This was my first uploaded image for 52 Frames - a quickly grabbed shot using my iPhone, hastily edited. I’d just returned from walking my dogs and was running out of time to submit, so I snapped a reflection of myself in the mirror with some of my photos in the background. I use my iPhone as often as I use my ‘big camera’, if not more. I find it more immediate, less obtrusive if I’m taking street shots, and much easier to handle if I’m out with my dogs.

My second post for 52 Frames was a greeting from Whitstable - a small harbour town on the north Kent coast. Its famous for its oysters and pink sunsets, and is a favourite destination for day trippers, second homer’s from London and occasional celebrities. This is an artwork on Whitstable Harbour celebrating the invention of the first diving helmet, right here, in the mid 19th Century.

Searching for complementary colours, I noticed this old buoy tucked under a beach hut. The peeling bright orange and blue paint was exactly what I was looking for. I must’ve walked past it dozens of times, but I usually look out to sea not in the shoreside nooks and crannies, so thank you 52Frames for prompting me to see differently.

Herne Bay’s pier head is derelict, separated from the shore in 1978 when a storm tore the pier down. Stretching three quarters of a mile, it was once the second longest pier in the country with trams carrying people to its end. Now, untethered and untended, it slowly rots into the sea. Recent drone footage suggests it’s collapse is imminent.

This image is part of a long term project - a collection of lost objects found on my walks around Whitstable. I look out for these left behind things - hats, scarves, single gloves, bits of broken costume jewellery, hair clips, sunglasses, dog leads…and I keep on collecting them. Often they’ve been placed on makeshift plinths (walls, hedges, groynes, bollards etc) like randomly curated art waiting to be found. This is a nearly new Wellington boot resting on the sea wall at Whitstable’s West Beach - I hope it found its other half.

The week before taking this photo we said a reluctant goodbye to Alice’s older ‘sister’, Bella. She’d was almost fourteen. I know this is a grand old age for a dog, but it didn’t make the parting any easier. We loved her and our hearts were broken.
Looking at this photo I can see melancholy in Alice’s sad eyes. Her heart was broken heart too.

Me and my dog Alice went to the beach one morning and found it entirely changed. The strong winds of Storm Eunice had shaped the shore into new contours, piling up shingle mountains against some groynes and sweeping the ground away from others. It had created deep hollows and revealed parts of the wooden sea defences that are usually hidden. The place we both knew so well was suddenly unfamiliar and unexplored. I found this ‘wooden window’ when I tumbled down the newly steep shingle and landed right beside it. Alice, full of curiosity is surveying the unexplored landscape beyond.

Taken on a walk from Whitstable West Beach to Seasalter, which I’d never done before as I usually head off in the other direction. It feels more elemental, less smoothed by the trappings of people and pubs and once again the 52 Frames challenge led me to be more curious.
I’ve noticed that the previous 52Frames prompt often unconsciously influences my take on the new challenge. So this week, I found an unexplored beach to look for my rule of thirds shot. Last week, my take on ‘unexplored’ needed manipulation of depth of field. I love how the learnings from all prompts flow together and cumulate. PS - the vignette is too harsh and off the subject…I was tempted to tweak but want a true record of my 52 Frames year, so I’ll resist.

This is my husband looking into a circular mirror in our hallway. It was a last minute shot, taken after a carefully planned, first time use of black plexiglass to create a ‘product’ shot was a technical disaster. He was a reluctant model, so I made the photo very low key and I like the noir feel it creates. I also like the way the mosaic mirrored circle around the edge of the mirror creates the optical illusion that the man in the mirror is stepping out of it.

Yet another challenge that was way out of my comfort zone. I realised, through this exercise and after watching a brilliant Jonathan Critchley webinar, that I often work at the right side of the histogram, using high contrast and highish key. So to push myself, I went right to the other side with this low key, low contrast shot of a tree that stands where the grassy slopes meet the pebbly beach in Tankerton.
I wanted a gothic, abstract result so kept the light source - the weak, low sun - behind the tree.

A metal detectorist on the beach close to my home. I thought about asking if I could take some shots close up, but he seemed so engrossed that I didn’t want to disturb him. In the end I decided I quite liked him being a small subject, surrounded by all that tide-washed beach, searching for buried treasure before the sea rushed in again. I also wanted some sense of the sea’s own constant activity, flowing in and out, shaping the shore and bringing with it all kinds of gifts - some entirely hidden, some just yesterday’s detritus and some, revealed for the first time in decades - or longer.

