Blog

Table Brushes

Table Brushes

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.

Summer Sale and Pastel Preset Launch

Summer Sale and Pastel Preset Launch

Welcome to our latest pack of the ever popular presets for Nik Color Efex.
For this seasons launch we have a soft pastel themed preset pack to cool your hot summer photography! A whopping 50 cool new mostly pastel presets all for the usual price of a 40 preset pack, bringing you bang up to date with all our recent image processing. These presets can tone down those bright summer colours and soften them, pulling them together with a softer, more tonal artistic look. They also work well with winter shoots, warming up cold grey tones.

Bokeh Pack launch

Bokeh Pack launch

We’re bonkers for Bokeh!
Welcome to another long awaited catch-up set of glittering Bokeh!
We’ve been working on this set for months and whilst doing so also noticed Bokeh is this seasons cool new look!
As we’ve been trialling them we discovered that layering them over dark contre-jour images really wakes them up and brings them back to life!

Summer in a jug

Summer in a jug

It’s been a wonderful summer here in southern New Zealand, in fact a record breaking one temperature wise. My garden has certainly loved the extra warmth, I’ve had a bumper crop of tomatoes and more cucumbers than I know what to do with, and the pumpkin has gone berserk,  as a result my pantry shelves are laden with jars of pickles and preserves. I’m in the midst of bottling unsweetened apple puree at the moment, I use it though the year as a base for smoothies, the apples (and all the fruit) have been very early in ripening this year.

River Saone part two in portrait format

River Saone part two in portrait format

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.

Flooded River Saone

Flooded River Saone

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!

Flypaper Vignettes launch

Flypaper Vignettes launch

Welcome to our brand new Flypaper Textures ‘Vignettes’ pack!
Who would have thought that we had not already launched such a strong concept pack?
This pack is a great all rounder, from heavy to light and ethereal and all shades in between perfect for adding extra drama to your photos.

Once again we’ve managed to cram 50 pro sized textures of various formats including portrait, landscape and square to cover all bases.

Bluebells

Bluebells

It’s been far too long since our last before/after photo and texture recipe blog post! Time has been short of late as we’ve been busy with many other projects. Hopefully we’ll be blogging a bit more frequently in the future though.
It’s late spring here in southern New Zealand and the bluebells are flowering, these ones were picked at our country hut where they grow wild under the trees…my very own English bluebell wood.

Flypaper Waxworks Textures Launch

Flypaper Waxworks Textures Launch

Welcome to our very first encaustic wax worked texture set! We noticed how popular waxing photographic prints had become some time ago and made a note to ourselves to do something along those lines, then this year the right time finally came about and we kitted ourselves up with loads of natural beeswax, natural pigment powders, bookbinding irons and blow guns, heated trays and bain maries, quite a job just to get kitted out! Then came the fun bit, hot and smelly but surprisingly enjoyable once all the windows were opened!

Fly Muse 20 Launch

Fly Muse 20 Launch

Our new first pack of the year the Fly Muse 20 pack of textures has been created to satisfy a demand for fans who have requested we bring out a smaller, cheaper pack who don’t want to spend as much $40 on a pack but still want our normal pro-sized textures.
This could be the start of a whole new sized texture pack series, depending on how popular they are with our fans, so feedback would be appreciated!