Lemon preserve jars

Our supermarket had a stock of large, knobbly photogenic Lemons, which inspired me to use a few in a new still life.
I have no fancy lighting, I just use daylight from a side window with the Mediterranean shutters most people have, mine are both internal and external. I can direct the light by opening one or both part way, but the same can be done with curtains, you don't need to have shutters!

I shot this in my little kitchen where the walls have their original gloss cream paint, which I expect has faded from its original white!
Before you go thinking "does this guy ever decorate"? I'd answer cheerfully that I've purposely left the original retro finish as I had photographic location shooting in mind!;-)

Back to the shoot, its just the fridge top, no need for fancy marble or stone slabs! The refection at first bothered me but in hindsight its added to this simple grouping.
During my scenic artist career in London I had a big scenic paint order to decorate several huge sheets of plywood for a famous British lighting catalogue. The eccentric photographer worked in a windowless WW2 Air raid shelter, his results were stunning, simply by wiring the wall lights through my sheets of scenically painted plywood and reflecting the light back with sheets of grubby white polystyrene, approx 2" thick. Normally one side would have a coat of Black Matt emulsion, he used this to reflect black or negative light.. I digress, here I used two sheets of Polystyrene from my new LED monitor. No need to buy reflectors and you'll help save the planet!
I shot bending down to the same low level, no tripod needed but probably would have helped!

The before shot shown has already had a few pale textures but unfortunately I didn't save half the recipe but will give approximate percentages for the before state.
The original picture was perfectly focused, here I had purposely softened the image with Gaussian blur and painted out the blurred insides of the objects leaving the outside edges slightly blurred.

In the second half of the recipe I used Sisley, our dramatically ugly painted Linen texture in an unusual way, firstly it was desaturated to a dark blue, then It was used with the rarely used, Pin Light mode at just 11% I loved the bottom part but the top wasn't showing so I flipped it vertically and softly removed the bottom half. A later layer of Creme Anglaise partly obscured this, but all the layers add up to form a kind of heavy impasto final effect.

First half recipe
Lime Wall - Soft Light @ 50% Approx - flipped vertically
Orange Blossom - Soft Light @ 50% Approx
Heather - Soft Light @ 50% Approx

Second half recipe
Sisley - Pin Light @ 11% Desaturated to dark blue
Sisley - Pin Light @ 14% Desaturated to dark blue, flipped vertically, the bottom half removed.
Creme Anglaise - Screen @ 47%
Base image copy - Overly @ 27% totally desaturated to B/W

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Passion

I bought these lovely wrinkly black New Zealand passionfruit today especially for photographic purposes, always a good excuse! Likewise the tamarillos, which must be amongst my favourite fruit. Unfortunately neither of these delicious fruit grow outdoors down here in southern New Zealand, but the tamarillo's at least grow almost like weeds further north. I'm jealous!
I suspect this still life composition is going to be a work in progress or at least it will be as long as the fruit lasts....we had tamarillos for desert tonight!

Anyway the processing.
I only used one texture in this so it was fairly simple.
After duplicating the background I added
Sahara Saddle (Summer Painterly) @ Soft Light 72% this was de-saturated a little using a Hue saturation adjustment and with a little texture softly brushed from the focus passionfruit using a layer mask.
To tone down the larger lemon a little I added
Sahara Saddle @ soft light 25% de-saturated as before. The texture was just applied to the lemon.

See it on Flickr

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Plums on white

A slightly different starting photo and slightly different processing.
I'm enjoying playing with photos in this soft desaturated style and have discovered after many failures that choice of subject and background are very important and likewise light, soft indirect light seems to give the best results.
After much playing with textures, I think I've come up with a winning combination:-)

I duplicated the background to start with.
Using a Hue Saturation layer I reduced the saturation a touch.
then:
Burnished Clay @ Hardlight 68%
Sail cloth @ Overlay 55%
Sail cloth @ screen 7% (this layer probably could have been omitted)
Gosgrain @ screen 54 % desaturated to taste. I started off having this layer toned blue to give the finished image a slight blue hue but changed my mind at the last moment and opted for just slightly desaturating the green of the texture. A touch of texture was removed from the focus fruit.

....and yes, that's a cup ring you see on the original background (a piece of cardboard), textures are so good at covering up such things :-)

The above processing is very similar to what I used on my recent stone and bowl image on flickr.

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nature morte

Firstly, I must fess-up, I'm not too used to still-life set-ups,
as they're a bit of a new thing for me.
But knowing those few basics about three being better than two
and five being better than four objects, gets you into the right arrondissement of Nature Morte! Don't ask me why, I suppose seeing odd numbers disturbs the eye a little more than seeing evenly grouped numbers of objects?
More disturbance is obtained by placing the whole set-up, off-center.
Shot in my little French house's top north facing room with reflected sunlight in raw.

Again, very simply processed. I used the most basic of painterly effects first, being just a slight noise reduction in the filters.
And then the following textures;

Ming - Hard Light @ 61%
Base image - desaturated - Soft Light @ 32%
Muscatel - Soft Light @ 61%

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brushes (with the law)

In my little old French house I have a kind of a studio,
where the walls are still rough as I've not yet decorated .
It used to belong to a Dutch professor of colour therapy.
He's still in France because I keep getting his speeding tickets!
Anyhow, he said this top north facing room was where he did all
his writing, and I can see why!:-)

After raving about all those cool dreamy, desaturated images in our flypaper group on Flickr, I thought I'd give it a go myself, and here's my first attempt. For those who have yet to discover 'desaturated flypaper textures' I hope this might help? Shot in Raw with natural light entering through open balcony windows, It gets the warm reflected sun from a yellow house opposite.

Dangerous Liaisons (desaturated) Overlay @ 23%
Backdrop - Hard Light @ 70%
Copy of base image - Soft Light @ 78%
Leaden Hall - (skirt cropped) Hard Light @ 45%
Colosseum Sienna (desaturated) Soft Light @ 45%

I shot this image in portrait format, the original is not a square, thus you might notice the top of the textures are missing from my image.

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