This is a 5-second exposure of my car dashboard, illuminated by the turquoise interior lights reflected in the windscreen, and the lights of a pedestrian crossing. I used Intentional Camera Movement to create the effect, which looks a bit like a chaotic digital meltdown to me - or being inside The Matrix.

I had a few ideas for this challenge. First, a portrait of my dad, who has 92 years of emotion etched on his leathery face - but he wasn’t feeling well, so I took lots of photos of my husband watching football, intending to process them as multiple exposures, but it turn out as I’d imagined. So I went for a walk and my mood was lifted by the sea - it’s smell, it’s sound, it’s moodiness, the feel of pebbles and shells under my feet. I took a few ICM photos to try to capture that emotional connection, which is expressed much better by Kate Chopin in The Awakening:-
“The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul … to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul.”

For me, the sea is nature at its most elemental. I love its colours, contradictions and ever changing moods - calm, wild, dangerous, playful. It sculpts and curates it’s landscape, which changes daily. It encapsulates permanence and impermanence at the same time, which I tried to capture by using ICM to make this photo of a high tide near Whitstable in Kent, just a few minutes walk from my house.

This close-up of my dog, Alice, doesn’t really look like her. She’s soft, gentle and always smiling, but here, even though I’ve softened the photo in post-processing, I can see the wolf in her. It’s fascinating what a change of perspective can reveal …

A serendipitous iPhone capture of the setting sun casting shadows from our window-shutters onto a blue lampshade. I quite like the atmosphere created by the light and shade - the shadows remind me of the scene in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet when Kyle McLaughlin hides in the wardrobe and peers out through its shadowy, shuttered doors.

This is a jetty on Tankerton Beach in Whitstable. Its a composite of two images taken at different times of day. I had no idea I’d get the arrow effect, which I love, particularly with the green algae at the tip. This place often looks misty and ethereal when there’s a bit of a sea fret and also at dawn and dusk, and that’s what I tried to capture - along with pull of the sea, drawing us towards it.

This is is quite an oblique take on the flat lay prompt, as it’s not been deliberately arranged. Its the top of a groyne on the beach at Whitstable, and the beautiful collection of pebbles, seaweed and tiny coastal flowers were deposited on their salty wooden plinth by the retreating tide.
I’ve been collecting groyne-tops for a while now, as part of a bigger project. I only ever shoot what’s there, curated by the tide, I never rearrange. This means that sometimes I find nothing for weeks on end, and some days I strike treasure. This day I was walking along the beach trying to figure out what to shoot for my flat lay, when I stumbled across this beauty. The sea never fails me.

I decided that rather than going for something iconic for the architecture prompt, I’d use an example of Whitstable’s coastal vernacular - which ranges from teeny tiny fishermen’s cottages to massive (and massively expensive) modern, minimalist, weatherboarded dream homes.
I chose an old ‘two up, two down’, built right at the beach edge, sitting at the end of a row of balconied Victorian terraces, looking straight out to the sea. The icon isn’t the house, but the person who lived in it for over 40 years, until his death in 1994 - the actor Peter Cushing. He’s famous for playing Van Helsing in Dracula, Dr Frankenstein, Sherlock Holmes, Dr Who … and Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars. He loved this house, but it looks shut up and neglected now, which is sad, and the reason I gave the photo a ‘roughed up’ feel.

This ICM was taken in a small copse near my house, tucked away between the high fence of a school playing field and the back of a cul de sac. In there, you feel like you’re in the middle of a cool, damp forest, even though its tiny - no more than a five minute walk in any direction. It’s quiet, apart from birds fluttering in the canopy and an occasional twig snapping. The gnarled trees are dense and curve around and over you. The ground smells so verdant it takes your breath away. It’s dark too, apart from glowing green pools of dappled sunlight that break through here and there. I’ve never seen anybody else here, which makes it feel private, secret - and just a little scary. Motion blur seemed the perfect way to capture the slightly disturbing feeling of being in there.

