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Edinburgh And the Festival – 2013

Edinburgh And the Festival: We came by train to Edinburgh and the following day, Monday 12th August 2013 was the first of a full week we spent in the city and the first week of that year’s Edinburgh Festival.

Ten years before this we had spent an enjoyable week in the city, three of my family staying in a very comfortable flat close to Haymarket station, and had spent a very full week exploring the city and some of the surrounding area – including Leith and walking a little of the Fife coastal path. That year we left just as the festival was about to start.

2013 was very different. Linda and I were invited to join a group of friends to stay in a large flat in Bruntsfield a short walk from the city centre who were there for the Edinburgh Festival, and although we didn’t have a great interest in many of the festival events had found a number which seemed worth attending over the week.

Between these and our share of the housekeeping for the dozen or so of us – including taking our turn at preparing an evening meal for the group – we managed to fit in quite a few other things during the week, including another climb up Arthur’s Seat, and I even managed to do a little work, covering a protest by the Scottish Defence League and a counter-protest by Unite Against Fascism on the Saturday.

But unlike on our previous visit we stayed inside the city, and spent most of the time in the central area where most of the festival takes place around the Royal Mile.

A few of the events were very much to my taste – such as a guided tour around the elegant Georgian New Town, which took us to a few places I’d not been before, and the City of the Dead tour turned out to be rather more interesting than we had anticipated.

And there were some interesting poetry and threatre performances as well as several talks. We also bumped briefly into a few old friends at some of them or on the streets, though usually then we were going different ways to other events.

On My London Diary you can read more about our packed week. It was tiring but largely enjoyable, but we left feeling going there once was probably enough and we’ve not gone back. We might return to Edinburgh but not to the festival.

There are also pictures from the other days – all of those here are from Monday 12th August 2013. I had travelled light and they were all taken with a fairly compact Fuji X-E1 using either a 35mm standard lens of the XF18-55mmF2.8-4, equivalent to 27-83mm on full-frame.

Edinburgh & the Festival
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

SDL and UAF in Edinburgh

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Glasgow Visit 2008

Glasgow Visit 2008: In August 2008 with my wife and elder son and friends I went to Iona. The journey up from London is a long one and we decided that rather than try to do it in one day we would take the opportunity to spend a few days in Glasgow on our way, staying in a hotel close to the School of Art in the centre of the city, named after Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

We were in Glasgow for only five days but managed to see quite a lot of the city and some of its surroundings as my pictures show. Looking back I’m surprised at the variety of subjects in the roughly 2000 images I took, working over a 12 hour day on most of the 5 days we were there.

Only a fairly small fraction of the pictures are on My London Diary – partly because this wasn’t London and I then felt a bit embarrassed about posting work from another city. But the web site – which I updated regularly from around 2000 to the start of 2022 except during the lockdown and is still on line was very much my personal diary and so does include at least some of my pictures from outside London.

All were taken on the 12Mp Nikon D300, a DX format camera which I had bought earlier in the year. It was a very usable camera with decent autofocus and nothing that came later from Nikon was really much of an improvement, though the sensor size and pixel count increased. Should you want a good, cheap DSLR a secondhand D300 would still be a good choice, so long as the shutter count was well below the rated 150,000.

I think I had both a wide-angle and telephoto zoom with me. The Raw images I made have suffered a little from the processing to produce jpegs – software has improved significantly since 2008, and I think all of them could benefit from being made a little brighter. But life is too short to re-process them all.

For convenience I divided the pictures into eight rather arbitrary sections to post them on My London Diary, and I’ll include the direct links to these at the bottom of this post. But you can start at ‘My Pictures’ and click the link at the bottom of each page to go through the complete set I’ve posted.

This wasn’t my first visit to Glasgow, but I don’t think any pictures from my earlier visit when we spent a week there are online, and on the brief visit with friends back in around 1962 I took no pictures – I think I’d finished my holiday film on Skye, where my holiday also almost ended as I fell down a mountain.

Mmong other holidays in Scotland I’ve also spent a couple of weeks in Edinburgh – including once for the festival. And though I enjoyed both cities, I found Glasgow interested me more. If I ever return to Scotland it will be to Glasgow, as I now feel too old to walk the West Highland Way.

