Sometimes a theme emerges quite naturally from your photography. Many years ago I photographed an abandoned cane chair in Kelso, in the Scottish Borders. It was a simple photo, but that simplicity captivated me. Since then, I’ve continued taking photos of abandoned or empty chairs wherever I’ve found them
And that’s the advantage of a theme. Individually, none of these photos are particularly remarkable. Grouped together, they share a liminal quality that makes them feel quite … strange.
What’s the strangest theme to emerge from your photography?
Street photography is hard. Usually you’re looking for the right moment. The eye contact. The point when something happens. Of the hundreds of photos I took of Olga, this is the one that works for me because this is one that succeeds in that aim.
Of course Olga knows I’m taking the photograph – she’s literally posing for me. The people around her? That’s where it gets a little trickier. Is it OK to photograph people without their knowledge? Well, this is Edinburgh’s Royal Mile during the Fringe festival. The bystanders may not have noticed me, but they have an expectation that cameras are everywhere. In that sense, this photo feels very fair. The subjects (Olga aside) may not have consented but they could see me with my camera. They had the opportunity, if they wished, to object.
And this is the photo that captures the decisive moment. Of the dozen or so frames I captured at this moment, this is the frame that captures shoe envy from the woman walking past.
But photographing strangers is hard. That famous British reserve is real. So when, a few weeks earlier, I encountered these three people sitting there, enjoying the bright summer sunshine at Hawkcraig Point in Aberdour, I quickly assessed the scene and took this photo of three old friends, enjoying a joke and laugh together.
And now I feel I short-changed them. How hard would it have been to introduce myself, offer to take their photos, and walk away with a cracking set of candid portraits? Of course they might have said no, but I never gave them the chance.
Street photography is hard. But I’m improving. One day …
Camera Clubs are great for improving your photography in a friendly, supportive environment. They’re not always the best place to learn who you are as a photographer.
The camera club aesthetic, basically, is:
Your main subject must be bitingly sharp.
Don’t blow the highlights.
Use the rule of thirds.
You get the idea.
A lot of these rules are good photographic principles to live by. Learn them, internalise them, and – once you’ve gained enough experience – feel free to break them whenever you want.
Bearing that in mind, what score do you reckon a camera club judge would give the photos at the top of the page? Personally, I think they would do well to score 13 or 14, and yet I’m hugely proud of them both.
The first image is of the Firth of Forth on a dreich, stormy day. It attempts to convey an impression of how it felt to be standing on the shoreline in the wind and the rain. It isn’t sharp. There’s no real subject. There is hardly any colour variation between sea and sky. But that’s how it felt. The wind and rain in my eyes, obscuring my vision. The sense of emptiness – no birds in the sky, no boats making their way back to harbour. Does it capture a sense of what the Firth of Forth actually looks like? No, of course not. Does it capture a sense of how I felt on that bitingly cold day? I hope so.
The second image shows a restaurant window in Morningside. Those abstract shapes, viewed through frosted glass, reminded me of the Manhattan skyline. It was a day of very little inspiration. I went out to shoot street portraits, and came home with almost nothing. Almost, but not quite. A found skyline in a grubby window rewarded me with a pleasing abstract.
And when I follow the rules? This photo of a friend of mine is probably an 18 or 19 in a camera club competition. It’s a cracking portrait, but it isn’t who I am as a photographer.
I guess that’s the lesson. Camera clubs can teach us how to make technically better photographs. And without knowledge of those technical skills I could never have done justice to my friend with this monochrome portrait. But the photos I love – the photos which matter to me – aren’t always the same as the photos that do well in camera club competitions. I hope I never stop taking that type of photograph: the ones that leave camera club judges scratching their heads.
For a brief period around the turn of the century, Agfa Ultra 100 was my default choice for creative work. Here’s an example from 2005, taken in overcast conditions at Tantallon Castle, East Lothian, Scotland.
The sky is clearly overcast, but the colours remain saturated without being unrealistic. The red tones of the castle walls are well captured, and the grass still reads as green underneath that yellow scorching. In the first photo, that sky is utterly convincing, and yet there are hints that something has gone awry.
Look at the sea in that second image. Scotland does, on occasion, have beautiful blue seas. But under those clouds? It doesn’t feel realistic.
Not convinced? Shooting Agfa Ultra in bright sunlight reveals its weakness more clearly
These photos were taken the same day, at the same location, when a break in the clouds allowed the sun to break through. Scottish grass isn’t really that colour. Agfa Ultra’s beautiful red tones and neutral white balance could quickly be overwhelmed by that nuclear green grass when photographing in bright sun. For all that, I loved the film and I was saddened when it disappeared from the shops a year or so after these photos were taken.