This is a detail from a palm tree in a neighbour’s garden - they’re often a feature of seaside homes. My inspiration is Jonathon Critchley, and more specifically his Sumi-E images, which are themselves inspired by photographer Don Hong-Oai and the Sumi-E style of Japanese ink brush painters. Though Critchley’s work is generally higher key, I’ve tried to keep the simplicity of line and some flowing movement. Taking it in my own direction, I’ve used double exposure to approximate the texture of brush strokes and create a denser, darker image, which is what I wanted, with the deeper strokes fading away into translucent.

This challenge made me realise that ‘everything in focus’ is a real stretch for me as I’m increasingly using motion blur and multiple exposures in my photography. Even when sharp focus is important, I play with depth of field. Luckily my groyne top photos are sharp (for now!), and this is one I collected after a high, stormy tide.

This is my greenhouse - ancient, chaotic, messy. I didn’t initially take this photo for 52Frames. It was only when I started processing that I realised what had drawn me to the ordered geometry that framed the disorder inside. Triangles. Lots of them! I’ve been seeing triangles everywhere, all week, so I’m tuned in to them! There’s the obvious triangles created by the greenhouse frame and my crop, but there are many others, created randomly by the juxtaposition of the bits and pieces inside. I even discovered two triangular shadows in the dappled sunlight.

This is a simple shot of cow parsley from above. I blended two separate edits together to achieve the abstract effect.

It’s organic and it’s not pink.
I edited the photo in Lightroom (I might have manipulated the colours a little…), and then for fun I ran it through a couple of other apps (Prisma and Formulas).
Do you know what it is?

I found myself looking for pattern everywhere including in my neighbours gardens - eventually I came across this baby Korean Spruce and was captivated by its architecture and its pattern - the striking bright blue cones, ringed with rust coloured spikes and surrounded by vibrant, zingy, lime green, young branches ( with their own beautiful pattern). This might be a common tree, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such blue, blue cones before - and I love the almost basket weave look to their pattern.

A solitary Herring Gull perched on the top of a telegraph pole, with a deep but hazy blue sky behind. I played around with Lightroom and Picsart to pull it back to just a dark outline, emphasising the geometry and negative space. Looking at it, I realise it would’ve been a better shot for ‘triangles’ than the one I submitted

I shot this statue against a naturally backlit window. I’ve blended two photographs taken at different times of the day to create a more ephemeral effect, like echoes of itself over time.

This is a very common household object in disguise. I took it with my iPhone because it was awkward to shoot with my big camera (there’s a hint!), and then played around with light, shadows and temperature. I blended two slightly different versions to get the glow. To me it looks like a strange diving helmet or space suit, or perhaps an alien in chain mail…but of course it’s just a …?

A bright yellow yarrow in the middle of a busy cottage garden., using a shallow depth of field to make the single focal point stand out. I was amused when I discovered that even it’s stem had disappeared into the background, so I have a floating flower, a little cloud of sunshine, or yet another ‘it could be an alien’ moment. It’s a little weird, but it’s growing on me (no pun intended)…

We used an online random colour picker for this challenge and I got May Green, which on my screen looked like a bright, almost lime colour. Luckily, that weekend was carnival time in Whitstable, so it wasn’t too hard to hunt down a giant green sea dragon strolling down my local high street…and here she is.

This is single shot image, taken at night, of the double gas ring on my hob. The kitchen was pitch black apart from the blue flame, and I used Intentional Camera Movement to pull out from it and arc away simultaneously.

I love that it looks like a strange spaceship, rocket trail or burner, as I wanted to make an image to represent the stratospheric increase in the cost of energy in the UK - along with an equally stratospheric increase in energy companies’ profits. It also make me think of how the use of fossil fuels is burning up the planet …

This composite image combines a photo of my hand with a shot of water droplets on the sun roof of my car. One photo was shot with my camera, one with my phone.
The hand reaching towards the unreachable water droplets reflects my anger at UK water companies who, despite imposing drought restrictions on millions of customers, waste over 3 billion litres of water every single day to leaks from ageing, poorly maintained infrastructure. The same companies are also discharging raw sewage into our rivers & seas, with the beautiful south coast seeing unprecedented sewage releases this summer, affecting wildlife and water users. All this is happening while company profits soar. Water is our life, but it’s slipping through our fingers. On a lighter note, a fellow framer said it reminded her of Psycho - and now I can’t unseen it.

