon across the water.   Again a picture captured by the mobile phone.   What did we do before they were invented?