My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

Category: general

  • What are those big yellow things dominating the Leith skyline?

    TL;DR – They’re wind turbine jacket foundations. They were made in China by COOEC–Fluor Heavy Industries, and shipped here on the heavy transport ship Hua Yang Long. They are being stored temporarily in the Port of Leith before being installed in the Inch Cape Offshore Wind Farm – about 15km off the coast of Angus.…

  • A year’s worth of tried and tested themes for your next group photo walk

    My camera group has been going out and about, every second Friday morning, for – oh, I don’t know, probably around 12 years now. You can imagine, even in a city as varied as Edinburgh, we’ve been pretty much everywhere. Usually multiple times. So a couple of years ago, around March 2024, we decided to…

  • Mindfulness: one of photography’s hidden benefits

    Mindfulness can be an important part of photography. Yes, I’ve gone out to enjoy using my camera. Yes, I’m enjoying spending time with friends and looking forward to enjoying a coffee together. But alongside all the obvious skills of photography – considering the light, composing the scene, capturing the decisive moment – observation is the…

  • Transform an old Android tablet into a digital photo frame

    In an earlier post, I talked about the importance of curating your photos – not just managing them. When you curate your photos, you bring them to life. Instead of sitting in a Digital Asset Manager, or dying in a social media post that no-one looks at after the first 24 hours, in a digital…

  • How do you curate your photos?

    How do you manage your photos? You do manage your photos, right? Whether you use Digikam, Lightroom, ACDSee or even Windows Explorer, you have a system? Maybe you organise your photos by date. One folder per month, or one folder per photoshoot. Maybe you completely ignore folders, relying on your DAM to keep them in…

  • 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…

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