Glasgow 2008

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Festival Edinburgh

Festival Edinburgh: I’ve only stayed in Edinburgh a couple of weeks over the years and only one of these was during the annual festival. Ten years ago in 2013 we were invited to share a flat for a week a short walk from the city centre with half a dozen of the family of my younger son’s wife who I think were all Scottish.

I’ve written a little about the week on My London Diary with rather a lot of pictures. We did go to a lot of events and performances, some together rather more on our own as our interests are different and there were so many things to choose from. But we also spent a lot of time walking around the city and surrounding areas.

It was a busy week and we enjoyed it. But I’ve not felt it something I particularly wanted to do another year, once seemed enough.

The pictures here are from one day of that week, Tuesday 13th Aug 2013. It wasn’t a typical day as there were no typical days for us that week.

Here’s the short text from My London Diary about what we did that day:

“I walked to the Nam June Paik exhibition, the visual arts high note of the festival, while Linda went to a concert. After that I went to hear poet Danny Chivers giving a great fringe performance. Linda and I grabbed some lunch from a street stall and then walked up Calton Hill and across to Arthurs Seat, rushing back to see a one-man play on the fringe, and after taking a few pictures along the High St before dinner.”

*The quick path down from Arthur’s Seat*

But I think the pictures probably make it rather clearer, certainly if you look at the larger set on My London Diary.

Many more pictures from the week at Edinburgh & the Festival and from the Tuesday here.

Edinburgh against Fascism: 2013

I seldom photograph protests outside London, and I hadn’t gone to Scotland to take photographs, but we had been invited to spend a week there during the Edinburgh festival. We’d never been to the festival before, and had timed our two previous stays in the city deliberately to avoid it, but decided to go and see what it was like. We did actually enjoy the week, but haven’t felt it was an experience we need to repeat.

On Saturday 17th August we rushed out after breakfast to attend a play about a male clergyman and a female quantum physicist, time travel and religion; clever and quite funny but it was too early in the morning for me. However it was conveniently close to where Unite Against Fascism and others were gathering to oppose a march by the fascist Scottish Defence League, and while Linda went to listen to a classical concert I made the short walk to cover the protest – my first in Scotland.

Like many such events in London it was slow to start. The assembly time was a couple of hours before the SDL were expected to march and the Scottish police were determined to keep the two groups as far apart as they could. But it gave me more than enough time to take pictures of the marchers and their banners and placards.

At the time all of my work on protests was made using Nikon DSLRs, but I’d left them at home when I came away for a week’s holiday, and all of these pictures were made using the relatively light and compact Fuji X-E1 and a single lens, the Fuji 18-55mm zoom. It was the first time I’d used the Fuji camera for a protest, and I did it a little less responsive than the Nikon, with slower auto-focus and sometimes a perceptible lag between shutter press and picture-taking.

The electronic viewfinder couldn’t match the Nikon’s optical one either for clarity, and sometimes was noticeably slow to react when I moved the camera or zoomed the lens. And having just an equivalent focal length of 27-83mm I found limiting, missing both the extreme wide-angle and longer telephoto I usually worked with. But despite this I was reasonably pleased with the pictures from the day.

Eventually the march moved off and was escorted by police who kept them well away from the SDL as they marched to a large pen on Horse Wynd at the back of the Scottish Parliament. Approaching a thousand people had come to oppose the racist march.

There was still no sign of the SDL, but I avoided the pen and walked back up Canongate to meet them coming down. Through a tight police cordon around the group of around a hundred I saw quite a few faces familiar from EDL protests in London – and some of them obviously recognised me and made threatening gestures.

Once police had led them into a separate pen far enough away from the anti-fascists to prevent the two groups throwing missiles at each other but within shouting distance, it got a little easier to photograph some of the EDL. Although there were police lines stopping either fascists or anti-fascists from getting closer to each other a few anti-fascists found their way though the entrance area to Hollyroodhouse and were then arrested as they approached the EDL.

I left as the two groups were still shouting at each other to go to the Postgrad show at the College of Art before it closed, then on to a comedy show and finally to a meal with the dozen of us who were sharing a large flat at a convenient Thai restuarant. We were up early the next morning to catch a train back to London.

SDL and UAF in Edinburgh