Monday 27 August 2012

Paradise Regained

Since our last posting in May, the vines have grown almost to full maturity and the grapes are filling out and ripening under a very hot August sun.  Unfortunately, the reason for our failure to post a new blog since May is not that we have been basking in the gorgeous summer weather but, on the contrary, we have been busy, much too busy.

We moved house for the third time in two years and we did it ourselves.  We are still in Chatillon-en-Diois, only a few hundred metres from our last, rented, house but now in our own, wonderfully situated house with magnificent views of Glandasse and Piemard and with quite a lot of land to look after.  We don't anticipate any more moves.  What we have now is better than we ever imagined we would find and in a future blog - when we have had time to make the best of them - we will celebrate the views.

Chatillon-en-Diois

 
A few months ago we experimented with printing onto canvas with the aim of producing archival prints without the need for glass and with the opportunity to use more flamboyant or fitting frames than we normally see used for photography.  We will continue to produce classically presented prints, framed and with a matte.  It has always seemed to us that, while this is often an ideal presentation for photographs in an exhibition setting, it is a lot less happy as a part of an inhabited interior which calls for something more imaginative.

It's difficult to find a framer, especially living where we do and, anyway, one of the greatest attractions to us of print production is to be able to take the process from the original shot through to the final presentation.  The only solution was to set up our own framing workshop and in the last couple of months we have done this and have begun to produce framed prints and to experiment with presentations and mouldings, some quite flamboyant.

So far, we have been very happy with the results and find that our canvas prints, laminated with an invisible protective coating, are easier to look at and to display than the traditional model.