We have just had a wonderful weekend at the Maranup Ford Farm Stay. Which is a beautiful Caravan Park near Bridgetown. We chose this place as it was The weekend of the annual Bridgetown Blues Festival and the Caravan park was one of a very select set of sites which has an especially “Pleasant Outlook or Vista” according to our Camps guide book. On both accounts we where very impressed. The Campsite had a beautiful federation style garden and the Festival was Just the right size for a great day out with street performers, like these two, and Cafes and Bars also providing a selection of Music, but more memorable than all this was the people we met at the Caravan Park who all made us feel very welcome. If everybody is this friendly and generous we should have no worries setting up home in Australia.

This is the Old Swan Barracks in Perth, Western Australia. It has been our home for the last two weeks while we look for a campervan to start our tour of Australia. As you can see from this image The Swan has been a host for temporary residents for over 100 years. Some may say little has changed but what can you expect from a backpackers in the most remote city on earth. We are revisiting the Fremantle car market on Saturday and viewing a nice ’87 Sunliner on Sunday. With a bit of luck we should be hitting the road on Monday.

This is another shot from a family holiday to Wales last summer. I can’t remember the name of the pub but if you recognise it please leave a comment.  Photoshop gives you many ways to make black and white images. I used Convert to Grayscale in Camera RAW. This allows you to adjust the brightness of each colour as it is converted. In this case the Yellow tones were made brighter to lighten the beach and give a greater variety of tones in the vegetation.

This simple use of spot colour is achieved by painting black on the layer mask of a Black & White layer. The Hue/Saturation layer above was used to make the ladybird nice and red. It was a little orange in the original capture. Vignette was achieved using a gradient layer and lens correction.

We went for a walk in Rutland today. Karen spotted these Crocuses outside a cottage. I have used Orton Effect and Desaturation layers in an attempt to make the flowers stand out of the busy background.

It took 2 satellites 16 days to create the original image.  Fortunately it is in the public domain so It is fine to use it. Rather than the traditional Blue Marble I wanted to age the earth and give it an apocalyptic look. I used adjustment layers with masks to alter different areas of the planet. I then reduced the opacity of each layer until they looked suitably polluted or deforested.

I decided to have a go at pimping this Lada from Cuba. If anybody knows the model please leave a comment. To process this image I used the same technique as Red Chevy. Orton Effect, Fractalius and Selective Desaturation.

This started life as one of my Grandfathers Pictures from Rome, Italy in 1926. The Colosseum is so well photographed it did not take long to find a modern image shot from the same angle. Google maps has geotagged images which makes it easy. Once I had them both lined up in Photoshop I created a mask to reveal the modern image.

This is the river Nile in Aswan, Egypt. I wanted to create a spot colour effect with the Blues and Greens. Instead of making a mask I used a black and white layer with a duplicate image above set to Lighter Colour blend mode. Then all you need to do is move any of the six colour sliders to fade that colour in and out of saturation. It is far quicker that creating a mask and I think the results look more natural.

This is Normanton Church on the shore Rutland Water. I used low opacity split toning, desaturation and various blend modes to get the dramatic sky without too many unnatural colours. As all thing are possible in photoshop I added a bit of lightening too.