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St. Andrews

By the Sea

By Ash Furrow

June 8^th, 2025

Since my last photo blog post, I have bought a new camera and taken a small vacation. I needed to recharge and wanted to take some photos, so Ashley and I went down to St Andrews for a few days. This was during the very first week of the summer tourist season and we had the town basically to ourselves.

Colour Challenges

For years I shot on B&W film. I started with colour film, on the promise it would take care of the "colour" for me. Now I'm back to digital and I have to make the colour work myself.

Colour is hard. It's subtle. It's obvious when you get it wrong, but it's not obvious when you get it right. The control that you have over colour in the edit is... overwhelming. Getting these photos edited and ready to share has really strained my attention span, and a lot of that has to do with the colour. I don't think I nailed it here, but I played around with a "washed out" look that was really fun and fit the beach town subject.

I kind of understand why people like to shoot in JPEG and hand all those colour decisions over to the camera. It's like choosing different films to give photos a specific look before you take them. I'm planning on experimenting with in-camera film simulations but, knowing myself, I'll probably continue to stubbornly shoot in raw and underexposing 2/3 stops.

Black & White

Processing digital photos in B&W is really nice. I used to use yellow and red filters to adjust the mix in camera, but I can do that all in the edit on digital.

Pushing the Edit

Earlier as a photographer, I would push things too far in the edit. Photos would look hyper real and cartoonish. I've got more restraint now, and a little more taste.

Editing tools have also advanced a lot in a few years. The most tedious part of editing, for me, was making masks precise. Lightroom's masking tools have advanced significantly since I learned them ten years ago.

So I'm trying to push the boundaries of what makes a good edit a little further. Trying to capture how it felt when I took the photo.

Taking Photos with Ashley

My wife Ashley and I have spent many, many hours taking photos together. We've travelled a lot together and I had forgotten how much fun it is to explore a new, unfamiliar place together. To wander around, drifting away and toward one another, experiencing the space.

She's also kind enough to take some photos of me.

Landscapes are Hard

I've always struggled to take photos of landscapes. It feels hit or miss. I'm more comfortable getting up close and photographing details than trying to capture a big scene.

Sunsets are particularly frustrating because it's such a beautiful subject that it feels like I'm failing to capture it. It's been a while since I've tried this, so I'm trying not to be too harsh a critic. St. Andrews was fun because I got to re-explore the technical aspects of photography and landscapes, like long exposures on tripods and exposure bracketing. My new camera has a tilting screen, letting me easily get shots close to the ground. It was a fun time, regardless of how the photos turned out.

This is a challenge that I want to work on, because as I'm rediscovering photography in a rural setting, I have a lot of beautiful landscapes opportunities. I just need to learn how to find a subject consistently.

Challenging Shooting Conditions

I love taking "bad" photos. I love blowing out highlights and missing shadows, or messing up composition, or adding motion blur. But I've found it a lot harder to do that on digital. It feels like my camera is pushing me towards taking a "proper" exposure, with a "level" horizon, or a "sharp" image. It gets a little tedious.

But then I get the results and I realized, I didn't make these photos bad enough. They're such a faithful capture of what I saw that I see how challenging the lighting conditions were. It looks like I took the photo in harsh lighting conditions, because I did. Film felt like it gave me both more and less control here. Maybe it was just more forgiving.

If I have to choose between "proper" photos that fail to meet that bar, and "bad" photos that are what I intended them to be, then I'd rather get weird with it.