My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

Category: beach

  • The Curlew

    At Port Seton, near the caravan site where the Red Burn flows into the sea, a small beach lies hidden from view. Here the fresh water from the burn meets the salt water of the Firth of Forth, connecting the land and the sea. The iron ore which gave the burn its red colour has…

  • Capturing drama with a mobile phone

    North Berwick is a pleasant 35 minute train ride from Edinburgh’s Waverley Station. I go there regularly for the coffee shops, the busy high street, and of course the sea views. What I don’t go there for usually is photography, because the setting is all too familiar to me, Normally this isn’t a problem. Yes,…

  • Capturing atmosphere with expired Kodak TMAX P3200

    In 2005 I was still shooting film. Oh, I had a digital camera – the very capable Fujifilm Finepix E550 – but it was a compact, and I still loved the precision that came from the manual controls on my Canon EOS SLR.  It was a very fine balancing act. I was saving for a…

  • The photo that looked like a painting

    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…

  • 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…

  • My photos, and the stories behind them

    It depends how you count it, of course. How do you define a serious hobbyist, and what differentiates them from a semi-professional? But using a few assumptions, I calculate that around 10 million photographers across the globe have some sort of website. Which leads to an obvious question: why one more? Well, it’s easy to…

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