Life Inside the Doll House

It was a beautiful frosty morning and Bear and I planned to get out to the park early to catch some  wintry shots to finish off the year. Of course we are still in our wonderful lazy Christmas mode so the frost was long gone by the time we got there. Never mind, I will catch it another day. I still managed to get some landscape pictures, which is unexplored territory for me.  It was still freezing, and Bear had purple hands in no time at all. In typical toddler fashion she was screaming with the misery of it, but refused to put on her warm coat or gloves. We had a nice doughnut and called it a day.  I finally found the time to photograph Chloe, my most wonderful Christmas gift.  I am not one for making new years resolutions but I like the idea of setting some photography related goals for 2015. I wanted the goals to be manageable and realistic, but it is hard to contain my ambition to get much better at photography. So I have prom...

Today's adventure was a trip to the Harry Potter Studio Tour and a meet up with Granny L and my brother in law's family. We have been on this tour before and loved it. If anything, today's return visit was even better. It makes us so happy to see all of the cousins together and getting on well.  The lighting was variable and extremely challenging. White balance was very hard to get right in the camera. I was also carrying a rather grumpy Bear a lot of the time. I was getting mighty frustrated with the low light, slow shutter speed and camera shake.  I have always found these busy fast paced family days out tricky to photograph.  Just look at Rexy's face! Then I remembered the progress I made with spot metering and decided to switch to that. From then on I started to have more photography fun and somehow Bear settled down a little. I'm still not clear about where to meter off of to get middle grey, so mostly I metered for...