My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

Category: experiments

  • Replicating a masterpiece … badly

    Alfred Buckham, Daredevil Photographer was the name of a photographic exhibition at the Scottish Portrait gallery in Edinburgh. If you don’t recognise his name, you’ll probably recognise his most famous photograph. Yes, that’s a biplane flying over Edinburgh castle, with Arthur’s Seat in the background. Yes, it was before Photoshop was invented. No, it isn’t…

  • Seeing through cataracts

    I have cataracts. Of course there’s nothing unusual about that for someone of my age and I’m fortunate that, at least for the moment, it makes relatively little difference to my life. But I need extra light for reading, and I often struggle when trying to identify birds at the extremes of my binoculars’ magnification.…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • Best software for auto-painting

    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…

  • 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…

  • A matter of focus

    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? When I found it happening to me once too often, I started thinking about what had actually happened. Usually the…

  • My most unexpected photo

    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…

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