My name is AJ and I am a Colour Addict!

If you know my work then you will know that I love colour, there's nothing that lifts my mood more than seeing an array of bright colours all together.

So it comes as no surprise that I rarely create anything in monochrome. Quite odd really as I love other photographers images in monochrome, but when I try it myself it just doesn't sit right with me visually. I believe in my whole collection of images there are only possibly five that have passed muster in the monochrome bracket and one of those I simply had to put a hint of colour back into. Ironically two of the aforementioned five were published nationally.

So this month on my Red Bubble Profile I am celebrating my colour addiction with 9 of my loudest and brightest images!

Oh and just because I mentioned it, here also are my monochrome images that were published.

Left: DIY...NOT and Right: Slinky

Gone all Flashy!

So a while back I talked about a company called Wix who offer a free service to build and host your flash website. No technical skills required, (currently running in Beta), there are a selection of very appealing templates to choose from and the interface is extremely user friendly. With the free account your site will include ad banners for Wix, but you can upgrade to Premium at anytime, which opens up a range of extra features including unlimited pages, using your own domain and removing the ads.

I was extremely pleased with the results of the free site and I decided it was was time to have another go at this, so this weekend I put together a new website and this time I upgraded the package to eliminate the ads. the combo package which I purchased costs $99 per year. Although I am personally a huge fan of free stuff and it pains me to pay, I thought it was about time I made the investment!

Here is the end result. Below is a screen shot of the gallery page, I like it and would love to know what you think and if you like it, why not give it a go yourself. To visit the new site click here

Another Texture Giveaway

Here's another homemade texture to try out on your images. This one gives a very vintage feel with its worn edging and faint text.

Below is an example of the result you may achieve. In this intant I used the multiply blend, desaturated and lightened the texture slightly.

To download the texture just click on the texture image and you will be redirected to the download page if you have missed any of the previous textures and tutorial just click through the thumbnails (top left).

Step Back in Time

I found a superb vintage action today online called 'Hand Coloured Vintage Photo' I thought that some of you may be interested in giving it a try. You can download it here and see my example below. To attain the colour result you must run and complete the ageing first.

If you are unfamiliar with PhotoShop Actions, you may want to take a look at this tutorial which is a basic introduction.

Eye Spy

Following on from my previous post regarding the security of images, here's a neat little way of keeping check of your images and where they are being used online.

Tin Eye is a reverse search engine that hunts down where your image is being used on the web. Although still in development and unable to check every single web page, it does work. I myself search every now and again if an image of mine has received a lot of hits on Flickr from unknown sources. Just a couple of weeks ago I found a European online magazine using my Stonehenge image without my consent, I wrote a strongly worded e-mail to them and they apologised profusely and removed the image.

Sign Your Name

With the advent of change relating to copyrighting of images published online (and not for the better) we really need to make sure our work is protected. If you are UK based and have not heard about these changes yet please read this article.

There are steps you can take to prevent theft of your images online, but in my opinion none of them are full-proof. That said, digital watermarking does provide some peace of mind. Digimarc (a plugin for Photoshop) have recently upgraded their application and it is definitely worth looking at. I currently use it and find it quick and easy to use, the basic account starts at around $49 per year.

I'm no Tweeter!

To tweet or not to tweet, that has been the question on my mind now for quite sometime.

Half of me thinks yes what a great idea, I can use it as a subtle marketing tool and the other half of me thinks I don't want to randomly chit chat rubbish with people.

As for celebrity tweeting, it gets me so mad! I like to think of my celebs as detached individuals, untouchable, sometimes elegant, sometimes clever or whatever I choose them to be in my own mind, but honestly, miscellaneous ramblings from celebs about what they had for breakfast, yada, yada, just makes them look and sound stupid with too much time on their hands and further more breaks the illusion and mystery for me.

So although I haven't entirely ruled it out, I shall not be tweeting anytime soon. However, thanks to a friend I have just discovered spnbabble. Now this to me seems a far better prospect. Maybe not as big yet, but geared for marketing, not twaddle! Check it out and see what you think. You can follow me on there if you so wish under the name DigitalExpressions.