September

View fullsize

Lange Voorhout - The Hague

I can almost taste winter in the morning right now, I actually thought for a second that the morning dew on my car windscreen was frozen this morning. I was positively excited by the prospect of having to scrape the windscreen. September has long been my favourite month of the year. In years gone past it has been the month that I returned to University, or at least started to build apprehension of going back. Nowadays it signifies that Winter is Coming, without the White Walkers of course.

I look forward to the nights getting longer and the temperatures dropping. As a photographer it means that light trails become ever present in my photo stream, sunsets are harder to catch but sunrise gets easier (especially in my case) and probably most important, the air gets clearer and the photographs crisper.

Of course Winter has drawbacks that most people like to complain about such as not being able to feel your hands after being outside for ten minutes, but I think that it is a price worth paying.

I have added my favourite winter shot from my favourite place to this post, I may have posted it in here at some other point but it is worth posting again. I hope you are as excited by the prospect of winter as I am.

New Prints from Glasgow

Have added two new prints to the shop, both from Glasgow University in Black and White. One of the archway through to the quadrangle and one in the cloisters adjacent to the quadrangle. Details can be seen in the prints page. 

The Cloisters 

Glasgow Univeristy

The Archway

A view from the Archway to the Quadrangle.

Blackness Castle

As Scotland has been pretty much drenched in bad weather this week I haven't been out much to take photographs. But, I do have some from last week of Blackness Castle. I was hoping for some nice sunset photographs, however, there was a lot of clouds in between me and the sun.

Blackness Castle is a 15th-century fortress, near the village of Blackness, Scotland, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth. It was built by Sir George Crichton in the 1440s. At this time, Blackness was the main port serving the Royal Burgh of Linlithgow, one of the main residences of the Scottish monarch. The castle, together with the Crichton lands, passed to James II of Scotland in 1453, and the castle has been crown property ever since.

View fullsize

View fullsize

View fullsize

The Festival Fringe

Little known detail about the Edinburgh International Festival and The Edinburgh Fringe Festival: they are two different festivals. It surprises me that people still clump the madness of Edinburgh at this time of year all into "The Edinburgh Festival". So what's the difference? The main difference is the programming policies. The Edinburgh International Festival principally promotes opera, music, dance and theatre and participation in the International Festival is by invitation only, issued by the Festival Director. The Festival Fringe has no selection process in its programming and is an open access festival for performers; anyone can present any type of work and pay a fee to the Fringe for services such as box office and inclusion in the brochure.

I thought I would give a flavour of the people and street shows I saw on a recent walk around some of the Fringe this week. It's absolute carnage trying to move around the city at this time of the year and I think this is the busiest I have ever experienced Edinburgh.

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.

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.