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Month: Sep 2025

  • When inspiration fails

    Picture the scene. I am standing underneath an old railway clock with a group of friends. The railway station is long-gone, over 60 years ago. The clock isn’t even in its original location because it’s been relocated to the side of the road, a victim of Edinburgh’s relentlessly increasing traffic. This is a regular catch-up…

  • Those beautiful Scottish skies

    At my camera group yesterday, we had a fascinating conversation about skies. As we critiqued each other’s photos, John repeatedly made the comment that there was too much sky in our photos. When John says something like that, you listen to him. Not just because he’s an experienced photographer but because he’s an experienced judge,…

  • Digital painting – before AI

    These days everything is about AI, but before neural style transfer came along there was a small, lively scene of procedural painting engines. These programs used algorithms to turn photos into digital paintings. Some have since been abandoned, while others are still being developed. All of them are great fun to explore. Here are some…

  • Remember Picture CDs?

    Picture CDs – not to be confused with Photo CDs – were widely offered by film processing labs in the early days of digital photography. They were fairly inexpensive. I usually got my films processed at Boots, which charged an extra £1.99 for a picture CD. Quality, unfortunately, was variable. If you were lucky, you…

  • Opening up the shadows

    Around 2007, when Flickr was absolutely at its height, I uploaded this photo of Duffus Castle, Morayshire, to a group which was dedicated to photo critiques. The rules were simple: post a photo of your own which you wanted critiqued, and give a critique of the three preceding photos. One of the critiques I received…

  • Fractal blossom

    A recent article in Amateur Photographer described post-processing as the most ignored part of photography. In my experience, that’s very true. Among my photography-minded friends, the folk who prefer their photographs straight out of camera significantly outnumber those who tweak and tinker with their images. Is either approach to be preferred over the other? Well…