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  • Cane chair, Kelso

    I have no clear memory of taking this photo. From my notes, I know that it was taken using Kodak T-Max Pro 400. And from the context – the photos on either side of the negative were all shot in and around Kelso – I presume that that’s the location. But beyond that, my memory fails me.

    A solitary, weathered chair leaning against a stone wall, surrounded by cobblestones and vegetation, evoking a sense of abandonment and the passage of time.

    The subject reflects a lifelong love of derelict and abandoned objects. Trying to find beauty in the mundane and the ugly. There’s an obvious contrast with the stone wall. It’s far older than the chair, and yet much better preserved. Today, if I went looking for the street where the photo was taken, the walls would still look the same. Almost certainly, the cobbles would still have vegetation growing from between them. There may even be an abandoned chair in the same place, but it wouldn’t be this chair, because this chair has long since been consigned to landfill.

    I didn’t stage this scene. I never do. I simply came across an ignored and abandoned object, and tried to find beauty in the ugliness. This is a scene of emptiness – but it’s also a scene which harks back to earlier days, when this chair was a treasured possession. Maybe a bedroom chair from someone’s first home. Maybe a long-forgotten chair from a conservatory which has long since been adapted for use as a laundry room.

    The use of film adds another dimension here. The film was long-since expired. At least 20 years out of date, I had to work hard on my negative scanner to obtain a usable image. Would the image have been as successful if it were a noise-free digital photo? I doubt it. If it was digital, I would have taken it into Affinity Photo and artificially distressed it. But I doubt I could ever have captured the mood of that expired Kodak film.

  • Liminal spaces

    According to the internet, liminal spaces are empty or abandoned places that appear eerie and forlorn. as such, I’m often drawn to photograph them. Reddit has a whole community dedicated to liminal spaces but beware – the posts there are often of back rooms or empty shopping malls with no real liminal qualities. Which begs the question – what makes a truly liminal photograph? Consider this image of a building in Lossiemouth Harbour.

    A small, white building with a blue sign reading 'North58' in Lossiemouth Harbour, against a cloudy sky.
    Whitewashed building, Lossiemouth Harbour, under a grey and threatening sky
    • It’s situated in a transitional space. It’s not a place to linger. It’s somewhere that people pass through on their way to somewhere else.
    • There’s a sense of stillness. No people, no clutter. The image has an eerie feel.
    • There’s an ambiguity to the space. Yes, the building is still used and occupied as a commercial unit, but it feels abandoned.
    • The lighting is flat. No shadows, no bright sunlight, a muted grey sky.
    • The colours are muted. Even the door colour, and the sign above the window, fade into the scene.
    • In general, there’s an uncanny normality to the scene, there’s nothing wrong with it, and yet it feels somehow “off”.

    Liminal photography is supremely difficult to do well. Reddit’s liminal community is full of boring photos which prove that. But occasionally, just occasionally, an empty space achieves that sense of unreality which elevates it into something more.

  • But I don’t want to be a pig farmer

    If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

    There are many variations of this quote from Quentin Crisp. They’re all slightly different, and they all share the same underlying truth. There’s no point spending your life wishing for what you can’t have. Just make the most of what you have. So it is with life. So it is with photography.

    I would love to live in the Scottish Highlands. Birds, seascapes, moody mountain views. But I don’t. I live in an urban village on the outskirts of Edinburgh. I have a beach (how many people would want that withing walking distance!) I have some small parks, and I have Edinburgh City Centre just a 25 minute bus ride from my front door. And so, mostly, I shoot street photography. It may not be my first choice, but it’s accessible, it’s enjoyable, and – very important – you don’t need expensive equipment.

