Walton Creative News Blog. A behind the camera look at WaltonCreative. With News, Photographs and Comments.

I love rhubarb. Not only does it look fabulous, taste gorgeous, but costs next to nothing!

The £1.50 worth of rhubarb chunks shown here being washed were roasted in sugar, then sprinkled with ground ginger, topped with crumble and cooked until brown and crunchy. The pudding fed six hungry folk and second helpings all round. Mind you it was so delicious I could have eaten the whole lot myself!

Its something about the sweet – tart combination that really hits the spot. Next time I am going to try roasting in honey instead of all that sugar. Another thought was to make chutney of course! my favourite salad accompaniment.

I still don’t think MPs get the point. There is more to it than effectively stealing our money – although some of them should be arrested for fraud. The problem is their lack of moral consideration that would tell them it is simply not acceptable that they should charge for US for THEIR benefits – hanging baskets, moat cleaning and the like.

Margaret Beckett on Question Time epitomises the problem. She is completely oblivious of public mood and has NO contrition. She should go – not at the next election, GO NOW. 

And as for Michael Martin?   you can imagine my opinion of him. The often-quoted Oliver Cromwell line is very appropriate:

YOU HAVE BEEN SAT TOO LONG HERE FOR ANY GOOD YOU HAVE BEEN DOING. DEPART, I SAY, AND LET US HAVE DONE WITH YOU. IN THE NAME OF GOD, GO!.
Oliver Cromwell. April 1653.

While we were all disgusted at the claims for none-existent mortgages and £400 taxi trips – Michael Martin was concerned about who leaked the details. How out of touch can he possibly be?

Labour  tell us how well they have dealt with the economic crisis – but we are in such a financial mess now, I am sure this could have been done better. Why didn’t labour stop the crisis earlier? why didn’t they bring the FSA to account earlier? why are bonuses STILL being paid?

I feel the whole lot should go. Not just the government, not just the parliament, but the whole darn system. The Dickensian system is so out of touch. Everyone should be voting proportionately, members (if we have to have them at all) should be in their constituency FULL TIME and go ON-LINE to debate with other members. If millions can vote for their favourite x-factor contestant by sending a text, the same millions can decide political decisions too. If there really has to be face to face debates they can either all stay in hotels (Premier Inn at Country Hall currently costs £119 per night). Or take over one of the many empty office blocks and house the whole lot there. Consolidating all the services and security into one building would save millions.

I don’t feel ANY MP represents my views – not even fifty percent of my views. Who am I meant to vote for? I feel the closest to anyone sensible and honourable would be Vince Cable, but he is in a party mired with the same smell as the others. He would do better to be INDEPENDENT and ditch the party allegiance.

The threat of letting in the BNP in by the back door is not showing the strength of the BNP, it is showing the weakness of the main parties.

For me the nearest party is the GREENS. Even my previous party – the Lib Dems – aren’t pushing it far enough. Although I don’t agree with all the policies of the Green Party. I think we SHOULD have nuclear power.

I will definitely NOT be voting Labour or Conservative. I think its time to put the deck chairs away, they have been arranged enough, the ship is going down, run for the lifeboats now!

The little box I bid for on Ebay has been delivered in the nick of time so the missing label for Copenhagen candles has now been shot.

I took out the red lining to the box and packed it with the faux resins made from sugar crystals and dried apricots. With some sparkly side lighting and a few drops of water the treasure looks fit for a King…!

Copenhagen Candles are constantly changing their range of perfumed candles – and the packaging too.

These are a range of simple labels for their newest range of ultra-stylish candles with beautiful stainless steel lids.

All the shots where taken here in the studio, with a few cheats along the way. Vanilla flowers are hard to find, so this is in fact the bottom of a plastic milk bottle chopped up and yellow highlighter pen added to the back.

The baby powder had the bottom chopped of and then clamped to a stand. The powder could then be topped up without taking the set to pieces. The flow of powder looked ok but I thought maybe water or milk might give a more defined edge. Wrong! it just sloshed all over the studio floor, but worth a try. The final shot had the stream of powder retouched and curved down in photoshop.

The last shot is waiting for a little jewellery box ‘treasure chest’ to put the faux Frankincense and Myrrh into. I put a bid in for two on Ebay and managed to win both of them, so will have to see which of the two looks the best.

Having researched the Frankincense and Myrrh resins I found a remarkable likeness to them in sugar crystals and dried apricots! so watch this space to see what the final shot looks like.

Another find in Budapest. These sweet little finger puppets were found in a toy shop. They are all held up with bendy hair curlers, which help to push them into good poses. They can then be cut out later. My puppets were shot as a demo for a client coming in to photograph her own finger puppets.

More shots in my rustic, yet modern-look. I like the combination of gingham fabric and fluffy string.

If I ever manage to find my rustic, paint-peeled background, shots like this can be taken further back. I can then also shoot them with low dramatic lighting, as if they were in a pantry.

In years gone by it was possible to get a piece of worn out pine for next to nothing – not any more. Now its characterless laminates or expensive antiques.

I love the combination of food and glass. The addition of movement, from the salt being poured over the lemons really makes the photo zing. 

The shots were lit through from below frosted glass and from behind with a low spot light to make the salt sparkle.

