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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 opal perspex and flashing in camera would help. These are notes on the tests I’ve done. I’m using The Anticipation Camera. I have an Intrepid 4×5 camera on order but the…
Read More Pre-flashing Multigrade Paper Negs
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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 everything ourselves. But sometimes it isn’t the right thing to do and we should get our hands dirty. I like making images and it has become so easy today that…
Read More Sometimes you should bark yourself
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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 for much of it which may have added to the impact but I actually had some good sitting and walking. Often you can tell a “good retreat” from the after…
Read More Wiston Lodge: Turning towards retreat
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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 spectacular.
Read More No IR Film required
Loch Ness Shores
Stepping out for a few minutes before breakfast can be magical. Camping makes this more likely.
Read More Frosty morning at Loch Ness Shores Campsite
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To encounter something living that is massively larger than you are on your way to nursery but change you.
Read More Size is important
I can't be bothered to fuss with it.
I just used the Fukasawa theme on the Botanics Stories blog so I decided to update my own blog to something else – anything really to make it a bit different.
Read More Updated my theme
Reality
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 my current obsession with politics and how our media portrays it I just had to put this lot together. It starts with a blog post moaning about BBC bias that…
Read More How to lie with a photo
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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 Scotland will appreciate how unusual this is. Waverley station was transformed by the light. I found myself taking photos again.
Read More Unusual light for Edinburgh
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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 launch this evening the official photographer was a little late but just as they asked me to help out she turned up. So I didn’t need to do anything but it…
Read More Henry mobbed by his public
David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (Scottish, 1821 - 1848 ), William McNab, 1843-47, salted paper print from a paper negative, Paul Mellon Fund
I just wrote a blog for work about the Hill & Adamson portrait of William McNab. The first photographic portrait of a professional horticulturist?
Read More The first photographic portrait of a professional horticulturist?
Walking up Skiddaw - we abandoned it as shortly after this we could not see that top or the bottom.
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 of way. We played rummy in the evenings.
Read More Back from the Lakes
Ed Taylor ~ Trustee
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 people who were involved in reconstructing the Botanic Cottage at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Needless to say the allotment project fell by the wayside as the Botanic Cottage People…
Read More Botanic Cottage People
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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 Princess Royal (their patron) to a function at the St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral. The last royal I photographed was the queen. It was 1977. I was twelve and stood on…
Read More HRH Princess Royal
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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 be considered too shallow a depth of field but which I prefer. It is testing my artistic integrity – pompous though it sounds. I have “it doesn’t have to be in…
Read More How shallow can you go
This is the view of the floor through the viewfinder with the 14mm attached.
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 the XF14mm f2.8 – a nifty little lens I like a lot. It is in response to a nice Ian MacDonald Photography review of the X-Pro2 where he shows the…
Read More XF14mm f2.8 on X-Pro1 & X-Pro2
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It snowed hard enough to drive me back indoors but by 10 o’clock it was all but gone.
Read More It was briefly winter today
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Sunday evening and I’m taking the snaps off my camera. It has been dark and I’ve been hold up writing software for my Ten Breaths Map project so there are only three shots I like but by chance there is a strong connection between the photos and the project I dedicated my Saturday to. All three…
Read More Two out of three of my green spaces under threat
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I thought it was the winter solstice this morning and my feelings were confirmed by ominous sunrise. But I was wrong. It is actually at 4:49am tomorrow morning. It moves around between 20th and 23th apparently.
Read More Solstice? Not Quite Yet
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Over the last year my main project has been photographing the people involved in reconstructing the Botanic Cottage. This is Sutherland who is the organiser of community stuff associated with the cottage and also the catalyst for me making the photographs. I’m getting close to finishing photographing people but still not sure how the final set of…
Read More Botanic Cottage: Sutherland
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I came to see that the human imagination is not paramount in the creative process: that what is paramount is “The Creation” and He who created it and that what the true artist is expressing is not himself but his response to this eternal continuing process of Creation … I believe that, in the humblest…
Read More The role of the artists
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I’m just back from a week at Plum Village. I’d hoped to do some portraiture but didn’t really have time. Retreats are busy places what with all the meditating and the Mindfulness. My working meditation was in the vegetable garden with Sister Coa Nghiem. She is from Thailand and speaks Vietnamese but not much English…
Read More Sister Coa NghiemMia shared this because it seemed relevant to my photography. I love it.
Read More You are not what you look like
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Vlasta is the interpretation officer at the Botanics so she tries to bring order to leaflets and signs and stuff.
Read More Vlasta Jamnicky: June 2015
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Paul is curator of Inverleith House gallery at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh a (surely THE) leading contemporary gallery in Scotland.
Read More Paul Nesbitt: June 2015
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Final day of the Wiston retreat.
Read More Josephine: May 2015
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Just having received the 5 Mindfulness Trainings.
Read More Jerry: May 2015
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Is this Roland? Looking out the door at the end of the Wiston Retreat.
Read More Roland: May 2015
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We had been dealing with some very sad family things and were taking time to walk in some very beautiful woods in the Chilterns to find space. It was a time when the power of Shinrin-Yoku (Forest Bathing) was really important.
Read More Demetra: May 2015