End of another month.

Well here we are at the end of November where did the last 28 days go?  Christmas will have come and gone before we know it.

So images for this week's challenge....mmmmm..... using the moon as a light source, love doing this but failed miserably on this occasion.  Out Monday night, Tuesday night, cloudy and no sign of the moon Wed when I was around, out Thurs and Friday night .... week gone and so has the full moon!!!  Though all is not lost as Louise did manage to get a couple of great images which can be seen here  personally I have never managed to capture an image of the moon with any sort of surface texture - just a shiny blob!!  So well done Louise.  Roll on the next full moon and we shall revisit this one I think. 

Our challenge for this week is buildings, concentrating on composition and exposure.

It is also time for my monthly photo, one of my back yard and one of my cousin's in Adelaide.  We are taking 12 photos of the same images over the next 12 months.  Here is the first month from Adelaide and my first image .  Here are November's images.

                                          Adelaide

The grass is turning brown now and the water level dropping.

                                          Cornwall

The trees are looking so bare now and very wishy washy.

Water Play

The theme for  week two of the 52 photos was rain/water and although Cornwall had plenty of rain this week I didn't see any - having seen the devastation it has caused I'm glad I didn't.  So I had to settle for playing with water inside.  I had a white dish with water in it and poured some water from a jug into the dish whilst using the remote cable to fire the camera, then I used a small syringe to drop the water into the dish.  The difficult part was focusing the lens on the point where the water was going to drop!!  Anyway this is what I came up with.

Now if I want to be really picky these are not technically correct as the focus is soft but personally I really like it as to me it looks like a pearl on a bed of satin.  As I have mentioned before I am doing a course in photoshop (beginners) and have to confess to enjoying it.  So I had a very basic play with this image, this one is straight out of the camera nothing done to it.

 This is the same image, with just a true white picked out.

and the same image again with auto levels applied to it

The affects fascinate me.  Here is the second image I chose out of the ones I took.

SOC.

Auto levels applied.  Initially the first image was my favourite, but I think this one is taking over.  I really enjoyed taking these but soon realise that I need three pairs of hands to achieve the perfect image... so more play is needed I feel.

The theme for week three is Moonlight - that is using the moon as the only source of light - but if this is not possible then an image of the moon will do.  So true to form the moon is hiding behind clouds tonight!!  Still we have a week.

Catch up time.

Well what a week it has been.  The computer that I use for all my photos crashed last Sunday afternoon whilst downloading a windows update - turns out it was a bogus windows update.  We tried everything but to no avail so in the end a friend suggested I rang someone who has helped them out before.  I rang him Tues, he picked up the hard drive Wed as he said from my description he would have to wipe the whole thing clear and start again!!  (Sounds serious to me who knows nothing about PC's) and he returned it Thurs evening everything saved - thankgoodness and all for £35 so I am a very happy teddy, just re-installing all the programmes I had on there now.

So I have a pretty good excuse for not uploading last week's challenge images. If you remember we were going to do fireworks but failed miserably at that and changed it to autumn. So here are the finals images. Personally I think we did a very good job.

Here are Louise's




A friend at work had a go and managed to get a firework image, which she was happy for me to put on here to show.  I think it is one of the best I've seen.

Now on to week two.

Cupcakes .. mmmm

I asked one of our mums at work who is a wonderful cake maker to make me some christmas cupcakes and this is what she came up with.

My intention was to photograph them for Christmas cards - but the photos haven't turned out quite as I envisaged!! So we are eating them instead and they are gorgeous so all is not lost.

This should make you laugh, I ordered a new lens on Sunday and it still hasn't arrived, I rang up yesterday after work to ask where is it and was told you should of had it on Wed!  So he made a phone call and rung back and said it will be with you by 6pm tonight (last night) ...... nothing.  This morning Mick presents me with a parcel saying there you go, so really excited I rip it open to be faced with a bag of brown cement dye!!!!!!!    Still no lens and I so wanted to take it to St Ives with me today and to make it worse the company are not answering their phone now ...  grrrr .... but I'm cool about it .... NOT!

Firework photos anyone???

Well I dipped out on capturing any firework photos this year - still trying to convince my daughters that they do want to go outside with the sparklers just to keep their mum happy but they really aren't that keen, especially as it has turned a little bit chilly now!!
So today I took myself off to Respryn for a walk instead, it was beautiful with all the autumn colours and the sun shining, it felt more like spring than the start of winter.  Here are a few of photos that I took, I have put them together as a collage - guess what we learnt at college last week!!  Collages (plus other stuff) so I thought I would have a go at creating one, I've done it very quickly just to get it on here.  Impatient as ever.

Plus it also leads me on to tell you what has been happening this week.  Not  only have I posted the first  images for my monthly project  but I have also started another project/challenge.  Read on and I shall explain.  I really like the idea of a photo a day project but know that I would fail within the first few days purely due to work and family committments, so I have settled for a photo a week and to keep me on track my friend Louise, who does some wonderful scrapbooking layouts - a real inspiration and can be found here http://www.scrapbook-me.blogspot.com/    has agreed to join me and each week we will link our photos together to show.  The plan is to set ourselves a theme each week and try to stick to it - famous last words eh!!  We were going to start with fireworks but we both failed to take any pictures - so we have now chosen 'autumn' - which I know we will both achieve.  The main aim of this project is to ensure we use the camera a couple of times a week as the weeks just fly by and it can end up not being used for months.   So watch this space!!

Monthly photo

Following on from my last post re my monthly photo project here is the image from Australia.  This is an image of the wetlands which are close to where my cousin lives in Adelaide.  Oh to have that on your doorstep ......