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.
An old Victorian letter box. Olympus OM-D EM10 Mark II, Olympus M.Zuiko 9-18mm.
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?
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.
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 of my favourites.
I don’t have them all installed on my laptop – but for those I do, I’ve included an example image.
Dynamic Auto Painter
Commercial product. Quite expensive, with occasional sales. Still actively developed. I’ve listed this one first because it’s my favourite. It has lots of presets, and is able to do oils, watercolours, pastels, and lots more. It’s quite slow. Like many auto-painting products, it renders the brush strokes in real time. Depending on your mood, you might find this relaxing or frustrating, but you can always set the canvas size to small – which paints this images much more quickly – to try out multiple presets, and than change the canvas size to large once you’ve found the style you like.
It’s quite complex to learn, and I’ve probably done no more than dip my toes into its capabilities, but the many presets give you a great starting point, For most people, there’s probably no need to dive any deeper.
Aqua Real presetVan Gogh 7 presetKlimt presetMonet Preset
Corel Painter Essentials
Commercial product. Inexpensive, and frequently discounted. Last updated 2023, and unclear whether it’s still being actively updated. There are far fewer presets here, but the unique advantage of Corel Painter Essentials is this it includes a cut-down – and vastly simpler – subset of the digital painting tools available in the full version of Corel Painter. This allows you, once you have selected your preset and let the program do its thing, to jump in with your own brushes and add your own brushstrokes, seamlessly integrated with the rest of the digital painting.
FotoSketcher
Free, and still actively developed. It’s like a cut-down version of Dynamic Auto Painter. This one’s way better than you would expect for the price. Very basic interface, perhaps, but all the tools you need are there. As a bonus it’s a small download, and is very forgiving of older computer setups.
SnapArt
Commercial product. It’s unclear whether it’s still being developed, and it hasn’t been updated for many years. Quite overpriced, though I suppose the price is reasonable if you buy it in a bundle with some of Exposure Software’s other products. The advantage of this one is the ease of use, the wide range of styles which it can output, and the fact that its hardware requirements are very basic. That price though!
Commercial product – discontinued and no longer sold, though it can still be downloaded from the Topaz website as legacy software. Now let me tell you something odd because while I’ve bought other Topaz products, I’ve never bought Topaz Studio 2. But when I logged into the app using my usual account credentials – intending to enjoy the 30 day trial – a message popped up onscreen stating that the software was “fully licensed”. Surely some mistake?
But no, several months later, it was still working. Does that mean that Topaz is allowing anyone to use it free of charge, now that it’s been abandoned. Did I qualify for a free licence at some point when buying other Topaz software? I have no idea, but I’ve seen other people hinting at similar experiences on Facebook. Who knows? Maybe it’s worth a try?
Well actually, my experience with Topaz Studio 2 has been quite poor, and I’m unsurprised that Topaz abandoned it. I realise that this puts me out of step with many other users who still lament the fact that it’s no longer updated. But for me, Topaz Studio 2 tries too hard to do everything. If you’re looking for an all in one solution – from basic photo processing to finished painting – it’s definitely worth a try. But other auto-painting software is better at the core job of creating digital paintings from original photographs.
Jixipix Software
Commercial products – still actively updated. Prices vary, with occasional sales giving very good discounts.
Jixipix has a whole suite of digital painting software, so it’s a great choice if you’re only interested in one style. The products I have experience with are Impresso Pro (oils) and Watercolor Studio. Both are excellent, if you can forgive the slightly dated interface. Costs can quickly mount up if you buy multiple apps, so check bundle pricing before committing.
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 got a good clean scan that was very usable – albeit only 1.5 megapixels. If you were unlucky, you got an unusable mess. Still, at least the lab always returned your negatives, which gave you a second chance to try at home with your own scanner.
Digital scans from APS – which I used extensively at the time – were even lower resolution. And because of the smaller negative size, quality suffered. Images could be grainy and lacking in sharpness. And of course, regardless of the format you were shooting, colour accuracy was hit and miss.
