My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

Category: general

  • 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…

  • Blogging is hard

    It’s been a few months now since I started this site. I waited till I had ten posts before I pressed the Publish button, and I’ve added another twenty posts since then. Early days still, but I see some themes developing, and I’m starting to see the topics I want to explore. Very early on,…

  • From grainy to gorgeous – upgrading my APS film scans

    Picture CDs – not to be confused with Photo CDs – were widely offered by film processing labs in the early days of digital photography. They were fairly inexpensive. I usually got my films processed at Boots, which charged an extra £1.99 for a picture CD. Quality, unfortunately, was variable. If you were lucky, you…

  • Megapixels are overrated

    It was my very first camera that persuaded me that megapixels aren’t important. The Fujifilm Finepix E550 offered an option to shoot at 800 ISO – at the cost of its image output dropping from 6.3 to 3 megapixels. Not ideal, but in 2004, 800 ISO was a rarity in consumer cameras, so I felt…

  • Turned out nice again

    Once a week, I meet up with a group of friends who share my passion for photography. We alternate between heading out with our cameras to explore and capture new shots, and staying in to share and discuss the photos we took the previous week. It’s a perfect blend of creativity, learning, and good conversation.…

  • Machrie Bay Community Tuck Shop

    Think of the photo that you’re most proud of. Maybe it’s a portrait of a friend or family member. Maybe it’s a beautiful landscape that took hours of hiking to get there, and then even more hours of editing to get it just perfect. Maybe it’s a piece of street photography where all the elements…

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