Photo fun

Mary’s a great photographer.  Unlike me, the point-and-shoot queen, she composes, controls and most importantly, understands what she’s doing.  A few days of enforced residence meant that there was rather more opportunity to spend time exploring the possibilities than normal and Shimelle’s bonus “In Focus” pdfs arriving daily offered rather a lot of inspiration.

First, we played around with candy canes, in and out of focus.  With a manual camera, controlling the focus would be fine, but here we were with two automatics and getting a bit of blur wasn’t easy!

Next, we played around with bokeh.  Once again, this wasn’t easy to achieve on our super-clever cameras which kept on producing the pin sharp shots when we wanted otherwise.  Finally, I discovered a setting I’d not used before and bingo, I got some bokeh shots.

Whilst we were fiddling with our cameras, other members of the family kept their focus elsewhere.

As the days passed, nothing was left unrecorded.  The Christmas Eve breakfast croissants were used to explore the “sharp foreground-soft background” challenge

and I discovered the “food” setting on my camera!

I also discovered the limitations of a point and shoot when it comes to keeping lines straight and minimising the distortion.

When darkness fell, we went a little crazy.

Once the celebrations were over, a new challenge dawned: the choir’s Christmas concert CD cover.  The light outside was super and we were all in need of some fresh air.

We’d noticed how the colour red “pings” off the page in such light conditions, so set up a shot on the theme of “A Taste of Christmas” and three cameras began clicking.

Except that one of us was distracted by the wonderful frost patterns on the summerhouse windows.

This weather has been truly remarkable and now the thaw has begun, it’s hard to recall how very, very cold it was!

As we returned to the warmth indoors to review our work, there was one last chance to capture that strange and rather unusual snow texture.  Surely the Eskimos will have a particular word for it?

Of course, there’s no stopping us now.  Whilst we enjoyed tea with friends, we spotted coloured lights and couldn’t resist getting the cameras out and playing around a little more.

And just to prove I can bokeh, there it is again.

Except there remains one unresolved challenge. 

Brilliant idea

A pity it’s not mine!

Recently, I’ve been discovering all kinds of interesting and attractive “magazines” online and of course, it’s the season for a visual feast of ideas and inspiration.  One of my favourites is “Sweet Paul” magazine and today, I came across this brilliant idea for fun gift tags and immediately wanted to make some for myself.

I opened Picasa where I organise all my photo uploads and used the “people” feature to identify a sweet photograph of each person for whom I have a present this Christmas.  Some of them need more than one tag, of course.  For the children, I found pictures of them as babies and they can have the added challenge of identifying themselves.

Having selected the thumbnail mugshots, I exported them to a folder on my desktop and then printed them onto white card in grayscale directly from Windows because I found that printing through Picasa opened up the whole original photograph and not just the face.  Printing nine to a page meant that they fitted my tag punch perfectly.  I punched a hole in the top of each and they’re ready to go.

Thank you Sweet Paul, for a brilliant idea.  I think they will go down very well.

This and that

Quite a bit of activity here today

A few bits of family history ephemera have turned up, including Mark's Grandfather's marriage certificate and some newspaper clippings about his Great Grandfather's death.  Great Grandfather John was Mayor of Lincoln and the obituary makes for interesting reading.  So, a few more pieces to add to the family tree and as a result, a few more leads to follow - a useful and warm activity to do on a chilly February morning.

It might be freezing cold outside but the clear sunshine is making the colours of the tulips on the kitchen windowsill sing.  Glorious colour.

There's a heady scent coming from this little bunch of Cheerfulness too. I find it amazing that such a small flower can have such a powerful perfume.

This might not look much but it represents a first for me - my first go at making crumpets!  We've been on the natural starter sourdough bread road for quite some time now and really hate throwing away the excess starter that accumulates over a couple of weeks in the fridge.  Thanks to Clotilde of Chocolate and Zucchini, we now know what we can make with it and though these first attempts don't look particularly pretty, they taste authentic enough. Practice needed!

Last but not least, thanks to Sue who shared a link to the 7day shop I've now got my pile of brightly coloured USB sticks, ready for filling with holiday pictures and memories of lovely days in exciting places.  That's the job for this afternoon!

