Yes, I have been taking pictures in the snow, just like everyone else.

I’m doing a meme on one of my blogs. People ask for pcitures of some part of my daily life, I take the pictures and I post ’em. My friend Ara asked for “Some part of the cooking process”. So here is the first part of what eventually became the sauce I put on my past this evening. Mushrooms, onions, garlic and some sweet peppers sweating a bit before I added chicken, chorizo, and a red pepper sauce to them. Tasty!

Hardly a work of great genius, but I like this one – a quick snap taken during a very thick fog one morning the other week. There’s something pleasingly Stygian about it.

I love getting shots of London like this one – limited colour palette, heavy shadow/silhouette and so on. Shots that make the place look just a little unreal, a little magical. Because that’s exact what it feels like to wander about London – pure bloody magic.

An experiment in throwing the focus right out the window for effect. I’m honestly not sure about this one, but I thought it was worth putting on-line as an example of an experiment at any way – it’s not something I do a lot of, deliberately defocusing, and it’s something I might want to play with more in the future, given that a lot of my photography is (trying to be) about this sort of combination of light, impression and mood.

I really wanted a word for karmic escape velocity for this one, but my vocabulary fails me.

A fairground ride on Brighton Pier.

It’s a champagne cocktail. I really wish I’d taken a bit more time to get the focus right, because obviously the thing I wanted pin sharp was the little silver balls in the drink. Still, this was taken with a point and shoot that I haven’t even taken 150 shots with yet, so I think I can cut myself just a little slack on this occasion – this is still quite pretty, after all.

I hope this makes sense in relation to the previous shot – for me at least, the shift in focus alters the whole tone of the shot, and the figure in the background becomes a thing that provides atmosphere to the drink, without, I think, just making this shot a photo of a drink.

This may be one of my favourite portraits that I’ve ever taken. I have another shot that I’ll be putting on-line shortly where the foreground cocktail is the thing in focus, which I think works very nearly as well, but is a completely different sort of shot, in as much as I think that with this shot I’ve managed a portrait for once in my life that captures something flattering about the subject. OK, you couldn’t identify them if you didn’t know them, and possibly not even then, but fuck it, you can’t have everything.

I aten’t dead.

OK, this lacks an imaginative title, but I’m quite happy with this shot – I think I’ve made them look almost as good as they taste. They’re eggs, poached in red wine, in a red wine sauce, served on garlic-saturated fried bread, and served with mushrooms and shallots. The nicest starter I’ve had all year.

And I am becoming increasingly convinced that Flickr ought to offer a background colour switching option, because this photo looks much better on a dark background. Damn.