My Camera Stories

My photos and the stories behind them

Category: landscape

  • 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,…

  • Best software for autopainting

    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…

  • Opening up the shadows

    Around 2007, when Flickr was absolutely at its height, I uploaded this photo of Duffus Castle, Morayshire, to a group which was dedicated to photo critiques. The rules were simple: post a photo of your own which you wanted critiqued, and give a critique of the three preceding photos. One of the critiques I received…

  • The photo that looked like a painting

    When you’re on holiday, you take the weather you’ve got. On the Isle of Harris, even in August, that frequently means overcast. So I approached Luskentyre beach – one of the UK’s most beautiful – with a sense of eagerness, looking forward to the exploration but not expecting to go home with any particularly great…

  • A matter of focus

    Have you ever experienced that moment when you look through the viewfinder to see a beautiful impressionistic image of colours and shapes – only for it all to snap into focus and lose the magic? When I found it happening to me once too often, I started thinking about what had actually happened. Usually the…

  • But I don’t want to be a pig farmer

    If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style. It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style. There are many variations of this quote from Quentin Crisp. They’re all slightly different, and…

  • No Sitting

    The covid lockdown of 2020 was the most extreme event of my adult life. Here in Scotland, there were times when we were restricted to our homes, allowed to go out only for “essential purposes” and – once a day – for exercise. The exercise rule was strictly enforced. Yes, you could walk the length…

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