My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

  • The photo I forgot

    Have you ever gone back to a photo you’d forgotten, and found yourself wondering … how did I forget that?  Of course your digital shoebox (and maybe an actual, real, shoebox if you’ve been taking photos as long as me) is full of photos you’ve forgotten. Occasionally you’ll go back to it, browse through, and find yourself muttering “I’d forgotten all about that”. But actual, real, portfolio-worthy photos that had completely slipped your mind?

    In 2018 I was exploring the possibilities of travelling as light as possible. My camera of choice was an Olympus PM1 – an impossibly small camera which combined point-and-shoot simplicity with the image quality you might expect from a full-size mirrorless body. Combined with the Olympus 9mm bodycap lens, you had a fearsomely good architectural setup which would fit easily in a jacket pocket.

    And so, in September 2018 I found myself at Seton Collegiate Church in East Lothian. It’s an atmospheric place, steeped in mediaeval history and with alleged – but hotly disputed – links to the Knights Templar. It’s also, usually, very quiet. It’s well off the beaten track. Tourists – at least in those days – rarely ventured there.

    But with beautiful, well-kept grounds, nestling in woodland with goldfinches, tree creepers, and nuthatches regularly visiting, for a long time it was my regular haunt whenever I had new camera equipment and wanted to take a few test shots.

    All of which, I think, explains why I completely forgot this photo even existed: it was a test shot, designed to help familiarise myself with a new lens. From the day I shot it, I never saw it as a keeper.

    But something must have gelled with me because I imported the RAW into Lightroom, which I was trialling at the time, and managed to produce this dramatic monochrome shot. Which I instantly forgot. Oh well. I’ve found it again now. I hope you like it as much as I do – at least now that I remember it!

  • Blogging is hard

    It’s been a few months now since I started this site. I waited till I had ten posts before I pressed the Publish button, and I’ve added another twenty posts since then. Early days still, but I see some themes developing, and I’m starting to see the topics I want to explore.

    Very early on, I decided this was a blog in which I would tell the stories of my photographs and I think, mostly, I’ve done that. Portfolio sites are – frankly – mostly pretty boring. They’re useful, of course, as a shop window for commercial photographers. And undoubtedly many portfolio sites are very attractive to look at. But there’s often very little reason to return to a portfolio site. If you really want to follow a photographer there are other ways to do it – via Instagram, Facebook, or even Flickr.

    Storytelling, on the other hand, is endlessly fascinating. We all love a good story, and even a fairly bland photograph can be of interest once you know the story behind it.

    A person sitting at a table, working on a laptop, with a plant in the background and a framed picture hanging on the wall.
    I’ll blog from anywhere – but the kitchen table is where I’m most comfortable

    So here we are. Six months in from that day when I sat down at my kitchen table to write my first blog post. My biggest challenge has been, frankly, technical. I didn’t expect this. In my working life I was a wiki administrator, so I was well used to navigating, updating, and generally managing a cloud-hosted content management system. Unfortunately WordPress, it turns out, is way more complex than Confluence ever was.

    Last week, finally, I got the blog navigation to work out (mostly) how I wanted it. My next task is to get to grips with featured images. At the moment, the blog is a mix of posts that do and don’t have featured images and, bluntly, it’s a mess. Maybe it doesn’t matter much at the moment but hopefully, as the blog continues to grow, in around a year’s time there will be around 100 posts to explore. And the current mess with featured images simply isn’t scalable.

    Oh well. The writing part is usually pretty straightforward. The photography isn’t a problem – it’s the whole reason why I’m here. But managing the blog. Hey, that’s difficult!

  • Behind the scenes of Millerhill’s energy recovery process

    Watching household rubbish being turned into electricity isn’t your average day out, but when my camera group was offered the opportunity to visit the Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility, we enthusiastically accepted the invitation. We all arrived on a fine Autumn day, carefully reverse parking under the watchful gaze of the CCTV, and entered the facility to discover the story of how the stuff we throw away avoids landfill and ends up powering 30,000 homes.

