During the recent summer holidays we paid a visit to the Catlins, a beautiful unspoilt coastal area to the south of Dunedin. The day we visited it wasn’t very summery, but looking on the bright side, the overcast showery conditions did lead to wonderfully moody photos, the kind that are so good for texturing. After a walk to Jacks Blowhole (stunning coastal views but a fairly chilly walk since I was dressed for summer); we stopped for lunch at a bay at the mouth of the Catlins River
We’ve had a crazy time crackle glazing this summer and here with the autumnal fruits of our labours we’d like to present a first ever Fine Cracks Pack!
This set was made following on from our Distressed Painterly set, a natural progression to more or less round off where we started, we wanted much finer, smaller sized cracks in this set plus several PNG transparent overlay versions so this has fewer plates but with the mixed Jpg and much larger PNG files it adds up to just as many megs.
t’s been a while..sorry! Blame holidays and suchlike. You’ll be pleased to know spring is finally starting to spring here in southern New Zealand (though it doesn’t feel much like it today)! There’s not a great deal in flower in my garden yet, but the Hellebores more commonly called winter roses are in flower, they start flowering midwinter and brighten the garden when there’s not much else around. I picked some and discovered they aren’t the best as cut flowers but before they drooped I did manage to photograph them.
I got a new macro lens for my lovely little SonyA7 a couple of weeks and I can definitely say that it’s money well spent! It’s a Sony 90mm F2.8 and the results are beautifully clear and sharp and it has wonderful bokeh. I’m looking forward to having more time to play with it. In the meantime, since flowers are in short supply here with it being winter, I’ve been taking macros of anything that catches my eye, kitchen tools, fences, things from the workshop and feathers!
This 5th pack of 40 Fly Nik Color presets are a mixture of subtle and dramatic and are perfect for jazzing up your holiday imagery, for use with textures and without, the sample images pictured above are mostly without so you can get an idea of their effects, a few of the above images are not yet published, but we’ll blog those shortly using some of the presets in this pack.
Just a taste of things to come over midsummer!
Not another hydrangea I hear you saying 🙂 I’m of the opinion that you can never have too many! They’re such photogenic flowers especially my favourite blue variety. This was textured with a mix of old and new Flypapers, one texture came from our ever popular Summer painterly pack and one from the brand new Distressed Painterly.
Although delayed by server problems, at last, our first new textures set launch of 2015!
Always wanting to give that bit more with each new Flypaper pack, for this new Distressed Painterly pack, think Shabby Chic!:-)
Think of it as a kind of two-part pack with traditional grunge painterly goodness to first texture your images in the time honoured way and then why not go the whole hog and Crackle Glaze them! The choice is entirely up to you, with this packs 45 king sized textures there is something to please everyone, for our loyal traditional grunge texturers and our newer painterly fans who have requested cracks on many occasions!
Sorry about our long absence here on the blog, we do have a good excuse though, we’re excited to announce we’re busily working on a wonderful new pack!! You’ll be pleased to know it’s almost ready for launch so keep an eye out for the “mailer” with the details and if you’re not already on our mailing list there’s a joining form HERE!
You’ll be pleased to know that the Hydrangea that I planted last season has remained blue! So I’m happy! I’m now hoping the bush will grow a bit bigger now and have a mass of flowers to brighten a fairly bland corner of my garden. While we’re on the hydrangea subject, I was given another hydrangea bush for Christmas which I planted it at our country hut. Unfortunately when the river that borders the property is low, the sheep from the paddock over the fence can get in via the river bank and this is what they did a month or so back. They ate everything; hosta, roses, flax bushes, potatoes, they even nibbled on
I have always made my own jam, usually from produce I’ve grown in my garden. As well as knowing exactly what’s gone into the jar, you get the satisfaction of eating something that’s completely home made (well apart from the sugar that is). The above is a jar of blackcurrant jam and I was delighted to find I’d sold the photo for use as a bookcover via Arcangel Images . The book is Burnt Toast Makes you sing Good by Kathleen Flinn, here it is on Amazon. I’m adding it to my reading list, I love books like this about food 🙂