Let the sun shine....or set

I always used to love drawing pictures of the Sun as a kid, you know, with the big rays coming out and filling the page? And colouring them in in vibrant reds, oranges and yellows. Although you don't tend to get the Sun actually looking like that, I still love the rays you see when you photograph the Sun in the sky and I never miss an opportunity to capture it. Here are some of the images I have taken (on the odd chance the Sun has come out to play in England this year!)

This was taken at Hampstead Heath on a very, very cold winters morning! I love how the light is reflecting off the dew and making it glisten. The Sun was so low and big in the sky and, maybe it's just me, but you can literally see the Sun is on fire. 

The rest of the photos were taken in my back garden. I love the variety I'm able to achieve without even having to leave the house, excellent! And thrown in a few sunsets for good measure too. Hope you like!

                                                       

                                                               

More Millie!

To those of you who follow the blog regularly I'd just like to say that you better get used to all the baby photos of my niece you are going to see over the next few years at least! Having said that, I have heard of this new craze where parents take a picture of their child every day to document their lives. I won't be that bad with Millie, but only because I am not lucky enough to see her every day! But this is going to be my own take on that project.

Here she is at 4 weeks.

This is Millie at 6 weeks old. So cute! And looks like she's already getting used to her aunty putting a camera in her face, definitely getting the hang of posing for me. A natural maybe? She has got long legs for a littl'un, could be a model in the making!

And Millie at 9 weeks at her 'Meet the Baby Party'. She had met most people already but we don't need much of an excuse to have a party in our family and I think she liked it too!

What a beaut!

No smoke without fire

I have a notebook at home that any idea, however weird or wonderful, goes in to. And 'smoke' has been written in my notebook for some time. So, with the weather as delightful as it is and preventing me from going out to take photos, I thought now was as good a time as any to do some smoke experiments.....

                                                                           

Not bad for a first attempt I don't think! I looked up a tutorial and got straight in to it. The tutorial said patience was key and I can vouch for that! However, I am pretty pleased with them. Of course, there is always room for improvement but smoke makes so many beautiful patterns and when you add colour to the images it brings those amazing shapes to life.

To achieve all of these photos I had the ISO set to 100 and used my flash gun, a home made reflector and snood. I found it really hard to focus because you have to use a manual focus and it's not easy in the dark! But I did it and had fun so I'll definitely be practising it more in the future.

Looks like I'll have a lot more of these to showcase seeing as this rain doesn't look like budging any time soon.