Scenic Decay in Havana.

May 17, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | 2 Comments

I’ve been looking through some of my less immediately loved photos from Cuba.  There’s always a subconscious hierarchy to a big batch of photos from a trip, there are the ones which you fall in love with at the time, they just look so good on the screen that you instinctively know that they will make fabulous prints. When you get home and see them all on the big computer screen, there are dozens which thrill straight away, all they need is a bit of a tweak and polish and they’re ready to go – all those happy memories in a perfectly saleable print-sized bundle.  Then when the first enthusiasm has worn off and other shoots have moved to the top of the list, you pop back to resize something every so often and in a bored moment, you scroll through to remind you of the blaze of colour and the mojito flavoured views and there are always some images which you somehow missed before.  And when you’ve done all that, when you’re feeling very dull you might start at the beginning and go through one by one to see what you’ve missed, if your eye has changed something will pop out which didn’t previously.  That’s what happened today.  I’ve rediscovered two photos which have been passed over countless times and have now left the Lightroom Catalogue to see the light of day.

So, here are my new Scenic Decay in Havana pictures.

First a glamorous streak of slightly battered Art Deco style vintage American automobile cropped tightly as to be almost abstract.  This one is in my Etsy shop here in a variety of sizes and finishes.

Next is this battered staircase in the entrance to a residential building in Havana.  It has undoubtedly seen far better days, but there’s always something charming in decay……
Find the print here.

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Underground Walking Tours Photos

May 3, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

My Underground Walking Tours photos which I shot way back in freezing cold February have finally gone live and been published!  They’re in two publications, the first is The Guide, the national trade magazine for the Institute of Tourist Guiding and features my pictures of Sue Grimditch of New Manchester Tours in the massive underground spaces below the Great Northern Warehouse in the city centre.  The underground pictures were really tricky as there was limited time as the people on the tour were real-life fee paying customers and Sue didn’t want me monopolising them for photographs when they wanted to be getting their facts about the subterranean life of the city, it was also pretty much pitch black once we left the big space in the photo below and I didn’t have any lights with me, but the customers did have torches with them so they did the trick for the picture at the bottom of the second page.  Worst of all though was the way my camera and lenses steamed up as soon as they reached the damp and steamy climate down the long metal staircase so precious time was wasted as I rather hysterically waited for my kit to become usable!  So all things considered, I think they turned out rather well!

 

The second pictures are of Ed Glinert and his group, shot on the same day as Sue’s pictures above.  The magazine picked my favourite picture of the day which was in a brick strewn corridor leading from the large lit space (in Sue’s picture above) into a rather mysterious area with small enclosures and some moody lights.  It was shot on a tripod for quite a while as it was actually much darker than the picture suggests, the people in the picture must have been pretty still, perhaps taking some photos themselves?  I think it captures the atmosphere of the location well.

The pictures of Ed are in the MCR11 Magazine which you can see here.

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Pickled radishes with mint

April 16, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

I came across this little recipe for pickled radishes and mint in this month’s Waitrose magazine and fancied it straight away.  After some dithering about what ‘distilled malt vinegar’ was and getting a very helpful reply from the every fruitful ‘Food Feed‘ page on Facebook, I seat out to pickle my radishes.  The ingredients looked so pretty, the pink of the radishes and the yellow of the lemon with the green mint were just asking to be photographed.

 

Ingredients
500g Radishes – trimmed
568ml distilled malt vinegar – I used Marston’s, it comes in a bottle similar to the more familiar dark brown malt vinegar.
1 lemon – zested with potato peeler, in thick strips with as little pith as possible.
2 bay leaves – I used dried as I had no fresh.
20 mint leaves
2 tbsp salt

Method
1. Cook the radishes in salted boiling water for 5 minutes, drain, cool and chill – the colour leeches out of them, leaving them a rather pretty pale pink.
2. Mix the remaining ingredients in a separate pan, reserving half the mint. Boil for 10 mins, strain, discard the mint, zest and bay. Cool then chill.
3. Sterilise a 1L jar, fill with the radishes, remaining mint & pickling liquid, making sure all radishes are submerged.
4. Store in cool dark place for 2 weeks, then they’ll last for 2 months in the fridge – if you don’t eat them all…..

Here’s the pretty pink, bottled up and ready to sit in the dark for two weeks version:

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Sorry for the spam

April 1, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

I have just realised that my blog has been hacked and I apologise for the non-Eyeshoot related posts.

I shall do what I can to stop it happening again.

Sarah
Eyeshoot Photography

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Beautiful purple (or lilac) hyacinths.

March 19, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

I used to really dislike the smell of hyacinths, I’m not sure what changed, but now I love them!

We spent a lovely weekend with friends and the fragrance of these few  beautiful purple (or lilac) hyacinths in a blue a white  jug smelled wonderful in the kitchen all weekend long.

