Another image from the archives today, this one again taken with my Fuji Finepix A204 point-and-shoot camera. I captured this shot in Edinburgh during a St. Patrick’s weekend visit with friends in 2003 and it’s a great example of being in the right place in the right time. It’s also a prime example of how you don’t need to have the latest and greatest camera to get good photographs.
The photograph was taken from a place called Calton Hill, which is an elevated site North East of the old centre of Edinburgh that houses Nelson’s Monument and the City Observatory. I’m not sure what had taken us there – it was probably in a guide book as a place to go – and it was on our walk back towards the city that I captured the photograph you see above. It is looking south west and in the background you can see Edinburgh Castle, illuminated on the hill top.
To the right of the frame is the clock tower of the Balmoral Hotel, possibly the most luxurious hotel in Edinburgh and, if I’m not mistaken, where a friend of mine Margaret (who was our unofficial tour guide for the weekend) had worked for a summer a few years earlier. To the left of the frame the illuminated building you can see is the Bank of Scotland. Incidentally it’s not like I was able to remember all those buildings, although of course I do the remember the castle – I used Google Maps to identify them.
Why this picture works for me is that the time of day that it was taken is just perfect for this scene. Bear in mind that it was captured on a basic point-and-shoot camera, which offered me no control over the exposure (other than to turn off the flash, which I knew to do for a shot like this taken at dusk). So the fact that it has retained detail in the illuminated buildings and the sky (while at the same time having detail in the unlit areas in the foreground too) is almost entirely due to the natural balance of ambient and artificial light that was present just at that time of the evening.
Any later and the camera would have, in trying to expose for the unlit areas, over-exposed the artificially lit parts of the scene. Any earlier and the opposite would have happened to some extent. In reality a shot like this captured earlier in the day would be just fine, but it wouldn’t have the mood that this shot has.
The unusual shutter speed (0.222s according to the metadata, which corresponds to 2/9ths of a second) was slow enough to require me to steady the camera – I only knew this after a handheld shot turned out blurry, so I placed the camera on a wall for the shot you see above. Unsurprisingly the aperture the camera used is wide, as there wasn’t a lot of light at the time of capture (6.31pm).
I’m quite impressed with how the camera handled this scene. Indeed I suspect you or I could return to this spot many times over with the latest and greatest SLR camera and not come away with a decent shot. But here, with limited photographic knowledge and even more limited photographic equipment, all the variables fell into place for a nice shot of a lovely city.
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