Running away

On the way home from the office yesterday, I stopped at the supermarket, to pick up one or two things like milk, cardomom pods and some washing up liquid.  Oh, and a couple of sweaters. 

As you do. 

At the same time, I thought I'd look for a small memory stick on which to store a few holiday photos.  I saw the idea in the current edition of Marie-Claire Idees and as I have - ahem - a "few" holiday photos here and there (we actually have getting on for 20,000 on our online album), this idea hit the spot.

At the moment, I copy bundles of photos onto a CD-rom, having downloaded them from camera to computer, backing them up on an external hard drive.  The "everyday" photos tend to remain there on the external disk though I try to put each set of holiday photos on a CD, all together.  I used to create pretty labels for each CD but these days seem to grab a felt tip pen and scribble on the disk before putting it away. I quite liked the idea of having a memory stick for each trip, tied with a label and stored in a basket which might catch my attention now and again.  who knows, I might even look at some of them!

I thought - wrongly - that I'd be able to pick up half a dozen cheap and colourful 1Gb memory sticks and begin the process of copying photos, but as I stood there in front of a large selection of the things, I realised that things move on.  However much of a gadget girl I am, I accepted that on this occasion, I was a bit behind the times.

 

I can't remember when I last bought a memory stick - in fact, it could be that I never have.  I seem to acquire them here and there, mostly from work-related activities and though I have quite a collection of them, I don't really feel I can use any of them for my own personal stuff.  After all, I can still remember the embarrassed look on a presenter's face when she inadvertently showed the whole audience her holiday snaps taken on the beach instead of the intended powerpoint presentation!

The choice on the supermarket shelf was extraordinary considering this was a pretty average store and not a specialist computer place.  Here, the smallest memory sticks were 2Gb, priced at around the £7 mark.  4Gb seemed to cost not that much more - £9 or £10 say.  Then of course, the 8Gb were not that much more again.  I hovered for a while, mulling over whether to see what was available online and then I saw it.

Or rather, I saw an enormous box with hardly anything inside, but that little tiny thing was a jolly colour.  Yes, you see what captures my attention...

I wanted it. 

Yes, of course I bought it!

Those two square centimetres of purple plastic contain 8Gb of storage and though it wasn't quite what I was intending to buy, I could think of plenty of uses for it.  Above all, I couldn't wait to try it when I got home, for I couldn't quite believe that it would slot into a USB port as claimed.

That's when I realised that technology is moving ahead faster than I realise.  For this little bit of plastic doesn't just provide me with storage for my photos, a few tracks of music and a bit of entertainment to take on holiday with us. When I plugged it in, it opens up all kinds of possiblities because it comes with some software for saving passwords and doing other clever things.  For the first time in a while, I am a little bewildered by something new.  I find myself looking at the incredibly long list of options and so, for the time being, I'm sitting looking at it, wondering how to set it up and how it could change the way I work on baby laptop when we're away from home.  I'll admit to a slight (and surely passing) urge to stay the same, to reject the bewildering range of choices, to run away from something new. What's more, I know that before I turn around, these too will be old hat...

I very nearly said "Whatever will they think of next?"

But I didn't! 

fiddling about

Together with a bunch of friends, I signed up for an online class about manipulating photographs.  As a result I'm spending more time than normal sitting here at my computer, fiddling about with Photoshop with mixed success.

The first exercise was about cleaning up "noise" on a photo and the sample photograph provided was of a bird.  As those who know me well, that was not a good image for me, who has a real "thing" about (your, not mine) feathered friends.  So, I trawled through my images and, with difficulty, found a noisy photograph taken in poor light which I thought could do with cleaning up.

Having followed the steps through using the bird image, I applied the same process to the poinsettia image above.  I resampled the image, worked on the channels using the smart blur too, merged layers which had been blurred using the Gaussian Blur tool and used the healing tool to get rid of the little white dots in there.  Along the way, I found myself struggling to use the recommended methods rather than those I normally use (eg making use of the healing tool rather than the clone stamp) but with a final sweep of the High Pass filter I was done.

The funny thing is, with the exception of the little white dots, I'm not sure that the process has been altogether successful.  Here's the "before and after" for a closer comparison

Your verdict?