Featured Images 2

Christmas Morning

Here is the previous set of Featured Images.

Christmas Morning

This is one of the oldest images on display (dating back to 1979) and really was taken on Christmas morning in Allestree Park on the outskirts of Derby, where my parents lived. This picture was the trigger for the idea that one day I might be able to sell some of my pictures. The picture was entered into a club competition, whose judge was the photo editor of a daily newspaper. He awarded me the top spot, and when I plucked up the courage to ask whether the photo might have any commercial value, he was very encouraging.

The colours were pretty genuine - it was a very heavy frost, but the pervading blue is softened by the pink tinge to the vegetation on the bank of the lake. The tree of course provides the framework, and is in just the right place. But the picture would be nothing without the gap in the middle, through which the two figures were walking. And it was just by chance that they filled it so perfectly. They look uncannily like my parents, both now deceased, even in the way they were walking, but Mum and Dad were at home at the time preparing for Christmas lunch, so I was just lucky!

Click here to find this picture in my Main Gallery.

Moon and Clouds

This was taken in Ronda, in Southern Spain, in 1990. The clouds were really, genuinely, like that, astonishingly. I entered it for a club competition in the early days of digital manipulation, and the judge awarded me 5 points out of 20 because she thought I had somehow "fiddled" the clouds digitally. Since then, of course, I have done a bit of fiddling; the original slide was a bit old, tired, and scruffy, so I have tried a softening effect to imitate a watercolour, which seems to work with the slightly watery moon, and the moonlit landscape.

Click here to find this picture in my Main Gallery.

 

 


 

 

Moon and Clouds
Open Shutters

Open Shutters

This was taken in Arles, in southern France, in 2007. I keep asking myself how much credit I can take for this photograph, for which I have an alternative title of "Don't Trust Your Eyes". Look closely at it. The left-hand window is clearly a window with open shutters. The right-hand window is - well, not a window. It's a fantastic trompe l'oeil painting, with windows, shutters, plantpots, cat, cage. I think that even the windowsill and the arch above are probably painted. So I'll just claim credit for spotting a photo, and praise the original mural artist with the clever, creative vision.

Click here to find this picture in my Main Gallery.

 

 

 

 

 

To return to the Main Gallery, click here.