Edinburgh in Black and White

I have processed a lot of the photographs I have been taking of Edinburgh in black and white, I think the city looks great this way.  It can be an easier medium to process and cover up things that I don't want in the photographs ;-). I decided to download my favourite BNW's from my Instagram account and create a gallery of Edinburgh which can be seen here and from the slideshow below. Click on the photograph to advance :-)

I am getting excited about a trip to Glasgow next weekend with other photographers, I hope to learn a lot from them and to get some great photographs of Glasgow, someplace that I have never taken photographs of! Any recommendations of places to shoot?

Bonnybridge Canal

Taken on the 7th of January, from the bridge that crosses the Forth and Clyde canal (which I think demarcates Bonnybridge from High Bonnybridge).

The weather was misty/drizzly and with a little higher ISO setting I think this image came out quite well. I also used a new app called Filmborn which allows you to take images using filters that give the effects of older film types (for those that are still in love with film). This was taken using the ILFORD HPS setting, but some of this was lost in the little post processing that I did.

 

Forth and Clyde Canal, 7th January 2017

  

New Years Day

As New Year's Day was so nice there was time to go for a walk to work up an appetite for dinner. I decided to go to Dollar. Dollar is a small town in Clackmannanshire, Scotland. It is one of the Hillfoots Villages, situated between the Ochil Hills range to the north and the River Devon to the south. 

The walk was from the town of Dollar through Dollar Glen to Castle Campbell. The castle was originally known as Castle Gloom, possibly deriving from the Scottish gaelic:  glom, meaning a chasm, and referring to the narrow gorges to either side of the site.

Torwood Castle

Finally a break in the storm allowed me to get out for a few photographs of Torwood Castle after Christmas. The Castle is a ruin near the village of Torwood in the Falkirk Council area of central Scotland. It has been estimated as being built around 1566 for Sir Alexander Forrester (so the local stories of Robert The Bruce staying there before the battle of Bannockburn are slightly off by about 200 years). The castle is a Scottish Baronial style castle.

The castle is undergoing a slow restoration, now under the auspices of the Torwood Castle Trust, but there is not much evidence of this going on.

Landscape Photography

While drinking my morning tea and sifting through my RSS feed I came across a very good instructional post from PetaPixel this morning:

"10 Ways to Become a Better Landscape Photographer in the Next Year"

At least two of the ten tips struct a chord with me:

#4 Stop caring about success of other photographers: For some reason I find validation in the number of likes I get on Instagram. Finding validation on any form of social media is quite possibly the most moronic thing that I have ever done and will be something that I will be working on getting away from in the next year! 

#10 Always try to find something extra in your photograph: It's not always something I do and I think I have become a bit formulaic in the way I have been shooting of late, taking photographs that could have been taken by anybody instead of shooting something that I see.

The post is written by Albert Dros (a Dutch photographer) and his shots really are amazing and definitely worth aspiring to. He also has tutorials and a blog on his site that is well worth spending time with.