Black, White and Red.

It's always nice to be alerted to an email bing on the old iPhone while just coming to in the morning. This little bing was for a Convo from Corky's Cookies to tell me that I was in one of her Treasuries. It's a real beauty too!

Have a Merry Little Christmas
by Corky's Cookies

Red and Brown Delicious

I haven't curated a Treasury for ages and as food has been on my mind, lips and hips lately, I thought I should put a food flavoured one together, so I give you:

Red and Brown Delicious from the Photographers of Etsy

My Most Interesting

I've always kept an interesting eye on which of my photos the big, clever computers at Flickr think are the 'most interesting'. So I've made a mosaic of my top 100 Most Interesting. I'm always amused that out of the thousands of pictures I have at Flickr, it's often the ones of food and graffiti which come out on top. Many of the food ones are perfectly nice pictures, but just as many have been taken on mobile phone cameras, or in very dim light or just aren't very good at all, but they still get masses of hits. It's the ones from the big name restaurants like El Bulli and the Fat Duck so I suppose people read about them and then Google them and my pics come up pretty high up the image searches, it's not particularly flattering, but I shouldn't complain. As Flickr has such good stats it's interesting to see what's going on, for example one of my Banksy shots from Liverpool got about 5,000 views in one day. I've not managed to find out why. It wasn't on the front page of Explore (as far as I know) and I didn't get many comments. Very odd.

See all of these images bigger and clearer here.

Excess

The excesses of the season have finally kicked in. Friday was our 'office' lunch at Carluccio's which was rather nice and not a slice of overcooked turkey in sight! We had friends round on Saturday night and I cooked smoked gammon for the very first time (boiled then glazed and roast) and it was utterly delicious, and I'll definitely do it again. 

Sunday was our annual champagne and lobster lunch with friends, they put on a magnificent spread of lobster, crab, prawns, smoked salmon, gravadlax, assorted mayonnaise, sour dough bread, caviar with vodka, then a salad course, then prune and Armagnac tart, mince pies and chocolates. All washed down with indecent amounts of Champagne (2 magnums) and a healthy selection of the six bottles of Prosecco my mother supplied. It was splendid. I was very glad indeed to get to the gym this morning to undo a little of the damage!

Bicycle!Bicycle!Bicycle

by Jan Morales Photography

And there was also a Treasury West by Jan featuring my Mansion House print. Thanks Jan!

The Children are Overstimulated
by Jan Morales Photography

Seaside Beauties

Here's a lovely seaside Treasury picked from the offerings of the European's on Etsy and it's a great collection.

European Street Team
by Lasidi

I love the Ti Amo photograph from Eleanor - I wonder if it was posed or just a lucky find?

Lasidi is a jewellery maker from Granada in Spain and her shop if full of goodies, I especially like the felted pieces which she combines with some unusual stones and materials to make very original looking items. I seem to becoming attracted to felt lately, I've not really given it a lot of thought but recently I've been noticing masses of the stuff on Etsy and it's all used in a really original way. The featured seller last week had some stunning things, it was her felted acorns which I fancied and one shop I've been in love with for a while sells the most delicious looking felted pebbles and beads.

Gone and Forgotten

I've been updating my website a bit today, I feel it's been rather abandoned lately, I've been adding some photos from my recent trips to Spain and the Isle of Wight, I've not added too many, as they're not exactly the best photos I've taken and I try to be selective on Eyeshoot - after all, I do have Flickr for posting a much wider range of photos.

One gallery I've been filling out a bit more is the one called Gone and Forgotten, it's for photos of abandoned graves, headstones and flowers at the Southern Cemetery which is just over the road from my home. It's the most amazing place and I'll happily spend hours in there taking pictures and even went blackberry picking there this summer (several jars of blackberry jelly and a cobbler were the tasty results). I find the bare graves with remnants of real flowers or faded bunches of plastic flowers incredibly beautiful, mournful and sad. When I first started to go there I'd concentrate on the damaged lead letters on the stones, the ones where many letters had dropped off as I found that I liked the resulting graphic effects, the way that some randomly formed words really stood out.

It's been a while

I can't quite believe how long it's been since I've blogged. The computer problems still haven't been resolved and I don't have access to my entire catalogue of photos which is rather irritating to say the least. I've have a few shoots since I 'lost' everything so I've had some new stuff to work on, but it's not the same as not having my whole collection at hand.

Sales were good a couple of weeks ago, lots of card sets, two or three to a customer which was great, hopefully they'll be back for more, some custom print orders and quite a few items from my other shop, Inter Alia too. Now it's gone dead, but I suppose postage times to America have run out now and I don't have anything Christmasy at all. Let's hope the good sales continue in the New Year.

I've also not been checking the Treasuries for ages and today sort of remembered about them and found my Mansion House print in a nice POE one - it's always nice to have my work picked by another photographer!

Surprise
By Alison Du Bois