Blog

Dock Surfers

Dock Surfers

Perhaps its sacrilege to say but sometimes you’ll have a batch of images that don’t suit textures!  They might already be busy enough or too dark, flash images or like the one above where I just wanted to keep it clean so you can still see the water splashes clearly. Its sister image ‘Jump’ that went viral on the net was slightly textured, but only to rebalance and colour, though that was way back as these days we’re cooking with gas, we love Nik color Efex pro here at Fly central and we love Flypaper Textures, put them together and you have a marriage made in heaven!

Flypaper Nik Presets Launch!

Flypaper Nik Presets Launch!

Today we proudly  launch our 84 Flypaper Nik Color Pro Presets! We’ve been using, publicising and including them in our tutorials for years, so thought it was about time we shared them! With presets you can produce stunning, modern movie looking images, without degrading your original image, its just a new layer, like a flypaper texture layer that you can continue to further process with flypaper textures for rich impressionistic images or brighten rebalance and stylise!

butterfly and view

butterfly and view

As its now cold and wet outside its nice to revisit unprocessed images from back in june whilst traveling in England. I stayed overnight at Leeds Castle, confusingly located in kent where I stole this shot of their cottage gardens looking down over the lake towards distant woods. You can just catch a glimpse of the lake between the topiary hedges

Books

Books

As an avid reader and part time librarian I have an avid love of books, the real versions of course, ebooks are handy to read too but the paper versions are so much nicer…the rustle of pages, the weight, even the smell…the list goes on! You can’t take a nice photo of an ebook either!

Winnats Pass Lambs

Winnats Pass Lambs

  I shot this English pastoral scene back in June, midsummer, but you'd never know it from the picture, having had such a long wet winter the sun had only just begun to warm to earth up on these Derbyshire moors. Its a favorite visiting haunt of mine because as...

Fishing lures

Fishing lures

I’ve built up a collection of old tobacco tins over the years, they’ve mostly been acquired from the family fishing bags and workshops

An apple a day

An apple a day

Continuing the fruity theme here today….
Usually I don’t set out with an idea in mind for a photo, I tend to improvise along the way, adding and subtracting components till I find something that works. I started with a plain apple, added plates and knives before settling on a plain partially peeled apple and the knife and since I didn’t have a red apple in the house, you get a lovely green Granny Smith!

Prickly Pears

Prickly Pears

It’s a little known fact, but whilst at school I was a nerdy member of the South Yorkshire Cactus and Succulent Society, and wore a cute little prickly pear opuntia sticking out of a house of York white rose enamel badge, unkindly abbreviated to… well, we wont go there!

Pear tintype

Pear tintype

Another addition to my collection of pear photos.  They’re such photogenic fruit and especially this variety with its elongated shape, a Beurre Bosc in fact. The photo was taken with the lensbaby edge 80, a wonderful lens I must add! Perfect for still-lifes like this one and lensbaby shots have a natural affinity to textures.

Medieval

Medieval

Another image from the grounds of Leeds Castle in Kent, I came across this interesting themed hillside camp-site situated beyond their large vineyard which can be glimpsed in the background, and found they’re now running a new Glamping site!
All these lovely fresh new tents with their different primary colours were glowing in the morning sun, however, some were occupied so I didn’t like to get too close!