The original lab scan, showing poor colour accuracy and excessive grain
This image from 2002 is typical. It’s a good clean scan, with no dust or scratches, but the colour accuracy is too warm and the image suffers from excessive grain. Still, in these days of AI-enhanced photo editing, both issues are easily resolved. I resized and denoised this image in On1 Resize AI 2026, and then took it into DxO Photolab for colour grading. The result is a big improvement. At 8 megapixels, this new version is big enough for a 16 inch print. It has more accurate colours, and the excessive noise has given way to a more natural film texture from the Kodak Advantix Ultra film.
After careful editing, with more accurate colour and more realistic grain – an image good enough to hang on my wall
Do you still have any Picture CDs tucked away at the back of a drawer? Dig them out – the quality may be better than you remember,
Duffus Castle, near Elgin, North East Scotland. Two blurred fighter jets fly past. Shot on Olympus E500 with kit lens.
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 came from a contact in Arizona who commented that it was “very dark” and the “shadows needed opening up”. Fair comments, and the photo posted here has been re-edited to take that feedback into account. But what I found most interesting was that the comment came from someone who – as I discovered when we continued to exchange messages – lived in the desert. For her, the challenges she faced all related to the light. Massive dynamic range, extreme clarity, harsh sunshine.
For me, too, the challenges related to the light. This photo was taken at the tail-end of November, on a day when cloud and rain meant that it never got properly light. Even at 3:30 in the afternoon, the light was dim, lifeless, and lacking in contrast. There was little colour in the scene. All of that grass just looked flat and grey.
And yet the scene was compelling. Even in the dreich Scottish autumn, the photo works on three levels. In the foreground, the ruins of Duffus Castle captures feelings of both endurance and fragility. Yes, the castle ruins are still there, still standing. But they are also slipping away, the walls sliding down the ancient motte.
In the background, two fighter jets (Eurofighter Typhoons?) are a fleeting presence, blurred by speed against the unchanging landscape. They speak to 1,000 years of military advancement, from local skirmishes in the late middle ages to the complex diplomatic web of 21st century politics.
In the middle ground, the farm buildings anchor the image in everyday life. This was farmland when the wooden castle was first erected in the 12th century. It was still farmland when the stone-built castle was inhabited in the 14th to 17th centuries. And it’s still farmland today.
Amongst all the landscapes I’ve photographed: hills and glens, sun and rain, this is probably one of the most Scottish photos I’ve ever taken.
Fractal Blossom, 2024 – created digitally using Dynamic Auto Painter and Affinity Photo
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 no, of course not. These are our photos, it’s up to us to decide how we present them. And yet for me, straight out of camera rarely works. That’s why I shoot RAW and process my images before sharing them. Sometimes my edits go too far. I look back at some of the over-saturated, high dynamic range images that I was producing in my early days using Paintshop Pro, and I shudder at my naivety.
But taken much too far, over-editing becomes a conscious decision, moving further and further away from reality. Keep moving in that direction and you end up with Fractal Blossom which, according to my notes, started out as a photograph of spring blossom. Is it photography? No, but it’s mighty pretty, and it was a whole lot of fun making it. I wonder if I could get it made into a fabric?
King George V Park is one of Edinburgh’s hidden spaces. Maybe not an obvious place for casual visitors because it’s just a local park – a green space for local folk who don’t have their own gardens, and a place for children to play. And it’s also, bizarrely, the site of a disused railway tunnel that even Edinburgh residents often don’t know about.
To get to King George V park, start at the Canonmills branch of Tesco. With the store behind you, cross the busy carpark access road, and find a fine path which follows the route of an old railway line. Turn left and pass through a short tunnel, attractively graffitied with colourful designs. On exiting the tunnel, go straight ahead through a brightly-painted gate, passing a children’s playground on your right, and come to a slightly dejected-looking basketball court.