Today, the emulsion is easily available as a LUT or a filter effect. Here’s the version from DxO Filmpack.
The original photo (right) was shot earlier that year in Daisy Park, Joppa, Edinburgh. The camera was a Fujifilm Finepix E550 using the natural colour mode. It’s a gentle image with accurate but slightly undersaturated colours. The Agfa Ultra simulation (left) gives a more saturated film-like feel while keeping the greens of the grass under control A good result, I think, but I still miss the original film. Sometimes.
ACDSee users have a problem. They have two different options for keywords, and another option for categories. Which one is best? The answer of course is that all three options are correct in different circumstances, and it’s important to understand their various strengths and weaknesses before you start using them. So here’s my suggestion for how you might want to use them.
Don’t be concerned if the way you use keywords and categories is completely different. Nothing is set in stone here. If you’ve found another way that works for you, stick with it.
This is the first in a series of posts taking a deep dive into ACDSee keywords and categories.
Categories
Categories can be used to describe how you are using a photograph. They are hierarchical, which means you can stack specific categories beneath more general categories. And if that all sounds a bit woolly, I hope this example will make it clearer.
Competition Entries
Competiton 1
Shortlist
Final selection
Competiton 2
Shortlist
Final selection
Winning entries
New
Unsorted
To be processed
Processed (for export)
Portfolio
Portfolio candidates
Current portfolio
Specialist portfolios
Macro
Portraits
Projects
Project 1
in progress
Complete
Skills development
Difficult exposures
White balance experiments
ACDSee Categories are hugely powerful for describing your relationship with an image. Is it portfolio-worthy? Have you previously used it in a competition? Is it part of a project? Importantly, a photograph can be assigned to multiple categories, meaning that you don’t need to make duplicates of a photo if it’s being used in multiple projects.
Also however, ACDSee Categories are ACDSee-only. If you move away from ACDSee, you’ll lose all of that category information you have so carefully added. Which is good to know before you start investing a lot of time in them.
Next – do you want a way to describe the content of your photographs? Something that will travel with the photographs, and be readable by other software? For that, you need …
IPTC keywords
Yes, I know, that’s a dreadful name. Unfortunately we need to specify IPTC keywords to differentiate them from ACDSee keywords, which we’ll discuss next.
Keywords – of whatever type – are usually used to describe the contents of a photo.
This photo might have the following keywords:
Embsay and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway
Bolton Abbey Station
heritage railway
railway platform
railway carriage
station buffet
Union Jack bunting
station canopy
Yorkshire
nostalgia
Enter any of those search terms into ACDSee and you’ll find this photo very easily. Even better, the same search terms will work in Digikam. Lightroom, or almost any other photo organiser. But have you noticed something awkward about those IPTC keywords? If you’re thinking “there’s a lot of repetition”, I agree with you. That’s because IPTC keywords are not hierarchical.
Another limitation of IPTC keywords is that they are very specific. If you search “station”, will you find a photo tagged “Bolton Abbey Station”? That depends very much on what type of search you are doing.
Given these challenges, there must be a better way to keyword your photos? Yes there is. ACDSee also supports hierarchical keywords. And for hierarchical keywords you need…
ACDSee keywords (usually called “keywords” in ACDSee documenation)
With ACDSee keywords, you can make the keywords hierarchical.
Places
England
Yorkshire
Bolton Abbey Station
Transport
Railways
Heritage Railways
Embsay and Bolton Abbey Steam Railway
Railway Stations
Railway Carriages
Buildings
Station Buffet
Architecture
Canopies
Flags
Union Jack
Bunting
Themes
Nostalgia
This is much more flexible.
You can find all your photos of bunting with a single keyword search
Or all of your photos of Union Jacks
Or all of your flag photos – all with a single search
You can find all your photos of Yorkshire with a broad search
Or you can do a more specific search for Bolton Abbey Station
You can easily do a search for all your photos of heritage railways
Or you can just as easily do a broader search for any of your railway photos
The downside is that ACDSee keywords are specific to ACDSee. If you ever decide to start using another software like Lightroom or Digikam, they won’t be able to use ACDSee Keywords.
Thankfully, ACDSee offers a way to convert ACDSee keywords to IPTC keywords. So why would anyone ever choose to use IPTC keywords instead of ACDSee keywords? I’ll be returning to that question in the next post in this series.
The bridge over the pond at Doctor Neil’s Garden, Duddingston, Edinburgh. Photographed using a 590nm infrared-adapted Olympus Pen E-P2 and Panasonic Lumix 12-32mm lens. Processed in DxO Photolab and Affinity Studio.
