The Autumn/ Winter season of  creativity is now in full swing, if you missed it the last blog post Leftfield and gallery Maison du fromage     well , they are up and running, my Video/ timelapse slider finally arrived, lithium batteries giving customs a bit of a tizzy fit apparently so played with that all day yesterday and now on to something I've put off for a while...Emulsion Lifting. There are many a fine video tutorial on that Youtube and there is a whole stack of duffers so here is what I've learnt...
I don't cut anything, just peel apart and then ease off the gluey edge surrounding the image area with the back of a brush
I use 2 trays of tepid water, first to get chemicals off the back, (dried white stuff) but using a very soft brush so not to scrape the emulsion and the second, very shallow to ease onto the paper
Finally I use an Ikea egg flipper to hold the image onto the paper when lifting out of the tray

by not cutting around the frame of the Polaroid the lovely Impossible Polaroid edge remains intact. Excuse the photo as it's an iphone in grim light. Ooofff lots to do, this image above was just for experimental reasons to see how the technique works but I quite like it...we'll see where this one goes to...TFI friday everyone   (Lawks it's nearly October)

Nothing to fear but fear itself...okay paraphrasing  FD Roosevelt is probably leaning on the 'Too Heavy' button this early on a misty autumnal weekend but like the attitude of Millwall fans 'No one likes us  we don't care' the Like or Fave or Please , please comment and share has become part of the fabric of Photo sharing on the Interweb. Okay back in the day I've got to say I was sometimes(lots of times) slightly miffed that another crowd pleaser had had been gently rolled into the recycle bin of solitary confinement...but I was younger and eager to get my way of seeing out to an audience that was wider than my cat and some close relatives..but then....
Things have changed for me, maybe age is helping as testosterone levels recede to be replaced by the need for comfier slippers and 'Something decent to watch on the Tellybox'...maybe it's because now, I really don't give a monkeys chuff about what folk think about my imageneering/photography and the only audience that really matters is , well me, me  actually creating something that I can say...'Hmmm Yep....' to So I present to you dear reader , a batch from leftfield, there is no depth, angst or wrenching going on, just a production of some new images that I quite like.....(please press as many fave /like buttons you can find on this page as I'm really really quite shallow and need the reassurance that a fave strike will give me...................)

The Swallows gathered in a huge group on the telephone lines yesterday...and were gone...see you in April. It's that time of year again, damp and misty, birds migrating, the bird feeders in the garden needing to be topped up every day and me wandering about in my Wellies shooting against the sun with wide open apertures......nothing changes.
So shooting with Mr Dependable, the old D700 with a 70-200 keeping the aperture around f5.6 not only trying to capture some decaying web laden nature but if you look closely, moisture droplets fluttering about in the gentle breeze. Into lightroom and a bit of white balance...er...balancing  quick waft in basic, some clarity and lens Correction applied which seemed to make no difference here's some more

Went out to Chateaux Trevarez for the exhibition of images by Julien Geradin which are placed throughout the grounds of the Chateaux He has a collection of 6500 autochromes, a technique pioneered by the Lumiere Brothers. Okay you might have to do a bit of google translate on the pages but basically...the birth of colour photography I'll post some images below ......but just a quick heads up on the image above. Because the light was so strong and I was on a walkabout with the F1.8 ,I was able to freeze the motion of water coming out of one of the Chateaux fountains...1/3200, f 1.8 at iso64
So...images taken into Lightroom where I just synchronised a mono conversion, lens correction and a square crop..opened them as a layer stack in Photoshop..top 5 layers selected and dragged into a group, opacity of the group dropped to 30% a very soft mask to bring back some of the bottom layer detail and I used Color Lookup, an adjustment panel, to add some color to the mono conversion..here are the images used in the stack. As ever...less complicated then it looks written down...

So here are a few images from the collection of Julien Geradin and his influence on the birth of Colour Photography