I'm dreaming of a white Christmas in July

Once again I have to quote my post on Alamy's soft or lacking definition because once again my blogging has been held up by my QC failures. This time I have managed to add Interpolation Artifacts and now Over-manipulated to my troubles!!! I am now shopping for a better camera body as 6MP just takes too much effort to get past QC (and for good reason, as announced here).

Festive blue bead garland 3/4

Festive snowman cut-out 3/4

I've been getting all festive in the last couple of weeks and looking for subjects to fill the buyers' hearts with joy. The result is these cheeky showman images and some limited DoF beadwork.

I haven't started keywording these images yet, I tend to quickly caption them to get them live and then return to them under my own steam. This means that they are out there and can be found by caption and I can link to them but they won't get a great deal of traffic.


Festive blue beads and gold star garlands 1/4

This week is Shoot! the Day (yes, the whole week until the 27th) so I will be trying to get some shots this weekend within the S!TD window. I've sprained my ankle but I'm still going to northern France this weekend and will be shooting peasants (if I see any) so expect some arty french farmhouse images in the offing.


Festive clothes pegs for hanging greeting cards cut-out 5/6

This week, I've been mainly adding, cut-outs!

My post about Alamy's soft or lacking definition, which went down so well with you all, reflects the reason for my lack of posts, they kept saying no to my photos until I was running with a backlog of nearly 40 pictures, grrrrr! Finally, yesterday, they relented and my more careful editing (see, I'm not in denial!) has seen me through. If they had said no again I would have been ready to join the ranks of the "6MP isn't good enough for Alamy" brigade, but then again, they may not have looked at my pictures so this still may be true...


Chinese dragon cut-out 6/6 [catchy caption, eh?!]

So...cut-outs. I been working with the archetypal silo rig, large translucent box, infinity white background, SB800 on a stand (free-standing Manfrotto monopod, no less, turning out to be very versatile) triggered on SU-4 slave mode by the on-board Speedlight. Plenty of information on this kind of rig out there, for which I am very grateful. So on to the subjects. I am about to start on some Christmas themes but for now I've found a friend in a chinese dragon, which was procured on a trip to Hong Kong, and some salad servers...this next one of the dragon is my favourite and could well be used for "looking to the future of the Far Eastern economies"


Chinese dragon cut-out 1/6 [no less catchy than the last!]

Cut-outs (or silos) aren't the most exciting things to photograph but they are a staple of the stock photographer's portfolio so I will be adding a smattering of them over time. It is a good environment to go a bit abstract, especially with the help of a macro lens, but I'll keep that for the next post



Blue plastic hand salad servers 3/5