The lemons were then shot at each of the stages of the preserving recipe. They are meant to be ready to use in three weeks.

To be fashionably frugal I suppose I ought to be using cheap, misshapen food, but it just doesn’t feel right with this kind of shot…. see below!

I am looking for an old bashed and distressed door or table to use as a background. The door to my brother’s old goat shed (honestly) would have been perfect, but I think it ended up on the bonfire when the goats met their maker. (No the goats didn’t go on the bonfire…).

If anyone out there has a door or any distressed wood that looks as wrecked as this please let me know!

I enjoyed shooting the Christmas biscuits so much, that I thought I would try shooting cup cakes next. By coincidence I found the little eggs in Julian Graves, hence the Easter theme. The recipe called for chilli powder in the cupcake mix, but I thought this might show as specks in the photograph. I put the chilli powder in the chocolate topping instead.  I tried the combination of chilli and chocolate in Puebla, Mexico last year. It sounds a strange combination but works really well.

With only a few days left until Christmas, I can pack up all my home made biscuits and photograph them. The first batch of biscuits, looked and tasted ok – but didn’t fit the boxes properly! so the latest ones are smaller hearts and stars that fit better. Again very high-key with my f1.4 lens has given lovely soft foreground and background, with pin-sharp biscuits.

Three large biscuits didn’t fit the boxes, so these have turned into hanging stars and another photo to send to the Alamy photo library.

I wanted to give biscuits for Christmas presents this year so took the opportunity to photograph them being made. I had originally imagined solid, star-shaped biscuits, then discovered if I used a smaller cutter as well, I could make weight watcher's biscuits too! The biscuit cutters also came in a heart-shaped version, so I couldn't resist making these as well. Maybe the photo might sell on Alamy for Valentines day? The biscuits were shot with a new f1.4 lens so I could achieve an incredibly shallow depth of field. I wanted the shots to be very bright and high-key so took the ginger biscuits out of the oven early to avoid them looking too dark. The next stage is to shoot the biscuits being packed into their boxes and tied with ribbon. Watch this space!

I saw this lovely marzipan Santa on a recent trip to Budapest. I wanted a solid background – which would have to be much larger than a real cake would be. So (as usual) I managed to make a simple idea a lot more complicated by creating a lake of false icing to sit him on.

I had hoped for that lovely spiky icing I have created lots of times before to disguise a rough top. But this time whatever I did the icing looked like either mashed potato or rice pudding!

To make matters even more complicated I had the idea of a giant knife cutting into the cake to make the most of Santa’s lovely anxious expression – to look as if he was worried about being chopped.

So the plan was to buy a small piece of real Christmas cake and to insert it into the fake lake of icing…. Well actually it worked, the only problem in the end was that the knife looked far too inappropriate for a Christmas card – well you can’t say I didn’t make an effort!

The website for Anna V rugs is now almost complete. All that is left now is the fun job to shoot the missing location shots for the rest of the rugs. These should have been completed well before Christmas, but it seems the chaps making the rugs in India haven’t started making them yet!
Visit the Anna V Rugs website.

Turner’s new livery uses the plate and cutlery logo from the stationery and website. The new vans have a smart clean look – printed by MotorModeUK.

Autumn shots for Chilstone to accompany their new website which I am designing at the moment. I am really hoping for some thick snow soon which would look fabulous around their pots and sculptures! 

Now this year’s big furniture shows are over and the new ranges have been chosen, its time for me to up-date Maison’s hundred and fifty page catalogue. This year the changes have generated another 10 pages to the catalogue. Most of the job involves scanning and cutting out their supplier’s photos. For me the best part is combining the furniture into their collection pages. The pages are used in the catalogue, website and for their in-store point of sale, so they have to look simple, informative, and attractive. Read more about my work for Maison.

The website for Copenhagen candles was an absolute necessity following the interest generated by the catalogue created earlier this year.

The site uses the square pages from the catalogue along side a narrow vertical menu on the left hand side.

The navigation works like an accordion. Opening and closing when you click on the headings so you can see the sub-sections.

The final job is to shoot all the new products Bo and Kelly at Copenhagen Candles have created over the last few months!

Read more about my work for Copenhagen Candles.

Reworking another designer’s work is always a tricky one as you have to spend a lot of time working out how they did things. I have been working on redesigning Capital Garden Products’ website. The original site had very little navigation meaning you had to keep going back to the home page. The re-worked version has a distinctive simple slab of colour down the left hand side which holds everything. Now clicking on any of the products takes you to a detailed page. Clicking on the photo again takes you back to the previous page. Speeding up the process of seeing all the pages. With improved meta tags and dynamic alt tags this database driven site should now also be much more Google-friendly.

This week’s projects have focussed on starting to update Jeremy’s Home Store to offer e-commerce. Shown here are rough designs for the home page and the yellow-background blog to show new products and latest news.

Relocating the Tunbridge Wells store has given a change to refresh the website. When the move is complete the site update will go online. Here are some screen shots of the chairs and lights pages.

I am working on the re-direction package for the relocation of the Mary Ensor store from Tunbridge Wells to Frant. Here is the poster and map to appear outside the store.

Demo Voice Recordings By Sebastian Gillies

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit

Ray

The Little Girl And The Wolf

The Crucible

Lamb Chop

Sea Birds Blessing