...this could be Gort contemplating how to fix the gift that Klaatu was about to give to the POTUS after he  was shot at by one of those pesky nervous soldiers in the Day the Earth Stood Still Good use of a Theremin as well. But no this another acrylic on board but looking at Still Life in this 'Acrylic on board' style I'm working with at the moment. So rather than being pure abstract there is an element of looking or thinking about the subject matter. Now I'm working on 60 x 40 boards, one day when I'm a grown up painter I'll get something bigger to splash the paint onto. 

For a long time that this image was developing, it only had the figurative outline on the right and basically a shemozzle of confusion to the left, so having no fear and my inner critic in the bin I covered the whole image in black paint and looked and started again...so really I'm just dealing in destructive layers, a bit like the early days of mashing Jpegs in Photoshop 4 a few decades ago
Out with the electric sander(!!!!!), indeed yes just to cut back into the paint and start again.  Now what comes to mind, as it's film connection day is one that should be watched through your fingers is David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers with Jeremy Irons as the twin Gynaecologists..it doesn't end well...spoiler alert...and finally for this week.

So this was always going to be about a food/table based still life again the bottle shape on the right hand side was there from the beginning with the left hand side taking a while to develop...I'm thinking Soup de Poisson and baguettes and probably the café where Amelie works, definitely a go to film on those Grim wet Sundays which are lining up to distribute their meteorological  joy.  So there we go, 3 this week with an image of Turnberry Beach on the go and another set of boards to create some mayhem on. Thanks for dropping by, some Photography up next.

It's been a while since I last worked with some Acrylic, but with winter closing in and daylight at a premium for Photography it is time to restart things. This time a bit different though, not monoprinting but using larger sized wooden boards. The 3 images on here are just finished with one more to be completed tomorrow, board size is 53 x 38 cms and I'm working with multiple layers and collaging ( with my own work) and sanding , scraping , rebuilding...well all kinds of stuff. I need to put  black edges on these pieces to finish them off and am a bit unsure as to either matt finish them or whack some gloss varnish over them, probably only one way of finding out.. So that's me sorted through the next lot of Yellow warnings from the Met Office, I'll leave you with these next 3.

...or how I came to terms with Capture One.

The transition from a Bayer based chip to that of a Fuji X Trans device has been more troublesome than I thought. 10 years of having a Nikon RAW to Lightroom workflow has been knocked on it's head by Adobes imaging products  rendering Fuji files into a mushy unsharp mess that no matter how much faffology is employed, the final results just stink. I thought it was me, I thought it was the camera and so I invested yet another chunk of time investigating what could possibly be going wrong...well turns out things were more simpler than I thought.
I'd played with a demo version of Capture One but , because of my 22 years of Adobe based footling, found the interface non-intuitive and a learning exercise I could do without considering the time I had invested in Adobe products. So I downloaded Capture One for Fujifilm, a cut down freebie version for Fuji users and after a bit of online learning finally found how to unlock the quality of Image file that the little Fuji X100V produces. They are sharp, crisp and have an amazing range in them and another positive is that Capture One doesn't seem to clog up the CPU and RAM like the latest version of Lightroom does, so here are some shots from our Tier 3 trip to Largs, Viking territory on the Ayrshire coast.
Just to say, there is no sharpening or clarity applied to these either in camera or through the software. So off to try and automate the workflow from capture one to Photoshop and probably organise an ADIOS to Lightroom....probably....

​

I wrote a blog piece on my other (soon to be defunct) site about never giving in to your inner critic, power through it don't give in to it, just create images . Now this doesn't mean that you will be creating images that explode with a Tsunami of likes out there on interwebland but it does mean you will always be working towards seeing things your way and this, at the moment is how I see things my way. I'm still getting to grips with the FujiX100v as it really is so different to be hoicking a big Dslr kit around, but I'll get there.
Now on to these images which are a combination of ICM and straight images then brought together in Photoshop CC. Blending layers is a pretty straight forward thing using opacity or blend modes, knocking out pixels or just masking. The technical bits can be learnt quite easily , Youtube is a great source of learning but it takes time. The next is planning out what you want the final image to look like....yes the hard bit...and it all takes time to learn and also think about what image you want to create, it will be much harder if your driving force is a thumbs up. smiley face or a like. Now I read an article the other day which tried to define when photography becomes illustration and the use of Computer programmes in the post processing workflow. I think that if you capture any image using a digital device, any finished final image should be a product of the person who created it, and that is the important bit, well for me, not only the capture but how you want that final image to look like. So I'll leave it to Frank to serenade us out.... 

For what is a man, what has he got
If not himself then he has not
To say all the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows, I took the blows
But I did it my way