Watch the birdie!

Thursday was a day spent looking at photographs, rather than taking them.

I took the train through to Edinburgh to visit an exhibition of photos from the World Press Photography Awards 2015 that was on display at the Scottish Parliament building. Some absolutely amazing, and some very harrowing and haunting, photographs from the world's best press photographers.- and isn't a scandal that the UK has refused the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei a six-month visa? - and from there, after lunch, it was back up to the National Museum of Scotland to visit another photography exhibition.

This was entitled Photography - a Victorian Sensation and told the story of the development of photography from Henry Fox Talbot and Louis Daguerre onwards. There were an astonishing number of 19th and early 20th century photographs and pieces of apparatus on display, with the ironic twist that photos of the exhibition itself were forbidden.  Hope no-one spotted that I took this one just as I left the exhibition!

In-between visiting these two exhibitions, I popped into Dunbar's Close in the Royal Mile and snapped a few photos there - partly as my fingers were twitchy and needed a photography fix and partly as it was one of the places mentioned in my 'Nothing to See Here' book that I got for my birthday. Another one ticked off the list!