My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

Category: landscape

  • Processing a 590nm infrared photo for a dreamlike effect

    The bridge over the pond at Doctor Neil’s Garden, Duddingston, Edinburgh. Photographed using a 590nm infrared-adapted Olympus Pen E-P2 and Panasonic Lumix 12-32mm lens. Processed in DxO Photolab and Affinity Studio. For me, the main challenge of infrared photography is translating the vision – what I saw inside my head when I pressed the shutter…

  • 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…

  • Photographic theme: lines

    Once a fortnight, I meet up with a group of friends and we head out with our cameras to enjoy some photography. And of course coffee. We’ve been doing this for many years, so even in a city as beautiful as Edinburgh, we’ve photographed pretty much everything there is to see. Usually several times. We’ve…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • A sculpture croft in the far north of Scotland

    I first encountered the ceramics of Lotte Glob in the far north of Scotland at Balnakiel Craft Village, near Durness. Even then, her work seemed to exist slightly apart from its surroundings. A mix of strange, playful shapes that felt organic despite their ceramic origins. She created mugs and plates too – we have one…

  • Small sensors don’t do bokeh

    Apparently, small sensors can’t do bokeh. It’s funny how often the “rules” of photography turn out to be old wives’ tales. Of course there are cameras that don’t do bokeh. In the early 2000s, I grew inexplicably fond of Kodak Advantix cameras. Bizarre, I know, but they were lightweight, easily loaded with 35mm film, and…

  • Those gorgeous Olympus colours

    My first serious digital camera was an Olympus E500. Launched in 2005, it had an 8 megapixel CCD sensor that produced beautiful film-like colours. Like all CCD cameras however, the dynamic range we severely limited, and noise quickly started to become an issue when you went above 400 ISO. I loved that camera, and when…

  • 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,…

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