I really like to use layered textures with my floral photos and try to shoot against a neutral or plain background to help the textures shine.  I use Flypaper Textures which are fabulous quality and although I’ve not used them for a while I find then endlessly variable and I can play with them for hours.  This was initially edited as a RAW file in Adobe Lightroom, then exported to Photoshop CS5 where I applied two Flypaper textures, tweaked their settings and colours and so on, saved back into Lightroom and tweaked some more there for the final image which you see here.  Now available as a print in my Etsy and Folksy shops.

This is the original image, straight out of the camera – shot under normal kitchen lighting – under cupboard kitchen lighting which is giving a rather harsh light on the tiles, on a very dull day, in a hurry with not a vast amount of thought and only a white tea towel as a prop to cover the dark granite worktop. The hyacinths really pop out of the background in the ‘after’ picture and the richer colour makes all the difference. It’s amazing what some time in Photoshop and Lightroom can achieve!

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Your choice of words in Scrabble Tiles.

March 1, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

blue skies above words in scrabble tiles bluewords in Scrabble tiles greenwords in Scrabble tiles pinkwords in Scrabble tiles yellow

I’ve been wanting to add some new ideas to my Etsy shop for a while and really fancied using words with my photos.  I’ve made a few prints using quotations but that didn’t quite seem the way to go for me.  I have used the old reliable Scrabble Tiles in the past for Valentine’s cards with some success so I began to ponder using them again.  Such a versatile prop!  To place the letters on the classic green board, to lay them on interesting backgrounds, pretty papers, maps, textures and so many more options.  I decided to keep it simple and use some pretty origami papers which I bought back from Japan and here are the results.  I hoping that the great art buying public will want to see their choice of words in Scrabble tiles!

 

It was fun to experiment with words in Scrabble tiles and the pretty papers in blue, pink, green and yellow. There was lovely natural light in my south west facing studio this morning despite it being a bit overcast which was perfect.  In fact, I managed to do my test shots without my tripod as it’s on loan today, but I will use it in the future just to make sure that everything is pin sharp.  You can fit a surprising number of lines and words on a small square piece of origami paper without it looking too crowded, so I hope that I have some interesting phrases to work with in this little project.  The print size I am offering in my Etsy shop at this point is 7×7″ with a slim white border, it’s a nice size and keeps the postage costs low.  I’ll see how these do before offering larger prints.

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Manchester Streetart Finds

February 17, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

It was pretty much the first day of decent weather here in Manchester yesterday and it was a pleasure to wander the Northern Quarter and environs without hunching and huddling from the bitter wind.

While not a prizewinning day for photos I did find a few little street treats worth snapping. Here they are:

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and then they were gone…..

January 25, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

Photographed at The Lowry Centre in Salford.

 

 

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Love is in the air

January 7, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

I know that we’ve only just got over Christmas and my shop still has Christmas cards in it and my 2013 calendars are selling happily, but still, it’s nice to look forward to the next event in the festivities calendar.

Valentine’s day is that lucky day – I am personally a bit ambivalent about it and I think this is because I didn’t really get involved in all the Valentine’s ho-ha when I was a girl as I knew absolutely no boys whatsoever due to my formative potential boyfriend rich years being spent at an all girls boarding school.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved my boyless time there and was generally much amused by the mild tone of hysteria which fell over the place every February 14th which increased in intensity as we moved on from being ten years old to world-weary and sophisticated 17 year olds in the late 80s.  I always got a couple of cards penned in badly disguised writing by my very kind parents and one year even a lovely floral arrangement which I couldn’t have been more chuffed to receive had it been from some spotty public school boy (as all the young beaux of choice seemed to be).  Valentine’s did get slightly more interesting once I departed the all female environs of St Margaret’s, but not much and thus it remains.  Today as an old married woman (to mis-quote Mr Elton) Valentine’s is an excuse for a little gift exchange or some flowers and always some nicer than usual food and wine and I am quite happy with that.  But as an active Etsy shopkeeper I feel that it is my duty to turn my thoughts towards the more actively Valentine minded and offer a range of tempting images for those in all stages of romance, from the tentative first steps to the long term partners and I hope that I have managed that.  I have used my stock of images for the last couple of years but this time I really do want to offer some new designs and to whet my creative juices I started of gently by making a montage of some of my romantic graffiti which I have collected over the years and I rather like it!  So far I have it listed as a card, but some prints will be following soon.

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Books Read in 2012

January 3, 2013 by Sarah Franklin | Leave a comment

I have been keeping a list of the books I read each year for some time as an aide memoir to myself as I find it so easy to forget what I’ve read and when and am enjoy looking back over my reading from the previous year.  I have a particular soft spot for reading multiple books by the same author and love long series of books.

