Monochrome Madness: The Demon Drink
Posted on October 30, 2024
Lens-Artists: There is a crack in everything
Posted on October 29, 2024
Look at this abandoned house on the main street of the nearby village of Rancon: the paintwork is cracked, the glass is cracked, the plaster is cracked, the wall itself is cracked…

Cellpic Sunday: Late bloomer
Posted on October 28, 2024
It’s been warmer than usual so far this autumn, which may explain why, even at the end of October, some flowers are blooming and clearly still have more to offer..

Lens-Artists Challenge: Intentional Motion
Posted on October 22, 2024
It’s almost counter-intuitive to move your camera intentionally when taking a photograph, but the effect can be quite arresting.
When I got my first proper DSLR we were living in an apartment in the centre of Abu Dhabi city. I took a couple of photography courses and this is the result of one of the exercises that was set.
With the camera on a tripod sitting on the apartment’s terrace, I aimed it at the night view, which was of a busy road with high rise buildings at the far end.. The effect was achieved with a long(ish) exposure, during which I slowly rotated the zoom lens. Weird.

Cellpic Sunday: My first espresso martini
Posted on October 21, 2024
I don’t often drink cocktails nowadays, but recently I tried an espresso martini for the first time. I don’t think it’ll be the last.

Monochrome Madness: Sidestep
Posted on October 19, 2024
Sometimes it’s necessary to look from a different angle at something mundane in order to find an interesting image. Last week I posted a very mundane image of the side wall of a multi-story car park. Its one redeeming feature was a partially visible spiral fire-escape.

For Monochrome Madness this week, where the topic is ‘Steps or stairs’, I cropped out all the mundanity and flipped the steps through 90 degrees to produce what I think is a far more arresting photo.

Lens-Artists Challenge: Looking Back
Posted on October 15, 2024
A particularly interesting theme for this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge: ‘Looking back’.
If you think about it, every photo you’ve ever taken – even the one you might have captured less than a minute ago – is looking back: a split second of a memory preserved for ever (or at least until you press the ‘Delete’ button). Indeed, why do we take photos in the first place, if not to create a memento?
I’m fortunate to have many happy memories – and perhaps even luckier to be able to remember them, but I’d be lying if I said that having a photographic record hasn’t helped in that.. So, the choice wasn’t easy, but I finally settled on something.
Madame and I have been lucky enough to visit Venice four times, all for wedding anniversaries, of which three were significant milestones. This is the hotel , on the Grand Canal, that we stayed in on two of those occasions. Happy days…

Cellpic Sunday: Rooms with views
Posted on October 13, 2024
We were away last weekend on a (very) special occasion trip. Our destination was the city of La Rochelle, on France’s west coast.
En route, however, we broke our journey in the city of Poitiers, where we stayed overnight in a budget hotel whose chief attraction was its proximity to the railway station. We certainly didn’t choose it for the views:

On the other hand, in La Rochelle we splashed the cash on a suite in a considerably more upmarket establishment, where the views were a signifcant step up from the poor relation in Poitiers.

Monochrome madness: Flowers out in the garden
Posted on October 8, 2024
In ‘real life’, as it were, these tiny flowers have bright pink petals. However, converting the image to monochrome goes some way to transform a ho-hum record shot into something a little more striking in its own right, partly helped by eliminating background distractions.

Lens-Artists Challenge: Setting a mood
Posted on October 8, 2024
The light of Golden hour adds a mood of serenity to this image of boats at anchor in the Vieux Port of the city of La Rochelle in western France.