    Our visit began with a warm welcome and a PowerPoint from the facility’s administration lead, before we set off to explore the plant itself. What followed was a fascinating glimpse into one of Edinburgh’s quiet success stories; a wee slice of urban life that hums away in the background, keeping the lights on while the rest of us put the bins out.

    View of an industrial facility's entrance with traffic lights, yellow bollards, and a clear sky in the background.
    View from the waste reception building, where refuse lorries deposit household waste to be incinerated.
    A monochrome interior view of the Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility, featuring a reflective sphere hanging from an overhead rail against a textured wall, with traffic light indicators visible nearby.
    Another view of the waste reception building, showing the bare grey of the industrial architecture.
    A row of high-visibility jackets hanging on a coat rack, with a safety helmet placed on a wooden bench below.
    Outside the main control room, a row of coat hooks with the ubiquitous high vis jackets and safety helmets.
    A large metal claw is seen lifting a load of household waste inside the Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility, showcasing the waste-to-energy process.
    A large metal claw gathers huge piles of rubbish to be dropped into the furnace. It’s hard to get a sense of scale, but the claw was probably abut the size of a Ford Transit.
    Interior view of the Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility, showcasing the structural elements and machinery used for converting household waste into electricity.
    The facility was full of liminal spaces like this. As our guide told us – “if you see a lot of people, it means something’s gone wrong”. We didn’t see many people while we were there.
    A door on an industrial facility, with safety signage and overhead lights, surrounded by metal railings and pipes.
    Another liminal space – a door, on a gantry at the Millerhill RERC
    Close-up of a white chimney on a metal building against a clear blue sky.
    The tour took us onto the roof to see a view of the surrounding countryside, slowly being encroached by massive housing developments. I was more interested in this minimal view of the huge chimney.
    Close-up of two industrial valves on insulated pipes in a facility, showcasing their black handles and attached labels.
    The facility was a gift for fans of industrial still life photography
    Two individuals in safety gear observing a glowing furnace at the Millerhill Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility.
    A view into the furnace, where the household waste is burned at a temperature of 1,300 c
    A large pile of household waste inside a recycling and energy recovery facility, with industrial walls and metal roofing visible.
    The ash pile – all that’s left after the rubbish has passed through the furnace

  • Cameras just get in the way, sometimes

    In 2019 I felt the need for a new challenge. A recent trip to Mull had introduced me to the white tailed eagle – a truly magnificent bird, about the size of a barn door – and I’d come away enthused by my experience. I’d always enjoyed casually watching birds at the local park, but without ever really taking it seriously. Putting those elements together, and being primarily a photographer during my limited leisure time, I bought a 75-300mm lens for my Olympus camera and set out to learn a new skill.

    White tailed eagle, Mull. Not a bad result on such a grim day, considering the very basic equipment I was using.

    Early outings were predictably basic. Goosander at my local park. Robins and coal tits at the botanic gardens. Redshanks at Aberlady nature reserve.

    The turning point came, ironically, during lockdown. Normally when I see people standing by the side of the pavement with their clipboards, poised to ask me my views, I shake my head and walk vigorously past. But walking home from Musselburgh lagoons one day, after an enjoyable session photographing the birdlife, a person with a clipboard, standing incongruously by a footpath through the lagoons, piqued my interest and I stopped to speak with him.

    He was doing a survey, as it turned out, about people’s use of the lagoons in their leisure time. Musselburgh lagoons, bizarrely, are not a nature reserve. There are scrapes there, well maintained by East Lothian Council for use by the birdlife. It’s a familiar spot for birdwatchers – I’ve seen many rarities there – and people treat it as a special place for wildlife. But it’s also well used by dog walkers and there are multiple leisure activities that take place there – a BMX track, a boating lake, and even a horse racing track. It is, in short, a multi-use location that adds hugely to the amenities of the area. But it was also, in 2020, in danger of going seriously downhill.

