Still Life

Pretty

Pretty

It’s been a while since we’ve had some floral prettiness here on the blog!  This was taken in our New Zealand spring a few months back. The flowers grow over the fence just down the hill from where I live and I couldn’t resist picking a sprig while passing, I’ve no idea what they are but they’re a beautiful subject, especially when paired with one of my little oriental styled teacups.

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;

White rose

White rose

  Winter is starting to show itself here in southern New Zealand so to get my flower fix I had a trawl of my archives and found this rose which cried out for the additon of some texture. It's a lovely easy recipe today utilising just two textures. Aqua Vita @...

Still life Photography Pears

Still life Photography Pears

  Here is my contribution for the texture chapter in Kevin Best's wonderful new Still Life Photography ebook. Paul and I were given a selection of photos to choose from to texture and naturally I choose the pears! Read Paul's previous post for more information...

Apples

Apples

  I love taking photos of fruit and it doesn't worry me if they're a bit past their prime, I think all the wrinkles and spots add to the interest. These scruffy little specimens came from a tree growing beside a road which probably undoubtedly started life as an...

Artichokes

  After creating and blogging the original image and recipe several weeks ago, we teamed up with the famous US Artist and print technique innovator, Bonny Pierce Lhotka to host a small taster pack of her highly original textures. To try out Bonny's Nature bits...

Artichokes

Artichokes

I dont think I ate an artichoke until I was a student? After finishing a water-colour still-life of them, as it would have been a crime to throw them out. I'm not saying we lived on just potatoes and boiled cabbage, but up in Yorkshire such things were frowned upon...

Jug and Bowl

Jug and Bowl

I've always been fascinated by large austerely decrepit houses,hankering back to my student house-rental days in Yorkshire. Later in London, after seeing a big Gwen John retrospective exhibition, I was reminded of those poor desolate student days where we'd burn...

Books

In recent times I've been going through a slow phase, photography wise, it being winter here in New Zealand is probably something to do with it.  Anyway I was getting sick of going through my archives looking for something to process so decided to do a quick...

Lemon preserve jars

Our supermarket had a stock of large, knobbly photogenic Lemons, which inspired me to use a few in a new still life. I have no fancy lighting, I just use daylight from a side window with the Mediterranean shutters most people have, mine are both internal and external....