PaulGrand

Bell Tower

Bell Tower

’ve recently started using my Lensbaby again, with the Optic 80, ideal for tilt shift effects looking down from the mountains, and frankly a lot lighter to carry! Its also great for capturing a moody, painterly effect. Enhanced by the painterly filters in Topaz Impression and finishing with our Flypaper Textures.

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

Snow Barn

Snow Barn

mouse-over for before view.
Up here in the French Jura again! This year the snow was very late, the resort workers were pulling out their hair for the lack of it.Then only just this weekend it finally arrived heavily enough and has been snowing ever since and now we’re expecting it to continue all week!

Fauvist mist

Fauvist mist

Here in the Languedoc, where the fauvist artistic movement made its home we’re blessed with over 300 days of sun, unfortunately many of those days are windy! It’s that same wind that keeps the clouds away and also makes my job as a landscape photographer harder as the light is very hard.

Paint it Black!

Paint it Black!

My first apartment in London after moving south with a college friend after graduating in the 1980’s was in the Hasidic north London Jewish area of Stamford Hill. Our charming Anglo German landlord and his wife we discovered to our embarrassment as we were hiding our pet cats, were drinking tea in our apartment on arrival! whilst meeting we noticed that they both had faded blue German WW2 ID numbers tattooed on their wrists, which we’d seen before on Holocaust survivors up north. On departing his final friendly though bizarre words were;

Lonesome Bison

Lonesome Bison

After an unusually warm autumn up here in the French Jura, we were finally blessed with an overnight snow fall and so we drove up early into the
nearby ski resort and snapped away until lunch time, passing a bison farm en route and shooting them eating fresh hay, all the other cows having being taken indoors and finally buying a load of freshly churned mountain butter and their local Comte cheese to take home with us.

Surreal Luggage Label

Surreal Luggage Label

  Just wanted to show this surreal use of the new Luggage Labels overlays, as well as thank Adobe’s Russell Brown and Thomas Ruark for their ingenious new updates to Russell’s Texture Panel to which we contributed ten more Flypaper testers to freshen up the...

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

Martello Tower

Martello Tower

his Martello tower is the most northerly of the original remaining 103 towers erected and is situated in Aldeburgh on England’s east coasts Suffolk county, built around 200 years ago to defend England from Napoleon, for which happily they were never needed. But later used in WW2 for various gun postings.