    A scenic beach at sunset with a rainbow in the sky, featuring people walking alongside the groyne and enjoying the tranquil sea.
    Rainbow over the Firth of Forth. Viewpoint from the tables outside the Espy Bar, overlooking Portobello Beach

    This photo pretty much exemplifies this approach to photography. I’m not really much into pretty sunset photos. I’m definitely not someone to chase rainbows. But when I’m sitting with a friend, drinking a pint of lager, and that classic rainbow shot falls into view – well, it would be rude not to. It’s even quite stylish, as Quentin Crisp might say.

  • Megapixels are overrated

    Close-up of a vintage car's green body with a round headlight and a chrome grille.
    A close-up view of a beautiful green hot rod in the Imperial Palace Car Museum, Las Vegas

    It was my very first camera that persuaded me that megapixels aren’t important. The Fujifilm Finepix E550 offered an option to shoot at 800 ISO – at the cost of its image output dropping from 6.3 to 3 megapixels. Not ideal, but in 2004, 800 ISO was a rarity in consumer cameras, so I felt the trade-off was fair.

    Visiting the Imperial Car Museum in Las Vegas, I was drawn to this car not just for its shape, but for how it stood so confidently on the showroom floor. The deep green paint, the way the curves caught the light, the quiet confidence of the grille. The whole car just seemed to glow.

    This photograph is about admiration. The craftsmanship, the care, the attention to detail that went into objects built to last. It’s also about time: how things age, and are reinvented over time.

    The hot rod underwent one final reinvention under my camera. I was just discovering digital photography, naively playing around with JASC Paint Shop Pro to edit my photos. Many of my edits were questionable – pushing saturation to unrealistic levels, for example. But this works. My notes tell me that I used the LucisArt plugin on this image. If so, I’ve long since forgotten what LucisArt did, or how I used it. But what I do know is that 3 megapixels was ample to achieve my creative vision, because I’ve printed this photo at 16×12 inches for exhibition use.

    Even today, with phones shooting 50 megapixels plus, my main camera is only 16 megapixels. Size doesn’t matter. .

  • Convertible in the snow

    A vintage car covered in snow parked in front of a residential building on a snowy day.

    An MG Midget parked on a residential Edinburgh street during the Beast From the East in 2018

    I had often seen and admired this car while out walking in Portobello. Some people like their vintage cars immaculate – concourse ready, as the phrase goes. I go more for the “gently distressed” look, so this car immediately appealed. The ill-fitting hood was far from water-tight, and leaked any time it rained. The Rostyle wheels – an expensive factory-fitted option – looked delightfully out of place on this classic British sports car. And the black polyurethane bumpers – a standard fitting from 1974 onwards – were nowhere near as attractive as the chrome bumpers of earlier models.

    I often meant to photograph it but never got round to it. It would just have been a snapshot. A quick grab-shot of an attractive old car, shoehorned into an undersized parking space. Until the Beast From the East happened. This was a fearsome storm that struck the UK in February 2018, closing down shops, offices, and public transport with its heavy snowfall.

    This much snow is rare in my part of Scotland, so I wrapped up warmly and grabbed my current favourite camera – a Minolta Dynax 4 with 24-50mm f4.0 lens. I loaded it with the only film I had available at the time, which was the budget Kodak Color Plus, and I headed for the beach.

    And finally, I struck lucky with the MG Midget. For once, it was parked with space to spare all around it. The virgin snow revealed no tyre tracks. The slightly-askew hood was letting the snow into the cabin. And the Rostyle wheels revealed a glimpse of the black tarmac beneath. For me, this was an important part of the story. This was no Scandinavian scene, where the snow had built up over months. This was south-central Scotland, where heavy snowfall is a rarity and convertible cars don’t need to be garaged over winter.

    The Color Plus film suits this image perfectly. The soft colours and lazy grain accentuate the vintage feel, and the falling snow softens the whole image. I wonder whatever happened to that car?

  • Turned out nice again

    Once a week, I meet up with a group of friends who share my passion for photography. We alternate between heading out with our cameras to explore and capture new shots, and staying in to share and discuss the photos we took the previous week. It’s a perfect blend of creativity, learning, and good conversation.

