Afternoon Tea

Recently, I've developed what can only be called an obsession with tea from a real teapot, in a real tea cup, complete with saucer. Luckily I have just the set for this obsession. Seriously, how cute is this?

In other, photography related news, I'm desperate to learn more - while I'm relatively happy with my photos, I want to look at them & think, "yes, those are exactly how I want them to look". I mean, I've come a long way, particularly since getting my DSLR, but I feel I've come to a bit of a standstil. & I know it's more a matter of developing my own style, & actually using the camera more to its full potential. It's been a while since I've actually played around with the settings. There are things I need to do, such as, going out & taking photos for the sake of taking photos, reading through the field guide, experimenting. It's a matter of time, which I do have, but I tend to sit down & get distracted by other things (TV, blogging, reading, etc). & then doing more with the photos once I've taken them, instead of just sticking them on my laptop & leaving them there.

So, here goes.

I hope.

Kittens!

Andrea's friend, Deborah, is currently on caternity leave, having acquired these 2 little beasties, Amber (the silvery one) & Armstrong (the darker one) at the start of the week. While Armstrong was the more timid, Amber was into absolutely everything!

I want kittens again!

My best friend has the most gorgeous little girl, Ella - an absolute delight, with huge blue eyes, & an addictive giggle & amazing smile. She's incredibly photogenic, & was all too happy to let me shoot photos as long as she could wear Phil's helmet, play cars, or "bake a cake", which resulted in popcorn all over the kitchen floor! & you really can't beat that chocolate all arounf the mouth look that a kid can pull off so perfectly. We had so much fun!

Starting up

I've been meaning to get round to actually doing this, you know, this whole setting up a blog / website thing for my photography for ages. I feel it's necessary to have a little more about me somewhere (here?) about who I am, what I do, than the limited info in the side bar. So where better place than here?

I'm a 27 year old female, with a great love of photography. My love of photography, I have to admit, has come later in life. I can't claim to be one of these artsy people who've been clicking away on a camera since the dawn of time. In fact, before digital photography, I'd barely even held a camera. Sure, I'd owned basic little things & attempted to take photos, that ended up being completely out of focus, too dark, too light, obscured with my thumb. Basically, photos that came out looking like nothing I'd envisaged they would - a great source of disappointment.

I guess it was only when I got my first digital camera at the age of 21 (2002) that I began to catch the photography bug. Armed with my battery guzzler Olympus C-120, that cost me in the region of £200 (& that was with a 10% staff discount as well!), I began taking photos of everything & anything. I was completely click happy! Much as I can look back now & claim certainly wasn't the greatest camera, it did the trick for a few years, until I purchased myself a more sophisticated Fuji Finepix S5500 in early 2006.

This was when I really began to get it. There I was, playing around with aperture, shutter speeds, a proper zoom. Luckily I have a very photogenic cat who was happy to pose over & over again, & I began to see the improvement in my photos almost right away.

Naturally, like anything, I outgrew the camera & ached for a proper DSLR. I coveted a Canon 400D (which was a sore point in my household as my boyfriend bats for the dark side & is a Nikon guy through & through) after realising how much more scope an SLR would give me. My Fuji fell by the wayside when I could get my hands on Phil's Nikon D50, but I wanted my own, more specifically, my Canon. I would stand in Jessops for hours, drooling over the camera, getting to the point of getting my credit card out of my purse & staring at it longingly, wishing I didn't have quite so much of this thing called self restraint. I put in all the hours of overtime I could possibly manage at work, & finally held in my hands the £400 I needed to get myself a refurbished Canon 400D in Manchester, along with the 18-55mm kit lens & a 4GB memory card.

That was January 2008.

Since then, I've also accrued (in order) a Canon 100mm f2.8 macro lens, Canon 55-250mm IS lens & my personal favourite, a dinky (ok, not so) Canon 50mm f1.4 lens, which rarely comes off the front of my camera.

In the last 15 months, I can see my photos have improved in leaps & bounds - I'm proud of the photos I take, I see shots when I don't have my camera with me, I grab my camera & lens or 2 practically every time I head out for a walk. I read photography - books, forums, magazines. I spend hours looking through the photos I've taken, choosing the best ones.

So that's me. In a nutshell.