The title comes from the Buddhist quote “it is better to travel well than arrive”.
This Buddha sits at the entrance to a ‘secret’ area of my garden, hidden away by gnarled, low hanging tamarisk branches and their pink blossom. Its secluded, silent and the ground is covered with deep layers of bark making it smell of the damp forest. It’s my peaceful place, somewhere I can meditate or ground my thoughts, slow down, settle anxieties, be quiet.
In the processing I wanted to create the impression of peacefulness and mindfulness - of somewhere that ‘takes the edge off’ - rather than submitting a straightforward photograph of the statue or our ‘zen garden’ (as we call it). Making the image oblique also preserves the privacy of the hidden space

An ICM shot of the beach huts on my local stretch of coast, edited by friend & fellow photographer, Federica Morgan. I love her treatment of my photo, but I didn’t really like the complete hands-off approach of the 52 Frames challenge. I would’ve preferred an active collaboration rather than a simple handover and so would she. Despite that, it was brilliant to have Federica at the helm. Thank you for generously giving your time and for making me a lovely image.

After over three months of wall to wall sunshine and almost daily amber and pink transitions from afternoon to evening, the drought ended and the rain poured. I’d planned to stake out a golden hour position overlooking the red rooves of Canterbury and it’s towering medieval cathedral, capturing them when they became infused with warmth as the sun dropped. Instead the clouds gathered and the cathedral became obscured and smudged by torrential rain. Typical! However, alls well that ends well, and I’m pleased with the effect of the rain, short depth of field and the gentlest touch of ICM - and it was shot at golden hour….

The extra challenge for this prompt was ‘cinematic’, so I employed lessons learned in the ‘single light source’ challenge and placed the board in a shadowy corner of the room and waited until a shaft of setting sunlight lit it up. I hoped the slatted shutter pattern and low key would creat a ‘film noir’ feel, which I think kind of worked.

These beauties were the last of the last tomato harvest from our greenhouse, and I wanted to celebrate them. We’ve had an abundance all through summer and this last jewel green (and barely orange) batch has now gone to a friend for chutney. I snapped these three in her house as the sunlight spilled through the kitchen window creating pools of light and shadow. Hard, shiny and a little opalescent nuggets of sea glass.

This is Oscar, one of the many lovely dogs we met on a short break to Frome. He made me smile when we first saw him in the window of a micro pub. I consciously aimed to place hishead in the ‘o’ so it looked like a framed portrait, but I didn’t realise until afterwards that the shop opposite, reflected in the window, was for a dog and cat charity! Later that night we popped in for a drink and met the lovely Oscar, a rescue dog himself. Its not a great quality snap, but it’s Oscar ❤️.

This is low key, sumi-e interpretation of a neighbour’s palm tree. I use a number of methods, including double exposure to try to replicate the ink brush strokes of Japanese sumi-e techniques. I’ve taken lots of photographs of this tree as I’m trying to get that calligraphic, brushstroke feel right. Its an occasional obsession!

I’ve isolated the rose from a bunch of mixed flowers on a busy table to make it the only detail still visible.

I tried to deliberately draw the eye to its tightly folded, detailed heart. I kept it dark, because I also wanted some mystery, with a softened focus (probably contradicting the prompt!). Lots of this weeks entries were close-ups, small details and patterns, abstract sections of a larger whole - normally that would be right up my street, but this time I wanted to see the small detail reflected in the whole, unfolding from it. I think the edit does draw the eye to the detail of the flower’s form, so it works for me. I hope it works for you too.

I thought a little ICM and multiple exposure would reflect the chaos I create in the kitchen when I cook. This is a particularly busy corner that I always mess up - full of spice jars, herbs and condiments (that should be tidily stored in their wooden box…), presided over by a just visible wooden fish on the wall. I do like the way the colours have turned out, with their autumnal tones, bright orange and contrasting greens. Out of chaos a little bit of order!

Armistice Day at 11.45. The poppy wreaths had been laid at the Cenotaph in Whitstable and the various veterans, regiments and local dignitaries had dispersed. I was on the beach with Alice when we heard a band playing and the Sea Scouts came marching out of town onto the beach for a group photograph. I love how the dog is looking at me, not the proper photographer…

This shot was bit of a placeholder as I had zero time to think about the week’s assignment, let alone do it. In the end I just shot what was in front of me, in the moment, the night before the deadline - which was the mix of spices I used in a Punjabi prawn and potato curry (which was delicious by the way!).

