I made a disappointing ambrotype by pointing my half-plate, wet-plate camera out of the window. I was just doing a test shot to see how…
Category: Photography
When you’re shopping for a large format lens one of the first things you want to know is what the coverage is. Will it cover…
If, like me, you spend too much time and money on old large format lenses you may be frustrated that the data that used to…
From 1913 to 1935 the German company Voigtländer manufactured a midrange plate camera called the Avus. This was before the standardisation of sheet film holders…
There is no doubt that making wet plate collodion photographs is a faff. I can make an image with my phone in just a few…
“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens…
Oh great joy – I’ve spent ages researching this and at last I’ve made my first wet plate collodion image! I tried to do a…
This is an image of Scotland that I created as part of my job. The green is Normalised Difference Vegetation Index which is basically the difference…
I really must stop posting things on Facebook without posting them here first. I’ve reverted back to my “nothing on Facebook or Twitter that isn’t…
I had a interesting exchange on the way to work. I was taking this picture of a window – just interested in the symmetry and…
Not sure what to say this month. Not quite to 200 days – although I am on the 200th as I type. Here are two…
I don’t feel I really understand something until I have had a go at it so, having watched some YouTube videos on Afghan Box Cameras,…
I don’t have access to a darkroom at home so pre-flashing paper negatives to reduce contrast is difficult. I wondered whether using a piece of…
Why bark if you have a dog? We need to be reminded to let someone else take over and do a job rather than doing…
I’m just back from a four day retreat at Wiston Lodge lead by Dene Donalds that I found very powerful. My sinuses were playing up…
These trees are the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh were a vivid yellow/green and just a red filter in post process produces this effect. They were…
Stepping out for a few minutes before breakfast can be magical. Camping makes this more likely.
To encounter something living that is massively larger than you are on your way to nursery but change you.
I just used the Fukasawa theme on the Botanics Stories blog so I decided to update my own blog to something else – anything really…
What I like about photography is it is so often about what you want to say and not what reality is. Mixing this up with…
For a treat I had lunch in Yo Sushi on Princes Street – and I actually felt the benefit of the air conditioning! Anyone who knows…
During my photo drought I have taken to having my X-Pro 1 with the 27mm pancake in my bag. Carrying but not using. At Henry’s book…
I just wrote a blog for work about the Hill & Adamson portrait of William McNab. The first photographic portrait of a professional horticulturist?
We have just had a week camping in the English Lake District. It didn’t rain the whole time. Very enjoyable in a gentle family kind…
About a year a go I had committed to photograph people on their allotments as my next project when Sutherland Forsyth suggested I document the…
Stuart Beattie, director of Scotland’s Churches Trust, liked the portrait I made of him and asked if I might photograph the visit of Her Royal Highness The…
I have had an interesting evening torn between two shots I took today. Same subject and almost the same pose but one with what may…
This is a quick post to host some camera phone snaps for a discussion about the new X-Pro2 and whether it has frame lines for…
It snowed hard enough to drive me back indoors but by 10 o’clock it was all but gone.