    If you know anything about British weather you’ll know it rains a lot. And yet – I’m not sure how – we rarely seem to be rained off. I can only recall a single occasion in the past two years when we’ve abandoned our cameras and sought the shelter of a nearby coffee shop. For a while this morning, it felt like we might have a second outing rained off. For the first half-hour or so, a group of us huddled under the shelter of a tree. But then the rain stopped, the sun came out, and we enjoyed the water droplets glistening on the foliage, and the treacherous but beautiful rain-soaked cobbled roads.

    A view of modern buildings with balconies under a dramatic sky filled with dark clouds.
    Apartment building, Lochrin Basin, Edinburgh

    Inevitably I found myself drawn to the nearest water, the canal basin at Fountainbridge, where I was rewarded with some of Scotland’s most beautiful light. Bright sunshine and storm clouds.

    The theme we had agreed for today was balconies and stairs. Well, those are some pretty spectacular balconies.

    This was the last of the threatening skies. The rest of the day was bright and sunny. We all meandered to Loudon’s and enjoyed each other’s company over a coffee – or maybe a tea – and a gently-warmed scone.

  • Victoria Street in the rain

    As I’m writing this, I have the windows wide open, enjoying the sounds and smells of a heavy rainfall during a break in a summer heatwave. There’s something special about British weather. Yes, we complain about it constantly. But those cloudy, overcast skies are a lot easier to live with than constant, relentless sunshine. And the rain! British rain can be glorious.

    I had this photo in mind for weeks before I got the opportunity to shoot it. A wide-angle shot of Victoria Street,, the cobbles glistening in the rain. When the weather forecast was right, I charged my camera batteries and headed for Victoria Crescent, where a high angle gave me a chance to look down on the scene.

    A high-angle view of Victoria Street in Edinburgh on a rainy day, with glistening cobblestones, parked cars, and people walking with umbrellas.
    Victoria Street, 2019. Panasonic GX80, Olympus 9-18mm

    Victoria Street is one of Edinburgh’s crown jewels. Search online, and you’ll find endless photos of people queuing at the Harry Potter shops, the colourful buildings towering over them. Photograph it in black and white, with the rain bringing out the textures of the cobbles and the sandstone tenements, and the effect is quite different.

    Cars can’t drive down Victoria Street now as it’s been closed to traffic. A good thing, I think. It’s much nicer as a pedestrianised street. I wonder if that terrible tarmac patch has been repaired yet?

  • No Sitting

    A 'No sitting' sign displayed on a concrete surface with a beach and sea in the background.

    The covid lockdown of 2020 was the most extreme event of my adult life. Here in Scotland, there were times when we were restricted to our homes, allowed to go out only for “essential purposes” and – once a day – for exercise. The exercise rule was strictly enforced. Yes, you could walk the length of the prom, getting your 10,000 steps. But woe betide anyone who stopped for a seat because sitting isn’t exercise.

    But how does a photographer react to such extreme events? If you answered “by documenting them”, then you have the same thought process as me. Once a day, I popped my Olympus XA3 in my pocket and wandered out for my daily exercise. The camera was chosen for its small size. Photography wasn’t essential exercise so I wanted to take a quick snapshot, without drawing attention to myself in the almost-deserted cityscape. And film instead of digital? Well, every frame you shoot costs money, and that forces you to make choices. Every day I went out for a walk, I took my film camera with me and shot a single frame. That roll of 36 exposures probably has the biggest number of “keepers” I’ve ever managed in my life.

    Blooming cherry tree branches adorned with pink flowers in a green park setting, with glimpses of a path in the background.
    A vintage red car parked on the side of the street, surrounded by greenery and trees.
    A stone monument with a sculpted relief on one side, situated in an urban setting under an overcast sky.
    A street view in Scotland during the 2020 lockdown, showcasing deserted roads lined with red brick buildings and a modern structure. The overcast sky adds to the quiet atmosphere.
    A green wooden building with white trim, labeled 'Joppa Tennis Courts,' alongside tennis courts in a residential area.
    A sign reading 'Stay Safe' with an illustration of a person wearing sunglasses, attached to a railing near a sandy beach under a cloudy sky.