    Cockenzie power station, a few miles down the road, was one of Britain’s last coal-fired power stations. It was also the reason why Musselburgh lagoons existed. The lagoons were built on reclaimed land, formed by decades of waste from the power station being dumped and gradually forming new land which was then taken over by nature.

    Now though, with the closure of the power station, the land was being handed over to the council who needed to find a use for it. Hence the person with the clipboard asking questions about how I used the lagoons, whether it benefited my mental and physical health, and what I thought should happen there. As I answered the questions, I found myself reflecting on my motivations for being there, and I gradually realised something very important.

    I love photography. To this day, it remains my principle pastime. But I realised that when I was in nature, photographing wildlife, the camera often got in the way. I found myself using the camera as though it was a pair of digital binoculars, enjoying the experience of watching bird behaviours more than the experience of photographing them.

    I didn’t modify my behaviour immediately, but over the following months I found myself going out more often with my binoculars, and less often with my camera. I joined a birdwatching group to enjoy the social aspect of birdwatching. And I leaned into the mindfulness of just enjoying spending time in nature.

    A couple of years later, East Lothian Council opened a new set of bird hides at the lagoons. Last time I was there, I enjoyed watching a marsh sandpiper among the much more familiar lapwings, oystercatchers, and curlews. I hope my survey answers helped, in some small way, to persuade the council that the money invested was well spent.

    Three geese flying in formation against a blue sky with fluffy clouds.
    Greylag geese, River Esk, Musselburgh

  • Small sensors don’t do bokeh

    Apparently, small sensors can’t do bokeh. It’s funny how often the “rules” of photography turn out to be old wives’ tales.

    A cluster of orange mushrooms growing among green grass, captured with a soft background blur.
    Mushrooms, Tentsmuir, Fife. Panasonic FZ150. presented exactly as shot (vivid mode).

    Of course there are cameras that don’t do bokeh. In the early 2000s, I grew inexplicably fond of Kodak Advantix cameras. Bizarre, I know, but they were lightweight, easily loaded with 35mm film, and they produced “panoramic” images with ease. The cheap cameras I used were also, invariably, fixed-focus; and if there’s one thing that fixed-focus compacts are really, really good at, it’s ensuring that everything is in focus.

    But almost any other camera? Hell, I still aim for bokeh when I’m shooting fisheye.

    2014 was a transition year for me. Disillusioned by Olympus turning its back on digital SLRs, I bought a Panasonic Lumix FZ150 and started to explore what it could do. And the answer was – a lot. The small sensor limited things, of course. Low-light could be challenging, and shots at the long end of the zoom invariably lacked crispness. But the colours were strong, especially in vivid mode, and I could get punchy results with minimal effort.

    With only a 1/2.3″ sensor, you might expect that it struggled with bokeh. Oh, no. With the right subject, it was a bokeh beast. One of the many reasons I loved that camera.

  • Those gorgeous Olympus colours

    My first serious digital camera was an Olympus E500. Launched in 2005, it had an 8 megapixel CCD sensor that produced beautiful film-like colours. Like all CCD cameras however, the dynamic range we severely limited, and noise quickly started to become an issue when you went above 400 ISO. I loved that camera, and when I briefly replaced it with an E620, I found the E620 a big disappointment.

    The 12 megapixel sensor of the E620 was, on paper, a big improvement. But the colours lacked that Olympus magic. And crucially by this time, the writing was on the wall for Olympus DSLRs. Olympus was ready to abandon the Four Thirds format and replace it with Micro Four Thirds – essentially very similar cameras using the same sensors. but in a smaller rangefinder-style mirrorless body.

    Disenchanted, I abandoned Olympus and spent the next few years shooting a succession of Canon bridge cameras and Sony compacts.