For me, the main challenge of infrared photography is translating the vision – what I saw inside my head when I pressed the shutter – into a finished photograph. I knew what I wanted when I shot this scene. Strong contrast, glowing highlights, the trees framing the bridge. Nothing too dramatic. The scene I photographed was a delightful moment of peace and coolness from a too-bright day. I wanted to capture that sense of peace in a photograph with a serene, dreamlike feel.
DxO Photolab was my starting point. I applied a custom dcp profile (thank you Rob Shea) and then an Ilford HP5 LUT (converted from a RAW Therapee HaldClut). Some fine tuning, some negative fine contrast, a wee geometry correction, and then took the TIFF into Affinity Studio to selectively apply a bloom filter to the highlights and … job done.
Like I say, infrared processing is hard. And while there are various applications out there that do it well (shout out to RAW Therapee) I haven’t found anything that works better for me than my DxO/Affinity workflow.
I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with the monochrome setting on my Pen E-P2. With the red colour filter applied in-camera, and a slight tweak to sharpness and contrast, it does a pretty good job.
The same photograph, straight out of camera using the camera’s own, slightly modified, monochrome setting. It’s perfectly usable but it misses the hallucinatory feel of the processed version.
Just for comparison, here’s the same photo processed in OM Studio to replicate the original in-camera JPGs. The first image uses a daylight white balance. The second uses the same processing settings, but with a custom white balance.
TL;DR – They’re wind turbine jacket foundations. They were made in China by COOEC–Fluor Heavy Industries, and shipped here on the heavy transport ship Hua Yang Long. They are being stored temporarily in the Port of Leith before being installed in the Inch Cape Offshore Wind Farm – about 15km off the coast of Angus.
If you go pretty much anywhere with a view of the coastline in Edinburgh just now, you’ll see these huge jacket foundations dominating the skyline. They’re each about 80m tall, they’re bright yellow, and they’re impossible to miss. They’re also a dream subject for an urban photographer.
Yes, they really are huge. This is what they look like from Musselburgh Lagoons.
The colour is safety yellow – a bright shade with good visibility which is often used offshore so that they are easily spotted from a distance. In an urban context, they look staggeringly out of place.
Yes, the yellow really is that bright.
Surprisingly, unless you’re looking at them in the distance it’s quite hard to capture the sense of scale. Snapshots are easy. They’re right there, in your eyeline. They’re hard to miss. But they’re also quite distant, surrounded by dock buildings which themselves have little sense of scale. Yes, it’s a warehouse. But warehouses come in all sizes so it doesn’t really convey just how big they are.
After a few attempts, I finally captured the sheer size of these foundations by stepping back slightly from the waterfront, using the more familiar architecture of The Shore to provide a sense of scale. They really are quite remarkable structures.
By photographing the jacket foundations as a backdrop to Victoria Swing Bridge and the adjacent block of flats, I managed to convey just how enormous they are
Picture the scene. A baking hot day. Bright sunshine. Deep, dark shadows. The sort of day that colour photography just doesn’t work, so instead you shoot black and white. Or even better, you shoot infrared black and white. Infrared-adapted cameras love bright, harsh sunlight. The sort of light that leaves you peering at the world even through darkly tinted sunglasses.
Of course on a day like that you never want to be too far from an air-conditioned café, so the best option is the city, right? Yes, the asphalt stores the day’s heat, there are too many people, and the buses all grind to a standstill. But at least the Place to Eat at John Lewis is cool, and you can find a quiet corner to regain your composure and plan the next set of photos.
That’s how it was on an August day in 2022 when I visited Old Calton Burial Ground, at the eastern end of Princes Street, Edinburgh, to photograph the cemetery’s historic tombs and lairs. Infrared cameras love cemeteries almost as much as they love harsh summer sun. Despite the familiar surroundings I was finding new angles, new compositions, new ways of seeing.
Even in daylight, most visitors to Old Calton Burial Ground stick to the highlights: David Hume’s Mausoleum, the Political Martyrs’ Monument, The Abraham Lincoln Memorial, and the views on Calton Hill and Salisbury Crags.
Step beyond those, ignoring the slight sense of menace even on this bright sun-drenched day, and you’ll come to the Robert Burn Mausoleum. On the day I visited, the mausoleum was unsecured, and I took the opportunity to photograph the open doorway. Only when I got home did I see the bedding on the floor and, to my shock, the legs of a homeless man sleeping away the hottest part of the day, hiding from the sun.
If I had noticed I would never have pressed the shutter. Photographing street candids is one thing. Photographing people experiencing homelessness is a step beyond – only to be undertaken in the course of serious journalism or documentary.
Having taken the photo I kept it private for a long while, trying to decide whether I could share it. And now here it is. What would you have done?
My camera group has been going out and about, every second Friday morning, for – oh, I don’t know, probably around 12 years now. You can imagine, even in a city as varied as Edinburgh, we’ve been pretty much everywhere. Usually multiple times. So a couple of years ago, around March 2024, we decided to start choosing themes for our photo walks. Themes are great. They encourage us to look at our surroundings with a fresh eye.
