Dunbar Cement Works

This is my first post so please be gentle with me. I’m new to writing, but have enjoyed enjoy taking photos for many years.

We recently stayed at the Dunbar Camping & Caravan Site, which is on the east cost of Scotland just south of Edinburgh. The site is close to the only cement works in Scotland which Blue Circle built in 1963. Dunbar is the only site in Scotland with sufficient raw materials for cement-making. Limestone, the main raw material for the cement is taken from the local quarry. The site is currently part of Tarmac.

Although an ugly building in daylight the site is transformed by the morning sunrise and also at night when floodlight.

Photographing lit buildings at night is interesting as it provides the opportunity for creating starburst effect, you can cheat using lens filters, but I prefer to use manual mode on the camera. For those interested the above was taken with a Nikon D7100 DSLR, 70mm zoom, ISO 400, F16 aperture and 20 second exposure. The narrow aperture creates the starburst effect. I tried an aperture of F8, but the effect wasn’t as strong. The added bonus was the westerly wind which enabled me to capture the “milky” smoke thanks to the length of the exposure.