CAPTURE NEW HORIZONS

I love photographing details on old buildings, especially those with wonderful colours and textures.   The old harbour buildings at Cove are two such buildings, with the red sandstone walls worn away by the weather and the door to the store having seen better days.   The old wood has been worn smooth by the wind and the rain and the paintwork that still remains is cracked and flaking away. This provided me with some great textures to point the X-Pro1 and 60mm f2.4 macro at while I was taking long exposure shots of the harbour on the X-T1. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PLEASE SUPPORT THIS BLOG BY VISITING THE ADVERTISERS ON THIS PAGE By clicking on the adverts you are helping support this blog - thank you. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ALL IMAGES ARE THE PROPERTY OF M...

Last month I added the superb Fujinon XF56mm f1.2R lens to my camera bag, which is the seventh Fujinon lens I have bought for my X-Series kit.  It is also the third lens that covers the short telephoto range, the others being the XF55-200mm f3.5/4.8 zoom and the XF60mm f2.4R macro.  This had me wondering if I could sell off one of the lenses or did each lens offer something that meant I could justify hanging on to all three? Well for starters we can ignore the 55-200mm zoom as this lens offers the long telephoto reach I need for my landscapes and wildlife.  It is an excellent all round zoom lens that has a place in my camera bag.  So that leaves the two prime lenses. The 60mm is the older of the two, being one of the original trio of lens launched in 2012 with the X-Pro1.  The auto focus has been improved with firmware updates but it is no where near as 'snappy' as the newer 56mm.  The obvious difference between the two lenses is the faster maxim...

A lens with a fast aperture like Fujifilm's superb XF56mm allows me to be very creative with the extremely shallow depth of field the very wide f1.2 aperture produces.  To illustrate the difference between f1.2 and f16 I took two shots of the 1881 East Coast Fishing Disaster memorial at the top of the track down to Cove Harbour. The shot above was taken at the maximum f1.2, with the focus on the figure of the child nearest the camera.  As you can see the rest of the figures are thrown out of focus. The next shot is taken at the smallest aperture available on the 56mm, and that is f16.  The small aperture extends the depth of field to include most of the figures, with the background visible to the viewer.  I did a blog on the memorial in February, which includes links to the story behind the disaster that left many widows and orphans on that fateful day on the 18 October 1881.   CLICK HERE  to read the blog. --------------------------...

This morning I decided to get up and catch the sunrise down at Cove Harbour, which is located a few miles down the coast from Dunbar and is an oasis of tranquility.  After two weeks of travel and work in Japan and Portugal, Cove was the ideal place to unwind for a couple of hours before heading back to the office to prepare for the next FIA WEC event in China, which I fly out to on Sunday for eight days. Once a busy part of the east coast fishing industry, Cove Harbour is now used by a few small fishing boats that catch crabs and lobsters. All of the buildings associated with the harbour are listed and the harbour is owned by Cove Harbour Conservation Ltd.   With its old world feel and old building Cove is the ideal location for filming and has been used for major films, TV shows and fashion shoots.  With it's close proximity to Edinburgh, Cove is an ideal location for international companies to use. The shots on this page were taken on the Fujifilm X-T1 and the...

At the top of the hill by the car park above the harbour at Cove is a bronze memorial by Jill Watson depicting the wives and children left behind after the East Coast Fishing Disaster of 1881 looking forlornly looking out to sea for their lost husbands, sons and fathers .  The memorial was unveiled in October 2008   The inscription on the memorial reads:  'Commemorating the widows and children of Cove left by the fishing disaster of 14th October 1881 when 189 fishermen were lost off this coast. Cove lost 11 out of 21 fishermen.' The disaster hit every fishing community on the South East Scottish coast with the Eyemouth fleet losing 129 men and one third of it's fleet (19 out of the 46 boats were lost).  Proportionally Cove was harder hit with over 11 out of the 21 fishermen lost and three of the four boats working out of the small harbour.   More on the history of the Disaster of 1881 can be found HERE For more on this memorial and...

Just down the coast from Dunbar and Torness Point is the little harbour of Cove, a beautiful little fishing port almost carved out of the rocky shoreline.   A beautiful spring like day in East Lothian had us heading down the coast to Cove for our first exploration of this part of the world.  I decided to only bring the Fujifilm X100 for this first visit with a view of returning should we feel the need to with the Nikon and X-Pro1. The harbour is still in use but like all the fishing ports on this coast it is a shadow of its former self. History of Cove (words courtesy of BBC Scotland Website) Since the 17th Century the naturally sheltered shore has been used by fishermen, as well as for exporting local coal.   During the 18th Century various efforts were made to improve the harbour. This included the creation of a tunnel through the headland down to the shore. This tunnel still provides access to the beach. The present day harbour was constructed i...