Travel Photography in Edinburgh

ISO 200, 20mm, f/5.6, 1/80 sec

The Fringe festival is in full swing and the city was packed. Street entertainers were all over the place and it was a nice change from Edinburgh’s usual streetside entertainment, drunken tramps shouting obscenities at passers by, or pipe band rejects destroying the ears of the innocent…

I was there to shop but took a few hours out to get some practice at travel photography. I got some people shots like Frankenstein here, asking permission first. For me it’s still unnatural and uncomfortable to go around asking strangers for photos but that’s something I have to work on if I want to get good travel photos. It really puts your technical skills to the test, if things aren’t set up right to begin with, they will lose interest or patience if you’re spending ages fiddling around with dials and worse, not interacting as a result.

ISO 200, 20mm, f/14, 1/60 sec, flash

I was put to the test with performer Harvey Gross here but it taught me some valuable lessons. I’d picked the location and had the camera pre-set before I asked him for some photos. But I had to use fill flash and wasn’t getting the right balance with him and the background. I couldn’t just keep him there for ages whilst I took tons of photos with different exposures so chalked it up to experience. Another thing I learned with Harvey was that although it’s great to chat with your willing victim, it’s not so good to have a bunch of otherwise decent photos ruined because your subject is in mid-speech! Next time I’ll wait till a pause or make it clear when to pose. Any tips appreciated! I also didn’t pay enough attention to the background, I could have moved to get that couple out of the shot. So inconsiderate of them 😉

ISO 160, 45mm, f/11, 1/40 sec, tripod

I was there during golden hour and after trampsing through the city looking for good shots I appreciated the advice given in the travel photography books I’d read: do your research beforehand. A lot of my time was wasted just looking for stuff the golden light was hitting before it rapidly vanished. The Scott Monument here caught the light nicely. With some research beforehand I could have planned out a better place to photograph it from. A wrecking ball to take out Princes Street behind it would do the trick.

It’s a dilemma I’m going to face on my travels. By researching all the sights beforehand it takes the wonder away from seeing something new and finding things yourself. Hopefully I can reach a compromise.

ISO 160, 23mm, f/10, 1/13 sec, tripod

I also got plenty of opportunities to use my trusty tripod. It feels pretty weird setting it up on the pavement but again I need to get used to it! The shop above was quite dark and using the tripod let me capture it with a decent light, plus the movement of the people. I had to wait until a break in the traffic too. A bus going through it doesn’t really help much, trust me.

The day was a good experiment for my bag setup. After two hours of walking around with a shoulder bag containing camera stuff, tripod and laptop, I realised I will cripple myself if I  walk around all day with all the weight on one shoulder. I’ll have to take a backpack for my tripod trips with a sling bag for quick cam access. The two bag wonder, oh god.

So, a lot learned. Not long to go now! Here’s my bobby for you (only dirty Scots will get this joke…)

ISO 200, 20mm, f/5.6, 1/125 sec

Mushrooms From Hell!

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ISO 160, f/10, 31mm, 1/15 secs, tripod, manual focus

Inspired by a Practical Photography video on still life, I experimented with this wooden mushroom with a variety of backgrounds. I don’t have any fancy lighting equipment so I had to hold a desk lamp in place and find things to prop up the backgrounds. And in the shot above, the “things” were actually my sister and my mum…

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For many of my shots, the strong light from the desk lamp was harsh and left sharp highlights as you can see above. In the first shot, the lighting was too flat (maybe because it was far away?) and the background (a waistcoat) wasn’t big enough to fill out the frame with that pattern placement. In the second photo here, I’ve actually changed the background colour in Lightroom from yellow that to help the mushroom stand out. Although I like the shadow, the mushroom doesn’t stand out from the background enough on the left, the tones are too similar.

ARGH!

Actually I found this photography frustrating and stressful. Where do I begin? Having to hold lots of things at awkward angles, slightest movements knocking your shots out, Constant readjustment of tripod and camera angle, out of focus shots, most shots looking flat and uninteresting, uninspiring backgrounds…. it all wound me up and made the experience feel like a lot of effort for little reward. The Practical Photography guy made it look easy, though he had a proper soft light and a top-down angle on his subject, plus experience! Perhaps when I’m wiser and more experienced I will enjoy this kind of photography more? Also I’m not sure if my lens choice was correct. 18-45mm at the far zoom end? I could have used my 80-200mm (which would have meant being half way across the room to get it in shot), or my 20mm pancake which would have been harder for framing.

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ISO 160, 34mm, f5.5, 1/125 sec, tripod, manual focus

In the end the best images came from shining the light through art paper, naturally bouncing up to light the mushroom from below. I increased the exposure in Lightroom to show more under the mushroom cup, also adding contrast and boosting shadows to add drama. Although I didn’t realize my original vision (mushroom in a green landscape!),  instead I discovered something far more interesting which made the shoot worthwhile once I saw it on the big screen! Mushrooms from hell!

If anyone has any thoughts or advice about still life photography, especially if you’ve found frustration like me, or want to talk about my lens choice – please leave a comment!

Mum’s Flashing Again

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ISO 200, 35mm, f5.5, 1/250 sec

Here’s my darling mother last week. The sun was just about to disappear at this moment and so I took some quick snaps of mum with the last of the light. Note the reflections from the glasses disturbing the eye, lesson learned there! Our walk hadn’t been very successful, some places I thought would be cool turned out to not be cool – I literally ran up the hill in the last 5 minutes of light to try and get a memorial cairn photo, only to find the cairn was too fat in any good shots. Stop building big memorials, think of the photographers, people. Except when I die of course. Then I’m going to have a massive memorial that you need to photograph from space.

The sun started to go. When the light’s low, normally this will happen:

Although the background’s alright, my subject’s gone dark. I could have increased the ISO here (or fixed it in Lightroom) but I wanted to try fill flash to solve the problem. I’ve not tried it before so it would be good practice, and help in my quest to blind my mum. So I forced the camera to fire the flash and experimented with different settings as it got darker and darker outside. The background was too dark in my first shots but upping the ISO to 400 solved that and I got a fairly balanced shot (the other settings were the same as the daylight one):

Try to ignore my mum’s grimacing…

Of course that’s far from perfect but it’s about as good as I’ll get from a standard flash. Pros use flashes on cords, tripods, softboxes to diffuse the light and so on. Again the glasses are a big problem, even worse with flash reflections. I didn’t want to make mum doubly blind so I didn’t make her take them off. A bit of post-processing in Lightroom brings the image out nicely with some contrast boost:

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In fact I had to darken the picture overall for this, so originally I should have underexposed I guess. I’m looking forward to trying fill-flash a bit more on my travels! Any further advice on fill-flash and exposure balancing welcome, just leave a comment.