Blooms

France is awash with flowers at the moment, predominately roses and poppies, they're everywhere and they look amazing!  The roses in the pictures above are all in my mum's garden and the courtyard at the front of their house in France.  They smell amazing and are exactly what roses should be.

New Tricks

I've been continuing my quest to improve my photography this week, and chose the cat as my project.  Well I actually thought I would specifically focus on her paws but she seemed to get a kick out of having her photo taken so I took the opportunity to photograph her.  Please indulge me on my journey to crazy cat lady status and old age.

She's looking very dusty in these photos because she'd been out in the garden and loves to roll about in the dust when it's hot, trouble is she gathers up ants and other undesirable bits and bobs and then brings them into the house.  

These are a bit dark which is a shame, but I'm trying not to use a flash, practice makes perfect!

Still a lot of work to be done to improve my skills but I'm happy with the photographs I've been taking, setting projects seems to be pushing and challenging me.  What do you do to improve your photography?

New Tricks

I would love to be good at photography, I did a multitude of photography projects at university but my frustration with the ridiculously complicated and seemingly nonsensical settings ends with me reverting back to the default automatic settings and a 'I'll crop it later' attitude.  (Look I know most of you will think I'm being dumber than a rock here but I really struggle with the technicalities of taking a good quality photograph.  Give a blank canvas and some paint and I can rustle up a better than average painting, give me an embroidery ring and some thread and I can produce a pug embroidery with sparkly thread dentures, hell I have other talents!) 
 So to improve my skills I set myself a weekend project; to take a subject that was continually changing, and not to use any automatic settings or flash.  So here is the view from my bedroom, inspiring isn't it?

It was a struggle because I just don't retain this sort of knowledge but I started to get the hang of it having gone on something of a journey via the too bright:

Too dark:

All monitored by a watchful cat who just wanted me to naff off.

The learning continues...

Another photographer in the family?

At the weekend MozzyMr and I travelled up North to Lichfield to celebrate our Jim's birthday.  Everyone was there to celebrate including our lovely nieces.  Little big niece was sadly poorly and not on her usual good form, Little small niece was full of smiles and had lots of fun with my camera.  To begin with we had lots of photos with fingers over the lens but then she really got the hang of things.  Here are a selection of her photographs, I think you'll agree she's got some real potential I hope it is something she explores further (she's only 4!).

I love that she went off and took photos of the toys she loves, she also got the best portraits of the family including this one of MozzyMr.