Taking only photographs – leaving only footprints
Princes Street Gardens is one of the nicest public parks in the centre of a city that I have photographed. As you can see from the above image the gardens sit below Edinburgh Castle and this angle shows just how imposing the castle is over the city. Ross Bandstand is the focal point of this photograph and at this time of the morning was obviously empty. However it plays an important part in the cities Hogmanay celebrations.
This photograph shows Kenilworth Castle from the side. At this point I had been on a nice walk around the countryside to the west of the castle and was walking back towards the car park to head on to my next location. As you can see this is a huge ruin and if you look closely there are a few tourists / visitors that give my image a sense of scale. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to explore inside this time but a few of my friends went recently and said it was well worth a look around inside.
One of the biggest problems of capturing Edinburgh Castle is that it is on the top of a hill with steep cliffs on three sides. Ordinarily in the day you have to be lucky with the light in order to capture detail in the cliff faces. Getting up a little too early (or so I thought) one morning the sky was still completely black to the naked eye. However on this 30 second long exposure the black sky turned pick and blue. I am not sure how or why. The camera wasn’t broken and this image has not been Photoshopped.
After a long day of photography and an evening trying to get a decent photo of the Scottish Parliament building at dusk I decided to walk back up the Royal Mile to the Castle before heading back to the hotel. From the main entrance to Edinburgh Castle only this part is properly lit up (from the side, down on Princess Street it looks much better at night). So I zoomed in from a distance and captured the above photograph. It was extremely windy, to the point where I had to hold on to the tripod legs!