Paul Grand

Provencal Fountain

Provencal Fountain

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

Winter Sunset

Winter Sunset

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.

Dungeon

Dungeon

Sometimes whilst searching for textures I’ll also fall upon a shot I can use and what a great day that is! Here we were in a village in a very deep gorge that’s known for its champagne type sparkling wine.

Being in a deep gorge on a cloudy winter’s day it was quite murky, and so a flashgun would have been handy, but it would also have killed this simple image. And who walks around with a flash diffuser anyhow?

Garden Barrow

Garden Barrow

Another from our French farmhouse garden, thought I’d try out my old lensbaby Optic 80 lens for a change. The rusty old wheelbarrow was left by the previous old lady owner. In the background are felled tree branches I’ve been trimming from all the old overgrown trees. The wheelbarrow helps ground the image and gives the eye something to focus on, all the better for being slightly retro.

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.

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...

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.

path through pinewood mist

path through pinewood mist

wisty paths are journeys and this kind of imagery is the perfect metaphor for the interesting twists and turns of a life story and thus make perfect book cover images!

Winnats Pass Lambs

Winnats Pass Lambs

  I shot this English pastoral scene back in June, midsummer, but you'd never know it from the picture, having had such a long wet winter the sun had only just begun to warm to earth up on these Derbyshire moors. Its a favorite visiting haunt of mine because as...