Along Came A Spider

This is an opportunist set and a (welcome?) break from impressionism - although there is still a theme of 'obscuring detail' running through the images.
Returning from a business breakfast, I noticed the dew-laden webs in the lavender running down the side of my garden, so grabbed the camera and snapped on a macro lens.
Little was done to these in post, apart from desaturation and contrast adjustments.
The question is, where's the spider? It's hiding there somewhere....

N.B. Some of these are best viewed at full size - just click on the image.

On The Waterfront

Here are some views of Wivenhoe that you won't see very often...
Playing with in-camera (and post-production) impressionist techniques once again, this time with a more avowedly fantastical goal.
This set could be subtitled 'pan and scan' as lateral movements and zooming were used rather than the vertical movements of the graveyard set.
Post involved some custom curves and some contrast shifts using 'apply image'. There was also some selective colouring and tinting using various layers.

Time and Tide

My visit to this location was primarily a scouting trip. I was planning a shoot with a model in the near future, and wanted to double check that the features that first drew me to the spot some years ago were still there, and not washed away by the remorseless waves.
As the sun descended I stopped just snapping images for my shoot plan, grabbed the tripod and worked on some long-ish exposures. As with the graves, my thoughts were turning to impressionism, and depicting different aspects of the beach as changed from moment to moment with the encroaching tide. That said, my personal work rarely sets out to simply record a moment in time, rather each image becomes a representation of the fantasies a given scene conjures in my mind's eye.
In post, each of these images was desaturated and then toned with curves. I also spent time increasing and decreasing the contrast in different parts of the images, using curves, overlay layers and layer masking.

A River Runs Through It

My second shoot with the wonderful Fracture took us to a beautiful location surprisingly close to central London. With these shots my focus in post-production was on saturation - boosting in LAB colour, and mixing partial with full desaturation. Discussions about LAB colour and the various desaturation techniques available in Photoshop can be found on my two main websites.

Graveyard Shift

Over the years I've played with a number of different techniques designed to create a pictoral, impressionist effect. They include long exposures of moving subjects, vaseline smeared over a skylight filter, and various digital methods, including a digital stocking soft-focus filter. These images utilized vertical movements of the camera, as well as use of my home-grown digi stocking filter and some custom curves.