In a vegetarian cookbook you might expect lots of pictures of the author doing his or her thing in the kitchen, or arial photographs of nicely arranged plates of food. Not here, but. I have put some pictures of vegetables on the recipe index pages and who knows, I might get round to sticking up some pics of 'Ashy in the kitchen', but not too many and I definitely won't be getting heavily into the food arranging bit. I knew a woman once who took pictures for cookbooks and she told me that she used to paint the peas green and use wax and glue and stuff to hold everything together. Sometimes she even varnished fruit.

Up to the end of 2002 I was using a Minolta Riva snap camera that I had for seven years until it broke. It was an excellent travel camera. Quite a few of the pictures I put in the galleries on the right were taken with it. I had to be selective though as it cost me a fortune to get them scanned. In the spring of 2003 I bought my first digital camera, a Jessop's FashionCam FC130. The resolution wasn't that great but it was simple to use and easy to get the photos onto the site.

The FC130 for all its charm, had one major weak point. The memory cards tended to forget things rather quickly when they were treated at all roughly. After losing the second load of photos in India in 2005, I decided to rely on the FC130 no more as a travel camera and invested in a Canon Powershot A250. I took the first pictures with it in Baravoe, north Kazakhstan and I immediately noticed an improvement in quality. In late 2008 I left my Powershot on a train in Berlin.... but it had been such a good camera, I went out and bought another. Now I'm using the Powershot A590 IS (with image stabilisation - I think that means you can still take good pictures when you're drunk).

If you would like to use any of my photos but need samples with a higher resolution than those on the site, please email me with a request.

I've also got a video clip page you can check out.

© Ashy Macbean

Mountains

Trees

Sunsets

Flowers

Towns and villages

Boats

Fantasy Photos

Desktop wallpapers