We love collections here at Flypaper HQ and as we’re both keen gardeners we were delighted to come across these two huge sets of vintage French seed pack illustrations at a local flea market store in Burgundy, France.
These scrumptiously coloured labels were printed from the mid to late 1800’s using a rich multi-layered chromolithograph printing process that ceased being used over 100 years ago so they are now almost certainly out of Copyright.
Because of Covid restrictions, I’ve been going through my back catalogue and came up with this image from 10 years ago, taken at the base of the chalk cliffs on the edge of England’s Eastbourne on the south coast.
Before the bleak mid-winter sets in, or high summer for our lucky Oz/Nz fans, we thought you’d like to hear about this fab new Luminar ai app which is a stand-alone app and/or works with Photoshop and Lightroom to breathe new life into your boring or blown-out skies, filling negative space from a list of included skies that come pre-packed inside the app or upload your own skies
During these strange locked down Coronavirus days its always good to have images to fall back on. Upon finding this image I’d taken 10 years ago, in Rottingdean near Brighton where this huge black Beacon Mill overlooks the English Channel. When it was built back in 1802, it defiantly faced France with its great Napoleonic foe.
Whilst picking up my first two swarms of honeybees in the Provencal town of Bollene I spied this typical French village fountain, I quickly took this picture and dismissed it as I thought I could never use it as it was too cluttered.
Only after we released our Provencal pack did I look again and started playing with it. I chose one of our last years Nik Fly Pastel presets which blurred the edges, pulling it all together beautifully.
I then tried a very grungy zinc based texture from the Provencal pack and
Jill and I would like to wish all our readers a Happy New year!
Here’s my first outing of 2019 just yesterday evening during a very dark and damp winter when the sun finally came out just in time for it to to set, so I rushed out to grab a few images before the light faded. My camera still had its new little 50mm and so I stuck with that.
Here’s a possible book cover set-up I shot several months ago, It’s theme being loosely based on Graham Greene’s famous;
‘Travels With My Aunt’ novel, but I didn’t like the final ‘before’ result as it just didn’t ‘mesh up’ so I filed it under ‘problem images’ and forgot about it until we were trialling the new Celestial pack and suddenly it worked! The final sepia effect pulling it all together, both softening and adding a real vintage travellers feel.
ack to work after a long hot, dry summer in France, where i’ve been busily turning our 300 year old barn into an artist’s studio come photo studio.
Along with concreting the earth floor I’m also fitting roof windows, the first is up and working and is partly lighting this simple still life along with the big open barn doors allowing the sunny gardens reflected light.
As i’ve also just purchased my very first 50mm prime lens and thought I’d very quickly try it out with this partly painted backdrop canvas and very old table.
Shot towards the end of the the same Saone river shoot blog we posted the other day,
I thought I’d quickly follow it with this similar but also quite different image that was processed in a similar way.
I used a poloriser filter on the camera to bring out the blue sky colour.
For processing I used Nik color pro to lighten the bottom with the reflector filter, then saved and sent it through Topaz impressions to give it a slightly more painterly feel, this smoothed out the image a little, but I could easily have left that process out as its so subtle here.
Up here in eastern France we’ve had a very soggy winter, warmer than usual but also much wetter and because of all that rain we’ve not had much chance of getting fresh images, but on Sunday we had a rare golden hour when I captured some lovely floodscapes on a very flooded River Saone.
Shot from an ancient raised Roman road above the flooded farmfields, these trees are normally overgrown hedgerow tops and not the banks of a huge lake!