Vintage Beauty

What goes around ...

Family Sneek Peek

You Capture ~ "Summertime"

(do you see the hat?!)

This weeks theme at 'You Capture' is 'Summertime' 

But hey...I live in England..!

Summertime here is much the cherries on the tree :~ there one day ~ gone the next!

Only summer can come back again without warning and bowl you over with it's intensity!





April was a sizzler 

May was wet and chilly,

June was a cold, wet, wash out (although some parts of the country were scorching I believe)!

July has been pleasantly warm so far...

Summertime is all about being outside...

At least you'd think so, being as we get so little really GOOD summer!

But, given the chance, my children would only play out when there's a power-cut!!

(hot dog)

No really ~ I don't allow that! 
All the same, they do seem to prefer to kick about under my feet!

Still, whatever they choose to do ~ I like to get outside

(and shoot for my friends)! 

I hope you've enjoyed my shots of summer-so-far!

And to join in with You Capture head on over to Beth's ~ see you there!

Another Baby Shoot

It's been a while since I took photos of a baby other than my own, but some friends of mine had their baby (L) 9 weeks ago. I've been promising her some pictures, but for one reason and another, namely our busy lives, it hasn't happened until this week. I'm really pleased with what I got, taken that they live in a small flat and the light was OK but not amazing. If the weather were a little warmer right now I'd have probably headed outside, but it just wasn't warm enough. So I made do and improvised :-) I opened all her lounge blinds right to the top (although the hedge was not far from them outside, so still limited light) and re-arranged the room  to make the most of it. I used a big 'throw' slung over some chairs and the table as a clean backdrop and got down low! 


The next hurdle was little L, who had for whatever reason not had his morning nap and was a little on the tired side. Thankfully he is not a grizzly child and is easily entertained. He lasted about 40 minutes before he began to loose the plot, but played nicely all that time, he just looked a little droopy in one or two shots! :-)


Sadly Dad was out at work, but here's a little peek at what I took...

My Favourites...

and possibly the funniest..!

All you super-brilliant photographer friends of mine out there ~ what do you think? 

Can I do this? Constructive Criticism welcome :-) 

I was shooting with my 18-55mm Nikon kit lens (mainly because the room was so small) and trying to keep it around the 50mm mark, apart from the 'birds eye' shots I took. ISO 640 for the light and f/5.6 ish because it doesn't really go much lower when zoomed in this much. Speed was around 1/50 when facing, although at a few angles I was able to make it faster. I am thankful for good VR on the D5000! 

Would you shoot differently ~ what would you change? Can you see anything I've missed in the PP editing? Would you be pleased if this was a set done for you? 

My friends have seen the full set of pictures and they are thrilled ~ which is great, but it's good to know what a more critical eye can see!

Shooting For Others....

I've never really done a 'photo-shoot' for anyone before ~ not properly.

I've snapped away at family & friends at every given opportunity, but this was different...

These are friends of mine, but they wanted pictures for a purpose.

How did I do?

I'm not quite done with the editing yet ~ I want to try my hand at some head swapping in the group shots, but I need to take the pictures into PSE to do that and I just haven't yet.


My Friend has said she wants colour pictures, but I couldn't resist editing the odd one (or two) in BW also.
As well as the portrait-type shots, I also took some others. 

(these next few are hosted on Picasa, so the quality in-blog never looks as good as when linked to a Flickr image)

I hope they will be pleased.