Last weekend we ventured into “The Bubble” (otherwise known as Highlands Ranch, Colorado) to attend the 46th Annual Scottish Festival and Rocky Mountain Highland Games.

What a blast! There were all kinds of things to see and do, from the individual clan tents (where clans would show off a bit about their particular history) to the “Dogs of the British Isles” area, a half-mile long line for haggis to the Highland Games – this was quite the event!  The highlights of the day for me were the parade of clans and the massed pipes and drum bands.  I never knew there so many of these pipe and drum bands in the Metro Area!  Seriously, there were at least 7.

Another real highlight that you’ll see reflected in the pictures below was the highland games.  Specifically, the caber tossing event.  These guys were definitely the ‘rock stars’ of the events.  The first caber that they warmed up with was 68 pounds and 14 feet long.  After that they went to a 108 pounds caber that was also 14 feet long.  Finally, they tried lobbing a 108 pound caber that was 20 feet long!  No one could do it, and as it turns out, the announcer said that no one has ever successfully gotten that caber over in competition yet!  Still, these guys gave it a very valiant try!

Photographically, none of these are complex.  In fact, they wereall taken with the 70-200mm lens, at f/4.0.  I was keeping the aperture fairly wide in order to blur the mostly distracting background, which I have wanted to do more of, especially after reading Dave Brown’s blog.  Post was all done in Lightroom and was fairly simple.  In most cases, I just applied one or two of my premade presets and was done.  I did apply some extra sharpening to the shot of the sword hilt using Nik’s Sharpener Pro 3.0 but that’s it.

Enjoy!