I have had a revelation today. I’ve discovered two things about myself and I’m not sure what sort of a person they make me.

Firstly, I have decided that despite being basically unfeeling, in other words not sentient beings, vegetables can be and often are extremely sexy. Take this red onion for example, I got it out of the fridge, peeled off the outer layers, in itself a sexy process and then discovered not one but two bulbs nestling together beneath the crinkly outer skin. Very sexy.

So I pulled them apart and used one while the other sat on the chopping board and looked, well, sexy. The plump-ness, the beautiful pink, the curves and sheen all come together to make this a feast for more than just the oral sense. It’s tactile, beautiful and delicious – it is only lacking in the smell part of the sensory spectrum, otherwise it’s a delight for all of the senses.

So, that’s one of my discoveries, though to be honest, I’ve suspected that one for some time!

The other is that I found myself defending “photographic standards”, which is something I’ve always been really sniffy about. You know the stuff, anyone who has done PAD for a while will be tempted into the wine glasses, (though not everyone will find their way as far as “inappropriate objects in a wine glass”), the coffee cup full of beans, the footprint in the sand, the shadows etc etc etc. maybe it’s because I tend, if I’m on pbase, to look at the meta gallery then choose a few pics from there to look at and so I get the “yawn factor” of having seen all of the above so many times that I’m sick to the back teeth of them. Sorry but that’s the way I feel.

That’s not to say I don’t do them myself – I’m pretty sure I’ve done all of the above except for the coffee cup full of beans. I have always thought though that the world has got enough of these shots really and if I do one, I recognise it’s for my own pleasure and probably adds to the displeasure of anyone in the meta gallery.

So, imagine my surprise when I found myself discussing coffee with DM earlier as he got the Gaggia out from the corner where it’s been languishing while we’ve had food piled up all over our kitchen counters while first-off getting rid of weevils and secondly turning a decidedly unsanitary larder into a clean and tidy one. I finished the painting in there a fortnight ago and have left it since with nothing in it so the paint on the shelves has had a good length of time to set properly. The food has all gone back into the larder today and DM decided that now we could access the coffee maker then he’d make coffee.

So, he looked for a pack of fresh coffee and found only a pack of beans which he complained to me about saying I must have made a mistake in picking up beans not ground coffee. I replied “I was going to use them to photograph, it wasn’t a mistake” and his reply was “don’t bother, the world really doesn’t need another coffee bean shot.”

Strangely, my response was “no, I know they’re a tired old cliché but they do sell”. We then got into a discussion about selling images like that and I recounted a tale of a chap who wanted to be my “friend” on one of the stock agencies I submit pics to. It later turned out that he didn’t really think I was someone for whom he wanted to link with creatively, he just wanted me to review his pics and to make his list of friends look longer.

Anyway, I have been following his progress compared to my own because we joined at the same time and at first he was roaring away from me in sales terms but most of his sales are of one picture….a coffee cup full of coffee beans! Now I’m telling you there are certainly hundreds and possibly thousands of coffee beans in a cup shots on stock agencies and yet his new shot still sells well. It’s a nice enough shot but not stunning if you know what I mean.

I have come to the conclusion that most people who use stock images don’t have enough imagination to think outside the cliché. I reckon that there are hundreds or thousands of people sitting in small ad agencies or in magazines or wherever all thinking “we’ve got a feature about coffee – OK a shot of coffee beans in a cup is what we need to go with that”. Basically that says to me that if you’re working to supply that market then it’s probably OK to reinvent some wheels, even though you may think they’ve been done to death already as long as you’ve done a good shot.

So, here is a red onion – a cliché shot if ever I saw one……but will it sell? Who knows, I’ll tell you later!

Last year? One of my best ever rants!