Category: experiments
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Saughton Park, Edinburgh, is one of Edinburgh’s hidden gems. Not literally hidden, of course. It’s easily found, and very popular with locals. But its position outside the city centre, a ten minute walk from the nearest tram stop, means that few tourists ever visit. I was there earlier in the summer, with a group of…
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In my last post, I shared the workflow I use when preparing one of my photos for autopainting. In this post, I’ll share the very different results achieved by four different autopainting applications on Windows – and also my own final version of the same painting. My own final version combines multiple approaches, layered and…
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Camera Clubs are great for improving your photography in a friendly, supportive environment. They’re not always the best place to learn who you are as a photographer. The camera club aesthetic, basically, is: Your main subject must be bitingly sharp. Don’t blow the highlights. Use the rule of thirds. You get the idea. A lot…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
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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…
Recent
- The view I almost missed
- Four autopainters, then my version
- My workflow for autopainting with Dynamic Auto Painter
- The Curlew
- Theme: empty chairs
- Street: photographing people is hard
- Balancing technique and personal style in photography
- Why I loved Agfa Ultra 100 – until the sun came out
- ACDSee Keywords and Categories
- Processing a 590nm infrared photo for a dreamlike effect
