Edinburgh Castle

It was a lovely bright day and I determined to go into town after lunch, I had in mind a photo from Princes St. with the tree blossoms in the foreground. I decided to do a wee tweak to some code which ended up taking about two hours :-( I was seriously short of hard disk space so I needed to get a new USB HDD at the shops so eventually grabbed a bus into town and got there about 16:00, by the time the sun had disappeared behind the clouds!

Since they have put up overhead cables and pylons all along Prince St. for the Tr*ms you can't get a clear view of the castle from the North side of Princes Street, I tried standing in the middle of the street (there's a narrow island between the lanes) but it was a little close to the buses driving past every 30 seconds (it was about 17:00 by the time I'd done my shopping) so I grabbed a coffee and headed into the gardens. The sun still was rather dull and the sky was quite overcast.

I took quite a lot of pictures but none of them seemed to come out very well, I couldn't get the lighting on this shot as I wanted, it was rather difficult to get the multiple distances in focus and strong bright colours. I ended up doing a lot of post processing on this photo (you can see the original jpeg here) It also didn't help I wasn't using a RAW format due to running out of memory space. I managed to brighten up the castle and tweaked the colours a bit as well as adding a blue tinge to the sky. If I had a tripod I could have tried taking multiple images and merging them but I can't find a decent small (that fits in my bag) tripod, carrying my bigger tripod around shops is a hassle.

Anyway after I had my coffee and wandered through the gardens the sun eventually came out and it was a gorgeous evening, I grabbed a beer and a sandwich from Sainsbury's to enjoy in the gardens, half way through my beer I had to leave as the gardens close at 19:30!

On the bright side I've now managed to move a bunch of stuff off my laptop onto my new HDD (disk usage had gone from 98% to 50%) and can now clear out my memory cards too!