    Years later – and now an Olympus shooter again thanks to the OM-D EM10 Mark II – I decided to dip my toes back into some of those old rangefinder-style Pen series cameras. It was a frustrating journey, leavened thankfully by the fact that early Olympus mirrorless cameras were cheap to buy on the second hand market. It was easy to buy an old Olympus, shoot with it for a few months, and sell it on for the same price as I had paid for it. I quickly established my likes and preferences among the early Pen cameras.

    • Olympus Pen E-P1 (2009) – Oh, those Olympus colours. Beautiful. But that low-resolution rear screen made shooting in bright sunlight very difficult.
    • Olympus Pen E-P2 (2010) – Essentially a P1 with the ability to add an external viewfinder. I still have one, adapted to infrared, but I don’t recommend it unless you’re willing to splash out on the optional electronic viewfinder, which makes it a much more pleasant shooting experience.
    • Olympus Pen Mini E-PM1 (2011) – A very nice wee camera, highly recommended if you’re looking for something pocketable. But the lack of dials and buttons make it more of a point and shoot than a serious enthusiasts camera.
    • Olympus Pen E-P3 (2011) – This was a major refresh of the Pen range. An updated processor (TruePic VI) made noticeable improvements to noise performance and focus speed. And – ignored by many reviewers – the speed of navigating through menus became noticeably snappier. A nice camera, and the only 12 megapixel Olympus that I would happily use today as a regular-carry camera.

    But what about those Olympus colours? The Panasonic 12 megapixel sensor may beat the Kodak CCD for noise and dynamic range, but it can’t match it for colour renditions, surely? Well, no. It can’t. But using the Vivid colour mode, and slightly increasing the contrast, it gets pretty close.

    Vibrant red maple leaves hanging from branches, creating a colorful canopy above a grassy ground.
    Japanese Acer in full autumn colour, photographed at Dawyck Botanic Garden in the Scottish Borders. Olympus Pen E-P3, Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42 EZ. Processed in OM Workspace to match original in-camera rendering.

  • In search of the Musselburgh spoonbill

    Two stonechats perched on a graffitied sign against a clear blue sky.
    Two stonechats, Musselburgh Lagoons, October 2025. Olympus EM1 MII, Olympus M.Zuiko 75-300mm

    Birdwatchers’ Facebook in the Lothians has been all of a twitter over the past ten days or so. Storm Amy, like all good storms, blew large numbers of birds off course. The result was a flurry of rarities at Musselburgh Lagoons – my local birding patch. A Marsh Sandpiper was the real highlight. That’s a genuine rarity wherever in the UK you see it. Spotted redshank, a large group of barnacle geese and a lone spoonbill were all duly spotted and added to my notes.

    That spoonbill, though – a photogenic bird for sure, but it was way too distant for my camera. Hence a second trip on a Sunday afternoon with the express purpose of bagging a photo of the Musselburgh Spoonbill.

    Inevitably, I was unsuccessful.

    Oh, I saw the marsh sandpiper again, so the afternoon wasn’t exactly a washout. And I enjoyed an afternoon of birding in fabulous light – the sort of mild autumn day that makes you glad to be out and about. But the spoonbill, I was reliably informed, had been seen in Falkirk. Oh well.

    Walking home by the sea wall, I spotted two birdwatchers pointing their binoculars inland – in the “wrong” direction. I followed suit, and was rewarded with a beautiful sighting of a stonechat sitting on an old graffitied sign. I couldn’t be that lucky, surely? But by the time I got my camera out of my bag, far from flying away, it had been joined by another bird. Two stonechats. Nice. All I need now is a photo contest on the theme of urban nature.

  • My first infrared photograph

    If you know The Unforgettable Fire by U2, you’ll know it’s a solid album — but it’s the cover photo that really sticks in the mind.

    What’s most interesting to me is that the photo wasn’t the photographer’s original idea. Anton Corbijn, who shot the cover, had come across an image of Moydrum Castle in a book called In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland by Simon Marsden. Something about Marsden’s photograph clearly stayed with him, because Corbijn’s shot of U2 standing in front of the same crumbling castle is almost an exact recreation of Marsden’s original.