I do like the photograph, despite it being ‘grabbed’ at the last minute, which I suppose means that you can find that shot, or at least ‘a shot’ anywhere, at any time - and sometimes the pressure of having to capture something in the moment or not at all is a very good creative lesson/experience.

Wabi-Sabi. At its simplest, beauty in imperfection, transience, impermanence. I chose a simple response to a complex prompt. This is the door to our garage. Built in the 1930’s its not big enough to fit a modern car. It’s a bit dilapidated and it’s full of rubbish and broken stuff. The old door is falling apart. It doesn’t close properly and is missing a pane. The frame barely holds it in place and it all needs replacing. But this spring, as we stood at the kitchen window, we saw a robin fly through the opening created by the broken pane, then she flew out again, and then back. We soon realised there were two robins and they were building a nest inside. It’s winter now and as the rain blows through missing pane, our robin still sits in the hole, chirruping and hopping inside to escape from the weather. What we see as a broken pane in a broken door is the gateway to the robin’s des res, and we’re not disturbing it anytime soon. Wabi-Sabi.

When we moved into our home it needed renovation.
Emmie, the previous owner, had passed away at 97, having lived in the seaside bungalow for 60 years. As we peeled back, knocked down and built up we discovered her love of seahorses. There was a fabulous 1930s bathroom cabinet with a chrome seahorse on its door, which we kept, but the rest of her collection disappeared as we renovated - the seahorse stickers on old tiles, plastic seahorses in the kitchen, another on the bedroom window sill, and outside a seahorse in an oyster shell, cracked to pieces by the frost.
For each seahorse we peeled off, painted over or threw away we bought a new one.
My favourite, is a stone statue we placed in the garden, where Emmie used to sit in the sun watching the birds.

This image was definitely a placeholder. I’d been in bed with flu (proper flu!) for 3 days and counting and didn’t even have the energy to find a household object to shoot, but I didn’t want break my streak at Week 49, with the finish post in sight. Earlier in the week we’d been to the panto at The Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury and I tried to capture the shower of smoke bubbles that rained down on the audience at the end. I didn’t do a very good job (though it’s quite a good shot of the acoustic ceiling and lighting rig!). Thankfully it fits the ‘shot from below’ brief, so at least I had something to post …and in the end, I quite like the abstract feel.

This week’s challenge was to shoot as though we had a single roll of film - so using no more than 24 shots to capture our final image. The ‘extra’ challenge was to take just one single shot and use that. I rarely take more than a handful of shots of a subject, unless it’s ICM, which is can be a bit hit and miss, so I opted to limit myself to one capture of my bearded collie Alice, To be honest, the quality isn’t great as the lighting wasn’t quite right, and catching her in just one shot wasn’t easy - but that’s what I’d decided to do, so what I had was what I had! I decided to play to the low contrast and softer than intended focus by processing the image to look grainy and slightly glazed - and I like how it’s captured her thoughtfulness.

This was the Christmas week challenge, so I wanted to be seasonal. I’ve tried here to capture something of the grotto-like atmosphere we’ve created at home, filling the house with stars and light to celebrate the Winter Solstice. This composite image breaks composition rules by having more than multiple focal points and ignoring traditional framing guidelines such as the rule of thirds. I hope my use of ICM (the Extra Challenge this week), creates enough depth, movement and trails of colour to make the image work as an almost abstract.

The 52nd week of my first year of taking part in 52 Frames. This week we got the opportunity to redo an earlier challenge. I chose ‘emotion’, and even though this just a snap, its laden with emotion for me. My father passed away a few days before Christmas so it’s been a strange, sad time, and also one of remembering and reflection. I’m an only child, but dad called my old university friend, Julia, his ‘second daughter’. When me and my husband visited her over Christmas, in honour of Dad’s love of the Greek chanteuse Nana Mouskouri, she’d learned to play one of her songs, ‘Try to Remember’, on her piano.
Music stirs emotion like nothing else, and as it filled the room the moment felt peaceful, calm and full of love for dad.
I don’t care that the composition isn’t great and there is too much table in the foreground, I love this photo because it will always mark a memory for me