What’s on your worktop Wednesday?

Not exactly on my worktop, but was yesterday!  These are the final pages for my ‘Home’ album.  This particular page I had actually made a good while ago.  It is based on a page from Shimelle’s ‘No place like Home’ class, which was what inspired me to do this album.  I hadn’t done any journaling on this DLO until yesterday.  I had a sudden burst of inspiration and decided to journal about the Quirks of this House!

1. we have 2 front doors (can be seen in this photo of DH and the dog).  They lead into a shallow porch from which there is just 1 door into the hall.  We often get junk mail delivered through both letterboxes, delivery people think we are flats.
2. Our doorbell goes off in thunderstorms!  I guess it must be something to do with static electricity as it is battery operated.  It’s a musical doorbell that plays several tunes.  Merlin (the dog) loves to ‘sing’ along to the tunes!
3. There is a crack in the bathroom wall that won’t go away!  As soon as DH fills it – it reappears.  It doesn’t appear to get any worse though, maybe just a little expand and contract with the weather.
4. The weird shape of all the rooms.  Who designed this house?  It’s an L shape with the hall across the inner corner.  When I tried to draw out the floor plan for this album I really couldn’t do it without standing in each room.  But… that’s what gives it so much character!
5. The lamp on the newel post on the stairs.  Funnily enough it was exactly the same as on DH’s Dad had!  It’s all wired in to the light switch.  Who thought of that?
6. Whenever I am cooking something with a strong smell, you can smell it hours later upstairs!  There must be a waft of air up the stairs.  I wonder what drives that?

And here’s the final page of the album.  I pulled out all the photos in #cold storage’ that I hadn’t used and used my square punch on them!  I love pages like this, they look stunning and come together really quickly.

 

Don’t forget to check out other people’s WOYWW? at Julia’s blog.

Top tips for photographing the garden

I have been trawling through the thousands of digital photos I have on my computer, purging, tagging, and rating them, all because of Stacey Julian’s new class Finding Photo Freedom.  I have come across nearly 2,000 of the garden!  Looking through them all in one go is a really good way of seeing what works and what doesn’t!

So here’s my top tips:

Wait until the sun comes out. 

Photos really do look better with sunlight!  This yellow iris was just catching a few rays of sunshine when I noticed it – it was like a spotlight on it!

Get close in.

I am lucky enough to have a macro lens, and love nothing better than to get really close up to my flowers!  Here’s a perennial geranium ‘Johnson’s Blue’.

Get the focus right.

Sometimes when I try to take a macro shot I get the wrong bit in focus! I like to have a narrow depth of field, but sometimes it can be too narrow! Many flowers are actually quite deep, for example I always have trouble photographing daffodils.

 

This problem can be alleviated by using a smaller aperture (larger f no) thus creating a larger depth of field.  You can see here how the middle daisy flower is in focus but the 2 flowers nearer the camera are blurry.  I love this photo like this but it would have worked perfectly well with any of the individual flowers in focus. But arguably not as stunning with all three flowers in focus!

 

Don’t forget to look up:

And down:

Look for patterns:

Here’s my garden bench taken from an unusual angle!

It’s not just flowers that make stunning shots

Try seed heads too, especially in the winter:

Black and white can work well with architectural plants, like this palm:

Look for different textures:

Finally, break the rules and have fun!

Beach huts

I’ve been asked a question about beach huts.  What are they used for?  It’s an English obsession!  I guess beach huts do exist in other parts of the world, but I bet they started out here!  The beach hut started out as a ‘bathing machine’, a kind of beach hut on wheels, in which the bather would change into a swimming costume and then a horse would draw the machine delivering the bather straight into the sea! Have a look at this page for more information.

 

Since WW2, the humble beach hut has become very popular.  They exist all round the UK’s beaches.  The hut is used for storing all the accoutrements one might require for a day on the beach. On bright summer days you can see occupants sitting outside their huts, doors flung open, sitting on deck chairs at collapsible tables, partaking in a cup of tea brewed on a little stove, maybe cooking on a portable barbeque.  Some beach huts are quite works of art inside, in fact, there are some artists who exhibit in some stone built huts over in east Worthing. They are locked up at night so people leave their things in them permanently.  You can either buy one or rent one, these days for the price we paid for our first house!

Here’s my friends Pam and Lorraine sitting outside Pam’s beach hut last summer.  Pam cooked us a lovely lunch of soup and bread bought along to the beach and heated through on her portable stove.  As you can see it was a bit breezy this particular day! We tried to put up an umbrella but it kept blowing over.  A great illustration of another British obsession, sitting on the beach pretending the weather is sunny when in reality it is wet and windy!

Our local council stipulates that the beach huts have to be white, although I have noticed that owners are beginning to paint the gables with colour.  But in other parts of the UK the huts themselves are colourful.

Here’s some favourite photos of beach huts that we have visited in other parts of the UK:

10 Scrapbook pages I want to create

1. BIL John’s Ferrari (360 Modena 3.5l, 0-62mph 4.5s) drive yesterday at Goodwood motor racing circuit.  He drove this rather gorgeous Ferrari for 3 laps round the circuit.  Great fun being petrolheads for the day!
2. Meeting up with old friends.  We were on the same NCT antenatal class 23 years ago!  Although we’ve kept in touch we haven’t ALL met up for quite a few years.  This was coffee at my house.
3. Aunty Margaret and Uncle David’s 50th wedding anniversary.  Stupidly we didn’t get a photo of them together at the party, so here’s one of me on the day they got married!
4. Long lost relations! Aunty Ann (in the middle) and cousins Joanne and Alison (both in red) I hadn’t seen for 20 years!
5. Maurice reading his Motorcycle News paper with these awful glasses on! He has bought some new ones now after much nagging!
6. Fun with self portraits and a very mad dog!
7. Staycation back in April/May.  Here’s Maurice at the Weald and Downland Open air museum at Singleton, West Sussex
8. Our recent weekend in Shropshire – visiting Ironbridge
9. Garden at the moment
10. Beach huts! I just love them!

And these are just the current pages I want to do! 

Right now….

I am sitting at the breakfast table on the lap top

I am about to go for a walk with the dog to the beach

I am writing 3 pages every day!

Then I am going to do my volunteering at Citizen’s Advice Bureau

The garden is looking really lovely!

I am sewing every day in June.

I am sorting, purging and star rating my digital photos!  Here’s a selection of some of the best (I have started with the BEACH tag, it’s shocking how many photos I have of the little bit of beach near here!):