Prints

Eagle eyed readers may have noticed the alteration in menu choices at the top of the page. I have dropped the photography (which can still be accessed in the sidebar when reading the Journal) and have added Prints.

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Prints available

After much deliberation I have decided to make limited edition prints available for purchase through this website on the Prints page. At this point I have six available, three from Loch Earn, one from Edinburgh city centre and two from Cramond. I will be adding a few more soon.

The choices that are available reflect my own style and are among my favourite shots that I have assembled over the last year.

They are all printed on a high quality fine art matt paper, the price reflects the size, as well as the time, effort and processing that has went into the final product. I have gone through a lot of research that photographers charge for prints such as these and have priced them accordingly.

I am the biggest critic of my photographs, and most people are their own worst critic, but ultimately this is always where I was going when I was learning (and continue learning) to take photographs.

All payments are made securely online and are sent out with a couple of days, to anywhere in the world. 

 

Ben Chonzie

Wow, the 7th of August already and my first post of the month, where does the time go? 

I spent a mostly beautiful Saturday hillwalking near Crieff with @alycoste, conquering Ben Chonzie. Ben Chonzie clocks in at 931m and is therefore listed as a Munro. We took the longer tougher route crossing the Loch Turret Dam and trekking up the east side to the summit. Just as we summited the heavens opened up and soaked us both! Of course, ten minutes later the sun was out and dried off the wet waterproofs.

Needless to say I took a few photographs, a few of which are below.

Loch Lomond

I have been meaning to post these images since Monday but it has been a very busy week. A spent Monday evening at Loch Lomond, on the East side near Balmaha. It was a beautiful summer day and the evening was nearly cloudless which made for great conditions for shooting a few photographs.

I was especially keen on taking some long exposure photographs. Realising that I didn't have my tripod with me when I was almost there basically killed that idea off... I tried improvising using my rucksack but there was still too much movement :-(

On the bright side, it's Scotland so there will be lots of sunny days like this to try again ;-)

I have also taken on the role of moderator for the Instagram Hub @pocket_uk which means I get to select some photographs each week from the UK to promote! Am quite excited about this as sometimes I see photographs on Instagram that just blow me away and I feel giving a "like" and a comment just isn't enough! If you have instagram photos of the UK go over to the @pocket_uk hub, follow them and tag your photographs with #pocket_uk and you'll hopefully get a feature! 

Here are the photo's that I did get from Loch Lomond. Click the thumbnail for the large version :-)

CSS and the Forth (Rail) Bridge

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on a former academic supervisor's pet project. It involves creating a new set of CSS code for his website to slowly drag it out of the dark ages (the late '90's when we still designed websites using tables). The first stage is to implement CSS rules and to discard the tables that currently hold the site together.

The task which at first seemed simple has turned out to be a giant monster that will seemingly never end. It took me roughly a week just get my head around how it worked. It's built around a database and perl code and is different from any other project I have worked on and it has been so: frustrating; fun; enlightening; educational; emotionally draining (depending on situation). Fortunately for me this is the kind of project I love working on :-)

Hand coding into a terminal window again reminds of how I built my first site on an Apple Mac I (yes, the 1984 one) at university in 1996. It was a amazing time with 56.6K modems and ytalk that allowed you to chat to other people on the network that was 'logged on'. I can't think of a word that is large enough to describe how much things have changed since then in technology. Anyway, back to this website that was built around that time... :-) I haven't put a link to the site because it would be nice to work on it until it has been totally overhauled and redesigned. 

So, last night I finally got out with my camera, and took a trip up to North Queensferry to try and get a moody shot of the Forth Bridge. Little did I realise that almost every route to North Queensferry would provide challenges. The route going through Kincardine was closed, and it wasn't possible to go back across the Kincardine Bridge, which I did not realise and ended up going around Kincardine twice. Eventually drove across the Clackmannanshire bridge along to the Forth Road Bridge missing my turn off on the Fife side due to the sat nav not recognising all the new roads built for the Queensferry Crossing. Thought I would be able to via Inverkeithing but alas the road was also closed here, for some reason that a local chap explained to me in an accent that was more alien than Scottish, of which I understood a couple of words.

Thankfully when I got there it was still a bit misty and heavy rain. All for this photograph. Soaked through to my skin the Albert Hotel then charged me £2.50 for the worst (instant) coffee that I have ever had.

Totally worth the hassle for this photograph though.

 

 

 

 

Lightroom hidden secrets.

I have heard from a lot of people that they are struggling with Lightroom of late. Admittedly I was an avid fan of Apple's Aperture when it was available and it did take me some time to get used to Adobe's Lightroom.

I came across this video today which I thought was worth posting as it has some nice tips that aren't usually covered in most Lightroom tips videos :-)