  • Like Snapshots – But the Light is Better

    A tranquil scene of gondolas with blue covers moored along wooden posts in a calm lagoon, with a historic building and a tower visible in the background under a foggy sky.
    Gondolas bob in the water, moored by St Mark’s Square, Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in the background

    How would you describe your photography in a single sentence? Maybe just a single word, even? A few years ago my friend Simon Wootton – letting his mouth get ahead of his thoughts – said that my photographs were “like snapshots, but the light is better”. I think he regretted it immediately, because he quickly added “I mean that as a compliment”.

    Thank you Simon. Seriously. Because that sentence captures how I feel about my photography, and describes it far better that I ever could have.

    Some people shoot landscapes, or wildlife, or sports, or news. And quite a lot of people shoot snapshots, so let’s celebrate that by taking the best snapshots we possibly can.

    Which brings me on to this photograph of San Giorgio Maggiore from St Mark’s Square in Venice – the gondolas gently bobbing in the foreground. It’s a photo that’s been taken a million times, and I’m not naïve enough to think that I can add anything to it, But I was on holiday, I wanted to take the best photograph that I possibly could, and so I slipped out of the hotel pre-dawn to make my way to St Mark’s Square.

    Yes, Venice really is at its best in the early morning, before the tourists all get up. I had the square to myself – well, me and a few street-cleaners in their high-vis jackets. I wandered over towards the Grand Canal and – leaning against a lamppost to stabilise myself in the half-dark – shot off half a dozen frames of San Giorgio Maggiore.

    Later in the day, many thousands of tourists would stop beside the Doge’s Palace to take the same photo, but mine was already in the bag. Like a snapshot – but the light was better.

  • My most unexpected photo

    An abstract image of a plasma globe with electric arcs and glowing light against a blue background, showcasing the dynamic movement of electricity.
    An abstract capture of a plasma ball showcasing vibrant lightning flashes and artistic light trails.

    One of the joys of digital photography is trying new things and seeing what happens. Unlike film, it doesn’t cost anything to press the shutter and take a photo, so you can try crazy ideas just to see if they work. When you get home, review the photos onscreen and if they’re unsuccessful, simply reflect on what you could improve them next time. And press delete.

    That’s how it was the day I took my infrared camera to the National Museum of Scotland. I’ve photographed this venue many times. Possibly even too many times. I’d never photographed it in infrared though, so on a bright sunshiny day I headed into the Grand Gallery to see what infrared would do to the familiar scene.  The results were disappointing. The infrared colours were uninteresting, and if I converted the colours to black and white – well, they simply looked like conventional black and white photos. I got one successful image – a photo of a strong geometric shadow pattern contrasting with the curves of the circular radiators – but there was nothing unique about it. Nothing to suggest the other-worldliness that I was looking for.

    Still, the National Museum is a place of many wonders, and as I wandered through the Science Gallery I spotted a plasma ball in a dark corner. Here was my chance to try something new. A silly idea? Possibly. My infrared camera – an ageing Olympus Pen E-P2 wasn’t noted for its low-light performance, and the kit lens only opened to f5.6 on full zoom. But hey! It wouldn’t cost anything, right?

    My first half-dozen photos were grim failures, until I had the realisation that the lightning flash was dancing around the globe, making it impossible to capture the movement in a single exposure. Instead, holding the camera as still as possible, I shot five frames – each identical except for the lightning flash.

    At home, I used Affinity Photo to open the photos as a stack, and then experimented with blend modes to get the right effect. That was the moment that I rendered this final photo. All in all, a successful morning.