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Category: general

  • Capturing texture in St Giles Cathedral

    With the weather being dreich and grey, my camera group today visited St Giles Cathedral, on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The theme was Texture. Whether that’s the same theme as Textures, or something different, is maybe something to explore another day. St Giles Cathedral is rich in textural detail, and my Panasonic Lumix 12-32mm lens was…

  • A change of perspective

    Many visitors to Tuscany bypass the town of Pietrasanta. There is no single, iconic sight associated with the town. The appeal comes from small galleries and workshops. Temporary exhibitions of sculpture, usually featuring the local Carrara marble. And partly, perhaps, that’s because there’s no direct train from the main tourist hubs – from Florence, Cinque…

  • What version of ACDSee should I use?

    It’s often overlooked, but ACDSee Photo Studio remains a great choice for many people looking to manage, process, and edit their growing photography collections. Since it was launched in 1994 (over 30 years ago!) it’s been continuously developed and updated into a mature DAM (digital asset manager), RAW processor, and layer-based pixel editor. The ACDSee…

  • 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.…

  • When white balance gets it wrong

    If you’re anything like me, most of the time you don’t even think about white balance. Set your camera to auto, shoot away … and the results are exactly what you expect. Sometimes your camera gets the white balance wrong, and that’s OK because DxO, or ACDSee, or whatever you use to tweak your photos…

  • Olympus “keep warm color” menu option

    What’s all that about then? Dig into the menus of your Olympus camera, and you’ll likely find two different options for auto white balance. There’s the regular, default mode, and there’s another mode that says “keep warm color off”. Now, much as I love Olympus – and I’ve been shooting Olympus for long enough to…

  • Elphin Chicken Day

    Chickens are funny, right? So when I saw a sign on the waterfront at Ullapool, advertising Elphin Chicken Day, I was immediately intrigued. So what is it? Well, according to the Facebook page, it’s a day of community fun. That means cakes, games, chickens. Who wouldn’t want to go? Sadly in 2018 when this photo…

  • The surprisingly simple story of how Greyfriars Bobby got his shiny nose

    TL,DR – tourists rubbing his nose for luck. Because I hate it when websites have clickbaity titles and make you read through a whole load of irrelevancies before giving you the story.  I’ve always been very happy with this photo of the Greyfriars Bobby statue, photographed in 2006. Look closely at Bobby’s nose, and compare…

  • Where are your photos from 20 years ago?

    Do you know where your photos from 20 years ago are?  The big social network of the day was MySpace. Theoretically it still exists, but a botched server migration in 2015 led to the loss of most user data – over 12 years of content – so if you were hoping to find your Christmas…

  • The little lens that died

    I’m not a fan of power zoom lenses. It’s one of the reasons why I prefer SLR or mirrorless cameras to compact cameras. But they do have their place. In their powered-off state they can be absolutely tiny, allowing a compact camera to be as small as a pack of cards while still having a…