1 – Smiley’s People – Jan 14th in Cuba
2 – Death at Pemberley by PD James (Jan 15th in Cuba)
3 – At Home by Bill Bryson (Jan 18th in Cuba)
4 – The Secret Pilgrim by John Le Carre (8th Feb)
5. The Readbreast by Jo Nesbo (21 feb)
6. Fall of Giants by Ken Follet (march 30)
7. Gallows View by Peter Robinson (April 11th)
8. The Hunger Games (April 15)
9. The Hypnotist by Lars Kepler (April 29)
10. Catching Fire (may 10)
11. Mockingjay (May 17)
12. A Dedicated Man by Peter Robinson (May 27)
13. Shark’s fin and Sichuan Pepper by Fuchsia Dunlop (May 28)
14. A Necessary End  Peter Robinson  (June 13)
15. The Song of Achilles (June 16)
16. Heresy by SJ Parris
17. Her Fearful Symmetry by Audry  Niffenegger (July 22)
18. Restless by William Boyd (Aug 11)
19. The Pyramid by Henning Mankell (aug 18)
20. Past Reason Hated by Peter Robinson (30 Aug)
21. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovich (6 Sept in Crete)
22. The Prisoner of Heaven by (Carlos Ruiz Zafon Crete 10 Sept)
23. Moon Over Soho by Ben Aaronovich (14 Sept ,Crete and home).
24. Prophesy by SJ Parris (Oct 1st)
25. Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant (oct 19)
26. The Litigators by John Grisham (Oct 28)
27. Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovich (Nov 14)
28. Sacrilege by SJ Parris (Dec 4)
29. Cold is the Grave by Peter Robinson (Dec 19)

Some thoughts on my year’s reading – high and low points.

I was disappointed in The Fall of Giants by Ken Follett as I had so enjoyed his earlier Pillars of the Earth books, I found it to be dull, plodding and seemingly aimed at a somewhat dim audience.  Very obvious things were explained in an irritatingly simple way and I found it just annoyed me throughout despite the potentially thrilling length and breadth of the story.  I hate to be let down by a much-anticipated book.  I won’t be reading the next in the series.

Bill Bryson’s ‘At Home’s was fantastic!  For a book chock full of facts it was surprisingly readable and I found myself ploughing through it with great pleasure on my sun lounger in Cuba boring my mother with a non-stop stream of information about everything from early ice production to rat infestations as she tried to get on with her own reading material.  I’m a long time fan of Bill’s, but this book was very special indeed.

I succumbed to the Hunger Games trilogy early in the year and really enjoyed the somewhat glum view of a dystopian future – very original and creative (a new genre for me so not sure how original it really was) and I read them in pretty quick succession on my Kindle with great pleasure.  I have yet to see the film.

Peter Robinson DCI Banks books – I have acquired a stack of paperbacks from my dad and have enjoyed reading them after seeing several of the stories on the TV during the year.  It’s been interesting to read the early ones (starting in the 80s I think) and noting the vast amount of alcohol consumed by almost all levels of the police force in Eastvale – it’s a miracle that they managed to solve anything at all and catch any bad guys without crashing their cars and dying of liver failure.  Too many together was a bit draining, but I think dad has some more for me which I shall look forward to reading in 2013.

The Song of Achilles was simply wonderful!  I was never a fan of the Greek myths and struggled with them at school and quite happily ignored them completely until I fancied reading this book on my trip to Crete in June as it seemed pleasingly appropriate to do so.  I am very glad that I did as I found it impossible to put down and read it in its entirety on my journey home.  It was one of those books which lingers pleasingly in the mind for some time after completions.

The Rivers of London trilogy by Ben Aaronovich was my star find of the year.  Initially attracted by an eye-catching cover in the bookshop I devoured the first book in Crete in September and promptly read the next two in the series.  A curious mix of Harry Potter meets Sherlock Holmes meets a London guide-book they tell the story of a magical PC working in the magical department of the Met. Police, there’s all sorts of strange goings on in this secret world but it’s so soundly rooted in ‘real’ London that it manages to be totally convincing.  I can’t wait to see what comes next.

The Giordano Bruno books by SJ Parris have pleased and irritated me in pretty much equal measure – I’ve been trying to fill a Shardlake shaped hole and Bruno seems to sort of do the job and he is growing on me book by book.

I have loved all the ScandiNoir stuff on television and read three books of the genre from last year – The Redbreast and The Hypnotist were both particularly grim with some moments of levity but the Pyramid by Henning Mankell was very good and it was an interesting insight into the enigmatic Wallander.  I shall not be investigating any further books by the authors of the first two books!  Mind you, I did love the Millennium Trilogy so shall not necessarily abandon the genre all together.

A special prize for the worst book of the year goes to John Grisham’s The Litigators which I bought after hearing a glowingly reviewed on the normally reliable ‘A Good Read’ on Radio 4.  It was so grim that I had to keep on reading to see when it would suddenly turn into the book I had heard such glowing reviews about.  It didn’t happen and I shall happily never read another Grisham novel.

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