www Fans In A Flashbulb

Weegee's photographs amazed me from the moment I first found them. When I studied a bit about him, I came across Letizia Battaglia too, whose work I also really admire.

I think I'm starting to realise that my favourite photography is black and white portraiture/photojournalism. Helmut Newton . . yep, definitely seeing a trend.

It was during a search for Weegee's work that I found this great blog (one of those blogs you can't stop scrolling through):

http://fansinaflashbulb.wordpress.com/

The Redstone Shop

If you're scratching your head over xmas gifts (hopefully not literally) you might try Redstone Press, for all your totally-random-but-beautiful book needs.

http://www.theredstoneshop.com/

Here's a diary I bought from them - it's like when you're a kid and you get something for xmas that you never touch in case you break/damage it. I never wrote inside this! Much too precious.

Futtock

Patterns with smart objects

In a previous post, I showed how smart objects could be used in Photoshop for photo editing. Here's another good use for them. 

The fact that smart objects can be duplicated within the same .psd file means you can repeat them over and over to create patterns. I started the design below in Illustrator by creating a single triangle with bits of lettering inside it. Then I pasted that into Photoshop as a smart object and duplicated it loads of times into the pattern below (using the secret kaleidoscope recipe).

Whenever you want to try a new pattern, all you have to do is double-click on the 'vector smart object' in Photoshop and it'll take you to Illustrator where you can edit it. Once you've changed it, just save and close and it'll update the Photoshop file automatically. Lots more time to spend trying new patterns.

Formicate

www Estevan Oriol

My absolute favourite portrait photographer, Estevan Oriol, has a book out on Amazon! He's into the LA gangland so there's lots of tattooed guys with battle wounds and women who look as tough as nails. That's going on my Xmas list anyway.