    If Marsden’s picture inspired Corbijn to experiment with infrared film, then it was Corbijn’s version, 35 years later, that inspired me to hit “buy” on an adapted digital infrared camera.

    Here’s the thing about infrared: it’s tricky.

    As photographers, we’re used to looking at a scene and having a fair idea of how the final image will look. Infrared throws all that out of the window. It sees light in a completely different way, revealing things the eye can’t, and making familiar places look otherworldly.

    I’ve been shooting infrared for about seven years now, and I’m still learning. But when I first picked up that Olympus Pen E-P2 in 2019, I was completely clueless. I’d purchased a camera with a 590nm infrared conversion, knowing that it could produce those surreal yellow leaves and pale blue skies, but I had no idea how to actually achieve that look in post-processing.

    So on a bright sunny day, I took the camera to my local park and fired off a few test shots. I wasn’t expecting much – and true to form, I came home with a handful of very average photos.

    Every journey has to start somewhere, though. Bit by bit, I learned how to white balance in-camera, how to expose properly for infrared light, and how to channel-swap the RAW files in Affinity Photo so those magenta skies could look a little more natural.

    An infrared photograph of a stone monument in a park, surrounded by trees with bright yellow foliage under a clear blue sky.
    Daisy Park, Portobello, Edinburgh. Olympus Pen E-P2 adapted to 590nm infrared, Sigma 30mm f2.8.

    This was the first infrared photo I ever took. It’s not going to win any awards — but it was the start of a journey down a fascinating rabbit hole that I’m still exploring today.

  • 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 with this particular group of friends. Once a fortnight, we meet at a different location in Edinburgh to photograph – well, whatever we fancy. We all have our different likes and dislikes. I enjoy photographing urban grit. Others prefer to shoot flowers, plants, colour. So we mix it up. One week, we’ll visit a park. Next time, perhaps a busy part of the city.

    This week it’s the turn of the city. Morningside Road is surely awash with photographic interest. Shops, people, movement all around. But no, I’m not inspired, and few of my friends are faring any better. When I call it a day after about an hour, I head to a coffee shop where some of my friends have already finished their coffees and are ready to explore Morningside’s (admittedly excellent) charity shops.

    Oh well, not every day is full of inspiration. At least I got a pretty picture of an old Victorian post box.

    A red Victorian post box mounted on a stone wall, displaying a collection time notice.
    An old Victorian letter box. Olympus OM-D EM10 Mark II, Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm.

  • 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, with dozens of club-level photographic competitions informing his opinion.

    And yet, several of us disagreed with him.

    Some rules-of-thumb from club-level camera completions make good sense:

    • Make sure the horizon is straight
    • Make sure the photo has a clear subject
    • Follow the rule of thirds (or if you break it, make sure it’s obvious that you’ve deliberately broken it)
    • Use leading lines
    • Ensure the photo is free of distractions
    • Make sure the exposure is correct
    • The main subject must be in focus (or if it isn’t in focus, it must be deliberately and clearly out of focus)
    • Avoid cliches, etc

    I think the rule that we were breaking was – in John’s view – “make sure the photo has a clear subject”. Look at this composition. Is it a photo of the sky, or a photo of the dome? If the answer is both, then the photo doesn’t have a clear subject. And if it doesn’t have a clear subject, is it a good photo?

    A cloudy sky above a dome-shaped structure, partially obscured by rooftops.
    Dome at Edinburgh Royal Observatory, Calton Hill, under a moody Scottish sky. Olympus EM1 Mark II, Olympus M.Zuiko 14-150 Mark II

    Well. John was in a minority. We’re not into entering photo competitions. We’re just a group of friends who enjoy taking photos together. And when you live in Scotland – a country known for its characterful skies – well. it would be silly not to take advantage.

    I do agree with John on one thing though. I’d never enter this image into a photo contest.

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