Olympus OM-D EM10 Mark II, Olympus m.zuiko 25mm f1.8. Processed using DxO Photolab.
The archway ahead of you forms the entrance to Scotland Street Tunnel. The tunnel has a strange history. Opened in 1847, it was closed just 21 years later.
It hasn’t been entirely disused all that time. Shortly after the tunnel was closed, the Scottish Mushroom Company set up business, using the tunnel as a mushroom farm. That lasted until 1929, and the tunnel fell out of use again until being converted into an air raid shelter in the second world war.
Since then, the tunnel has been completely inaccessible for the general public, although a YouTube video from 2023 gives a comprehensive look at the interior. It would be good if the tunnel could be reopened, as the 1km length could provide a safe and car-free walking/cycle route between Waverley and Canonmills. Until then, we can dream.
When you’re on holiday, you take the weather you’ve got. On the Isle of Harris, even in August, that frequently means overcast. So I approached Luskentyre beach – one of the UK’s most beautiful – with a sense of eagerness, looking forward to the exploration but not expecting to go home with any particularly great photos.
Luskentyre Beach, Harris, as captured using my Nokia 7.1
Even though I had my camera with me, I didn’t even take it out of my satchel for this photo. It’s just a record shot, right? A memory from my holiday of a tranquil walk on the Isle of Harris. .
Until today, watching a slideshow of the photos from that holiday, this photo stopped me in my tracks. Another hobby of mine is creating digital photos from my photos, And looking at this one, I couldn’t tell if it was a photo or a painting. The muted colours, the sweep of clouds obscuring the details of the horizon. It all looked so … painterly. But no. When I checked the EXIF, I saw that this is exactly the image my phone captured. No editing, just a phone cam doing its thing, Nice one, Nokia.
Every year during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, preachers make their way to the city centre to spread their message of hell and damnation. This image from 2003 captures a fleeting moment of tension on the bustle of the Royal Mile.
Edinburgh, 2003. The camera was probably a Canon EOS 3000 with kit lens. Film unknown.
The image is anchored by the preacher’s placard bearing a stark message: SEX before marriage equals HELL after death. The preacher is speaking to a young man who appears to be wearing a makeshift sign, or maybe a lanyard, around his neck. Presumably he’s someone directly involved with the Fringe – most likely a performer. Someone who, to put it more bluntly, is unlikely to agree with the preacher’s message. All around them, life continues. People ignore the interaction, or glance quickly as they pass – hoping to see what’s happening without being drawn into the narrative.
Adding to the claustrophobia, the scene is presented in harsh black and white, and tightly cropped. We can see enough of the surrounding streets to understand the context, and anyone who has visited Edinburgh during the Fringe will quickly quickly recognize the location. But this isn’t in any sense a portrait of Edinburgh. It’s a documentary image depicting the other voices striving to be heard amongst the hubbub of performance, celebration, and fun.
Today, street preachers are still to be found on the Royal Mile. Still ignored by most passers-by. But sometimes their voices break through the noise.
Have you ever experienced that moment when you look through the viewfinder to see a beautiful impressionistic image of colours and shapes – only for it all to snap into focus and lose the magic?
The image I saw in my viewfinder for a spilt second before the camera attempted to correct everything.
When I found it happening to me once too often, I started thinking about what had actually happened. Usually the focus was off – sometimes wildly – and I was seeing some magnificent bokeh balls before the focus snapped to the correct position to show me an accurate view of the scene. Often, too, the exposure was off, showing me an underexposed image that made the colours more vivid, more vibrant, before the camera’s auto-exposure kicked in, giving me an accurate exposure.
It was these realisations that made me decide to take more control. If I defocussed the image, the bokeh balls would return. If I exposed for a low-key image, the colours would pop. The resulting image wasn’t in any sense an accurate view of the scene in front of me. But it did capture the magic that i had seen in the viewfinder for that split second before the camera imposed its world-view.
The image my camera wanted me to take. Good enough, but really no more than a snapshot.
My Camera Stories 