Fine Art & Stock Photography
There’s something about poplar plantations that appeals to me. It has to do, I think, with their monumental appearance. I took these pictures on a bike ride we took down to towpath of the Mayenne river, which snakes down through the department of the same name in the Pays de la Loire region of France. The towpath has been converted into a voie verte (greenway) for walkers and cyclists. You can read more about the ride and the river on our […]
I wasn’t expecting to get anything on this trip. Trish & I went out for the day just to explore. An hour down the road is an area known as the Suisse Normande, a hilly part of Normandy on the Orne/Calvados border that is cut into rocky ravines by a number of rivers. One of those rivers is the Rouvre and I’ve decided that I want to use it as the basis for a photography project (about which I’ll be […]
Having put a roll of film through my much-loved Canon FTb, it was time to drag out another old classic, the Nikon F3. I still think of this as one of the best cameras I’ve ever owned. I converted to Nikon in 1985 (and if that sounds like a religious experience, well it was), after having been an Olympus OM-2 aficionado for many years. But then all my Olympus gear was stolen in New York and it was time to […]
It would grieve me to find that someone has mistaken me for a hipster. But I realise I’m running that risk writing this post. Because, you see, I’m shooting on film again. Not much. Just the odd roll now and then. I can handle it. This is not about nostalgia. Oh, who the hell am I kidding? This is entirely about nostalgia. I’m at an age where I’m entitled to gaze back at that ‘foreign country’ that is the past […]
Pushkin adopted us a few months ago. Although we already had two cats and a dog, he simply knocked at the door, walked in and asked to see his room. According to the vet, he’s about four years old and neutered, so was obviously someone’s pet. We tried hard to find out whose but ultimately came to the conclusion he’d been dumped. Why, I don’t know. He’s a sweet, mild-mannered soul. He avoids fights and tries to gets on with […]
It was a weird June. First cold. Then torrential rain. Then blazing heat. And now, as we slide into July, blazing heat with torrential rain. The other night we had a thunderstorm the likes of which I’ve never experienced outside of the tropics. It wasn’t the thunder and lightning so much, although there was plenty of both. It was the rain. It felt like the house was underwater. By the time I came to give the dog his last walk […]
May was beautiful. But then June rumbled in, grey and grumpy. Temperatures barely made it to 20ºC, and that was on the good days. So the moment the sun peeked out, Trish and I knew we had to get on our bikes. Cycling is such a great way to see the landscape. You can cover more ground than you would walking, but you’re still fully immersed in the environment, in a way you never are in a car. And when […]
Back in the days when I used to participate in forums on RedBubble (hint: don’t bother) there were two phrases that cropped up a lot and that I came to loathe – ‘nice capture’ and ‘great bokeh’. Now, I’m not suggesting that the use of these phrases with no attempt to mitigate them through irony should be grounds for instant execution. That’s for other people to decide. And I might even concede that the term ‘bokeh’, referring to how out-of-focus […]
Sometimes you have an idea for an image in your head. But when your subject matter is the landscape, nature doesn’t always cooperate.
I’m generally not all that interested in plastering my photographs on mugs, bags and other merchandise. At the risk of sounding pompous, my work means too much to me to subject it to that kind of treatment. But then… there are some images that actually cry out to be shared in this way. Maybe this is where art and craft diverge. Take this one, for instance. This is our sprollie Cézanne. (A sprollie is a springer spaniel crossed with a […]