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Gullane Bents
One of the best things they ever did with Edinburgh - beautiful city though it is - was to create the city bypass. It means that instead of getting tangled in traffic in the Capital, you can drive around it all - which is just what I did, heading east toward the Lothians and the Firth of Forth and on to a quiet little place called Gullane. And slightly beyond that is one of the hidden gems of Scotland - Gullane Bents.
It's a very quiet little white sand beach and I suspect the locals do their best to keep it to themselves and prevent 'outsiders' encroaching on a very unspoilt piece of the country. And I can see why they might want to do that. Gullane Bents is remarkably beautiful.
With one or two notable exceptions, I don't really have much experience of coastal landscapes - seascapes - so the visit to Gullane Bents provided an opportunity to rectify that. As well as the obvious water scenes, there were a wealth of other photographic opportunities, such as abstracts in the sand ripples and rock formations, and some fantastic wild grasses.
But the best thing about the trip to Gullane was the clouds - astonishing. I couldn't stop photographing them and they were an amazing backdrop to some of the wider shots I took.
It was incredibly warm on the beach even though I arrived early in the morning and at times, it was also very sunny - which led to bright skies and the risk of uneven exposure in the shots.
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To reduce that risk, I used two 0.3 graduated neutral density filters - these reduced the difference in the brightness between the land and the sky and allowed me to capture the scene in a single exposure which then didn't need any adjustment in post-processing.
Also on the post-production side, many of the images I captured were good candidates for mono conversion and a couple of those are included here on the website.
Gullane is highly recommended as a photographic location.
Just don't tell anyone it's there.