Stourhead, A Garden For All Seasons

Stourhead Gardens in Wiltshire has long been one of my favourite places. It is the most photogenic of places at any time of year. Some of my favourite shots of Stourhead are now available on Red Bubble and in my new Imagekind Store



The gardens were designed by Henry Hoare II and laid out between 1741 and 1780 in a classical 18th-century design set around a large lake, achieved by damming a small stream. The inspiration behind their creation were the painters Claude Lorrain, Poussin and, in particular, Gaspar Dughet, who painted Utopian-type views of Italian landscapes. It is similar in style to the landscape gardens at Stowe.

Included in the garden are a number of temples designed to show off the Hoare family’s education and wealth. On one hill overlooking the gardens there stands an obelisk and King Alfred’s Tower (a 50-metre-tall, brick folly designed by Henry Flitcroft in 1772); on another hill the temple of Apollo provides a vantage point to survey the magnificent rhododendrons, water, cascades and temples. Amongst the woodland surrounding the site there are also two Iron Age hill forts: Whitesheet Hill and Park Hill Camp. The gardens are home to a large collection of trees and shrubs from around the world.

NEW! 2010 Calendars Available Now!

My 2010 calendars are now available to preview and buy on Red Bubble. There are 6 titles to choose from:

Rural Alberta, Atlantic Canada, The Canadian Rockies, Floral Wonders, British Beach Huts and the newest addition to the range, Dreamy Nature.

The Great British Beach Hut

Brightly coloured beach huts are an essential part of the British coast. They go together with ice creams, sandcastles and the unreliable British weather to form part of our experience of summer by the seaside. In recent years the spirit of nostalgia for the British coast has meant that beach huts, in some locations, can sell for more money than houses in other areas and given that you cannot stay overnight in them and many need annual maintenance, this is really saying something!


West Wittering Beach Huts

Whilst taking images for a competition at my local camera club based on the Great British Summer I became a tad obsessed with Beach Huts. You can find some of my best in my Beach Hut Collection on Red Bubble including my latest image (featured above).

If you like Beach Huts as much as I do (probably unlikely :o) you may be interested in my Flickr Group Beach Hut Elite with features some of the very best Beach Hut images on Flickr, so do drop by and take a look.

Honey, I Shrunk Toronto!

Tilt-shift miniature faking is a post-processing technique, which involves selectively blurring a photo to simulate the narrow depth of field found in macro photography and some tilt-shift photography, making the image appear to be of a miniature model. (Description from Wikipedia)

If you fancy having a go at making a miniature, Tiltshiftmaker.com is a site does all the hard work for you, upload your image or use the URL of your image location to create a miniature in just a couple of clicks, preview, then download the full size… Job Done!

I tried out this site for the first time yesterday with some of my images and got a couple of quite pleasing results, (click on the images to view larger). The hardest part was finding images that this treatment might suit, and in my opinion it works much better if you are looking down on a subject in the original shot.


Gargnano, Lake Garda, Italy

If you would rather have a go at making this effect yourself in Photoshop, here is a tutorial I found. Also check out 50 great examples of fake miniature photography here.

New Additions

Below are the newly added images in my Dreamy Nature Collection, these are now all available to buy in various formats on my Red Bubble Site.

Wix.com - Flash Websites for the Non-Technical

In all honesty I am not usually a fan of Flash based websites, for one they usually take too long to load and secondly, in some cases they tend to be more gimmick over content. That said they can be very attractive and what I am a fan of, is free stuff on the web. So if you are looking to create a Flash website and know nothing about Flash, here is a superb place to start.

Wix.com offers 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 decided to give it a go, with a view to using mine as a mini portfolio and platform to link to my online store at Red Bubble check it out here and see what you think.

Adding Textures in Photoshop

I really enjoy enhancing my images by adding textures, nearly all the images in my 'Canada's Atlantic Provinces' book have had textures added to give them a more story book/vintage feel. My ongoing 'Dreamy Nature' collection are also texutured lightly to create a slightly softer feel to them.

I have put together an easy 6 step tutorial that you might like to follow if you are new to textures. Also included with the tutorial is a free texture created by me and used in the the example image here. I would be most grateful if you use the texture if you would credit me and kindly link back to this blog so that others can use it too. Click here to download the zipped file.

If you are feeling more adventurous and fancy having a go at creating your own textures from scatch in Photoshop, then here's a great little tutorial for making paper textures.