Party!

So the party actually took place!

It was great fun and even my husband joined in dressing up as an elf.

The idea of the Fairy Quest was that Jack Frost had banished the fairies from fairyland and they now needed somewhere to live so all the party guests had to help build a house, furnish it with extras from a treasure hunt and dress up as special fairy helpers! It was a great success and all the girls had lots of fun.

Here are just a few photos of the day.

My fairy and elf helpers decorated the bushes in the driveway with the fairies we'd made before the party started.

We made a beautiful throne for the party girl but of course we all tried it out for size!

And then with the party in full swing we read the clues from the treasure hunt and got on with making some rather special fairy houses!

Thanks for all the support and encouragement in the run up to this event - it was so much fun.

Black and White

I took Hannah into the woods for a photo shoot, although she got bored quickly, she was very good at trying out different looks and poses.

This weeks task was post production, specifically trying out different techniques for converting to black and white. So two photos each converted to black and white firstly with the simple grayscale method and secondly by adding a levels and gradient map layer and making adjustments for each colour.

Grayscale method:

Layers method:

I much prefer the results of the second method because it gives more texture to the photos and allows me more control on how I want the shots to look.

London reflections

I had an amazing time in London taking lots of different shots and looking for reflections everywhere. I'm really pleased with the photos I got but the thing that really made my day was when Canary Wharf security stopped me and asked if I was professional - when I had stopped laughing, they seemed ok! (All photos straight from camera except for slight cropping and resizing)

Reflections of buildings:

I love the last of these best, although the edge near the trees is a bit dark, the colours of the water and sky are just great and I really like how the reflection came out.

Reflections of flowers:

No reflections but lots of peg fairies!

We've been making peg fairies today to decorate the bushes in the driveway so everyone knows where the party is. Well at least that's what we were doing until my new tripod arrived and then I just had to stop and take photo's!

Now on fully manual and loving it (well have left lens on Auto Focus, it would be rude not to!). I'm really pleased that I seem to be learning much more about the camera settings. Thanks CJ.

On reflection

This week's task is to consider reflections. Well I had lots of good ideas but poor weather and for some reason I completely lost the plot on the camera settings. so these are as good as I could do at the time. The good news is that I'm planning a trip to London on Friday as a sort of photo shoot so hopefully I'll do better then!

The cake!

Ok so it's just a practise run for the cake as the party is still some way off. I'm really pleased with the cake and delighted with the photo as it's the first on fully manual and I got on well with the control it gave me especially given the poor daylight today!

Both photo's straight from the camera except for the border I added and an attempt at feathering the edges! Camera setting for both: f/8 1/20 sec ISO 400

My fairies

Ok so this week we are looking at depth of field and the idea of setting up a shot with foreground, main focus and background. I took my girls out into the garden as fairies and got them to pose amongst the flowers. The plan was to try out aperture priority and shutter priority and I found I had two big problems (in addition to the weather); in aperture priority I can get exactly the depth of field I want but the photos came out too dark, in shutter priority I could get over the exposure issue by slowing down the shutter speed but the girls couldn't stay still for long enough! Anyway these are the best ones.

Fairies in the garden

I had great fun taking lots of photos for each shot each time checking the histogram and changing ISO and shutter speed.

Fairy party stash

OK so I make mistakes!

We're looking at exposure and how to use histograms as a tool to help improve things. Well I was playing around and made a big mistake in over exposing this photo but it was so over done I thought it looked quite cool in different colours!
I have to make the best of a bad thing, it may be all I get!

Inspiration

All things fairy party!

A theme

CJ’s asked us to pick a theme to base the photos on.

Having played with the idea of ‘Summer’, I’ve decided to go with the preparations for my daughter’s 5th birthday party.

So watch out for lots of pink and fairy dust as we go on our ‘Fairy Quest’ Adventure!

A first!

I did Cheryl Johnson’s Painting with Light online photography course and loved it.
That was the first time I really got into the whole forum thing and now I’m back with the Masterclass and this is my first time with the whole blog thing.

But hey trying new things is good right?