For a familiar location, having a theme can mean the difference between a boring morning – coming home with an original set of photos that you would never have thought of. Here are all the themes we chose in our first year of theme-based photo walks.
My camera group has its own blog. Why not take a look at how we interpreted these themes between February 2024 and March 2025?
The front page of the blog for the Edinburgh Ageing Well Camera Group
Symmetry
Yes it’s obvious, but after years of going out with our cameras on a Friday morning, this was the first time we had tried shooting with a theme. It’s an easy theme, and it worked predictably well.
History
This is a great theme for an urban environment. Photographing in Edinburgh’s Old Town, it was probably a bit too easy!
Spring
We chose this theme when visiting a garden in early April. The seasons are an obvious choice for nature walks.
Angles
We chose this theme when visiting an urban park with the cherry blossom at its best. It was a location we’d visited many times, and the theme prompted us to look beyond the obvious blossom and find compositions in the urban environment surrounding it.
Out of Place
Another theme that prompted us to think outside the box. Some people chose things that were obviously out of place – litter, weeds etc. Some people took props with them, photographing household objects which clearly didn’t belong in a country park.
Off-centre
This is a theme which can work in any environment. It obviously invites photographers to use the rule of thirds, but it also suggests some off-kilter compositions.
Flags
We chose this theme while visiting a small local harbour. There was bunting on display, and some of the fishing boats proudly displayed the Scottish saltire. It would be a good theme for an urban environment, forcing photographers to look beyond the obvious buildings and street scenes.
The Letter A
No idea how we ended up with this random theme but it worked well. People found the shape of the letter A in construction vehicles and in decaying trees. And of course in signage and advertising.
Doors and Windows
An obvious theme for visiting a church.
Transport
Bikes, cars, trams, even a distant telephoto shot of a cruise ship. A fun scavenger-hunt of a theme.
The Edinburgh Fringe
Seems obvious, right? You’re attending an event, so make the theme the name of the event. But street performers are the same all over the world. This theme invited us to place the street performers in context. Their location in Edinburgh was as important as their performance.
Black and white
Yes it’s obvious again, but for photographers who normally shoot in colour, it encourages tighter compositions.
Curves
We found curves in street corners, in decorative ironwork, in the chairs of a local café.
Dereliction
We chose this theme in an overgrown urban cemetery. It would be obvious in almost any urban environment, encouraging photographers to go behind the glossy facades and explore the back streets.
Red
The theme was suggested by our location for the day – an urban park with a war memorial, festooned with poppies for Armistice Day. But red was everywhere. A literal fire engine (no idea why!), berries, winter coats, and details from a children’s playground.
Motion
We found this theme surprisingly difficult. It should have been easy because we were on a busy street surrounded by movement. we really should try this again sometime.
Street
Surprising it took us so long to choose this theme. For a group of friends photographing in a busy city full of tourists and commuters, it could hardly be more appropriate.
Look Up
Another scavenger-hunt theme. You’re in a familiar location? Look up. See what you see.
Reflections
This a a location-dependent theme. We chose it when visiting a canal, but it would work equally well after heavy rain, or in a cityscape surrounded by glass skyscrapers.
Mindfulness can be an important part of photography. Yes, I’ve gone out to enjoy using my camera. Yes, I’m enjoying spending time with friends and looking forward to enjoying a coffee together. But alongside all the obvious skills of photography – considering the light, composing the scene, capturing the decisive moment – observation is the skill I keep coming back to.
It’s particularly the case when photographing a familiar location. If you’ve visited a garden many times, you know its secrets. You know what flowers are the most photogenic. What angles reveal the garden’s character. Where to stand to perfectly capture the characterful shape of that particular tree that everyone loves.
Sometimes, it’s very nice just to sit and observe. Place the camera by your side. Listen to the wind in the trees. The birds flying overhead. Enjoy the breeze through your hair.
Important, too, to acknowledge that the real world is never far away. Perhaps there are cars on the road outside. A gardener cutting a hedge in the distance. A fly buzzing past.
Sometimes – and more often as I ease into the less hurried world of retirement – I will spend as much time sitting as I do taking photographs. So yes, mindfulness is the word I need to use. And I didn’t arrive at it via meditation, forest bathing, yoga, or spiritualism. I’ve arrived at mindfulness simply through using my camera.
Duddingston Loch, Edinburgh, as seen from a bench in Jock Tamson’s Gairden. I spent a good twenty minutes here, just enjoying the moment. The photo captures the feel of the moment by defocusing the lens to concentrate on the shapes and colours of the scene.
My Camera Stories 