France

Horse track into mist

Horse track into mist

Great to be back to almost normal after moving house a few weeks back.
We’re now in a rural area, away from the mountains and near the famous river Soane which is but a few fields away.
We’ve moved to a 300 year old half timbered farmhouse with a large treed garden and swimming pool. The best part is it’s a totally new area to photograph

Road to Carcassonne

Road to Carcassonne

Welcome to the first blog with the new Ethereal Textures used!
They say all roads lead to Rome, well this one more so as its a typical Roman road that leads from Carcassonne to Rome.
I just shot this quick view on my Iphone from the roundabout at Capestang, it was captured in a bitter north-westerly lunchtime wind but the processing makes it look like evening!

Annecy Canal

Annecy Canal

Just back from eastern France, where we visited Annecy, the ancient lakeside mountain town on the Swiss border which, coincidently, during my time as a freelance Getty curator, whilst selecting mostly French imagery, I was delighted to finally visit the actual location of the famous Palais de l’Isle canal prison that I saw images of nearly every day whilst looking through Flickr.

Canal walkers

Canal walkers

Low winter light with its dramatic long shadows can be fabulous, it can also be very hard to process. Here’s one of several I shot just before Xmas at our Canal du Midi’s head of the UNESCO protected 17th century Five locks, i’ve photographed it many times, in fog, mist and even rain when it had its beautiful rows of Napoleonic ancient marching trees along each bankside, unfortunately this is all that’s now left, as they were all cut down last year because of a fungal infection spreading though the canal water all the way from the Atlantic coast, now finally reaching here in the Mediterranean coast after they think the

Remembering Sam

Remembering Sam

Now the photo, I have inherited much of the family photograph collection including the one peeking out of the book. Sam was my Grandmothers very handsome little brother and like many young New Zealand men of the time went off to what they thought was the “big adventure” of World War One. Ten percent of New Zealand’s  then population  of 1 million fought in WW1 and of those  18 000 died and 40 000 were wounded. Unfortunately Sam wasn’t among those who survived , he got injured in battle, wrote home to his mother saying he was fine, it was only a slight injury, but shortly after writing he succumbed to gangrene and is buried in France.

Fire Truck

Fire Truck

Without further ado, welcome to our first blog tutorial using the new Fly Nik Anolog Presets! But before I go on, we’d just like to remind you guys that this Analog Preset Pack is for the Nik Analog Pro Plug-in and not for the usual Color Efex Pro. You can download it free from Nik as its all part of your original subscription.

Cardabelle

Cardabelle

Over the Easter weekend we drove up into our nearby southern Aveyron mountains to visit Auberge owning friends on the edge of a historic Knights Templars village, Commanderie de Sainte-Eulalie-de-Cernon a place I’d never been to or heard of before but ideally situated for A75 route national motorists, just a few kilometers south of Millau’s world record breaking tallest viaduct.

Snow Trees

Snow Trees

Welcome to the first Paper Painterly Textures Blog Post! Im currently delighted to be staying in the French Jura again, near the Swiss border as a returning guest of my art college friend I recently re-discovered living right here in France;  Amanda!
This image was from my last trip up here, but as ive just arrived we’ve not been back up to the snow line above the town yet so it may or may not be still like this when we plan to take another cross country ski trip over the weekend.  As you can see from the original image, it was purposely exposed quite dark to get a nice full range of tones around the watery sun

to the sea

to the sea

  Firstly we'd like to say a big thank you to Ben Willmore for helping publicise our Flypaper textures on his very informative live podcast last Monday and Tuesday! I've managed to watch around half of the many hours so far, and I have to say after downloading...

Jousting Horses

Jousting Horses

  Back in the blog chair with a totally fresh image from this morning, I practically tripped over the annual Medieval Camel festival parade at the top of my lane here in the old ancient central area of French Beziers. I love these Mediterranean antique dressed...