Life Inside the Doll House

Happy new year! I was so excited to get hold of a simple studio set up with my Christmas money this year. Today I got it out for my first attempt with the family. I suspect that there will be a bit of a learning curve with studio lighting and backdrops and the circumstances were not ideal tonight. No one was really in the mood and I had to grab my husband and Roo from other things that they were busy doing (exercising and Minecraft playing). The backdrop and clothing obviously could have been improved upon. There were some overhead lights that were throwing a shadow down their faces in some pictures. I wonder how my flash will help with that. I am still unsure about the editing, but I am just going to have to roll with the uncertainty right now. This one was my favourite but Roo's sparkler had gone out. I was however able to put ignite it again through the magic that is Photoshop.   All in all, I am happy that it is a good step in the right di...

Rexy got some new jammies for Christmas and I could just squeal at how cute he looks in them. And then when we were done, he wanted to take some photos of me. I reluctantly handed over the camera and let him take some shots of me and Bear. They were a little out of focus but I firmly believe that a bad photo of a mother with her kids is better than no photo. So I planned to keep them but not give them too much attention. In the end I chose to throw a lazy vintage preset on it - and I love the results. I am going to do this more often!

Okay so I am having a lot of difficulty finding my identity in editing and it is frustrating me like crazy. I am no longer satisfied with the basic clean edits that I used to do and have developed a strong preference for the matte look that is so popular right now. My two concerns about that are that this look will not age well and I will regret editing all my photos that way and... I don't even know how to achieve it all by myself anyway. I have been using a Lightroom preset and then toning it down a little here and there. Because it is not really my own work, I feel like I am cheating. My plan is to learn from the preset and then have the skills to create my own look from there. It appears to have a lot to do with split toning, which is a section of Lightroom that I had chosen to skip over before. Mostly because I don't understand it. I struggle to keep skin tones looking natural whilst using split tones. Day 19 Day 20

We are now in the depths of Christmas week. It has been wonderful to unwind a bit from the stresses of our usual lives and we are loving having Granny B over to visit. It is always a massively intense time of year for my photography. Mostly this is because I have more time to take photos but there are usually a couple of new photography books to get me thinking. Overall I fear that I end up with a bad case of quantity over quality. I can drive myself absolutely batty trying to decide how to edit photos. I think that they look okay but then don't like the edit the next day. As always, white balance is my biggest source of confusion but I am not always so sure about exposure either. It is mind boggling! Day 16 - Christmas Day Day 17 - Boxing Day. Of course it doesn't help that we are actually having Christmas on a building site! Day 18 - Time to blow some cobwebs away.  And have some precious family time.  I am very excited to hav...

To flash or not to flash; that is the question. I have been toying around more and more with my pop up flash and becoming very frustrated by the results. I need an off camera flash. I gather that there is lots of learning and trial and error once you get one, but I have had enough of taking photos in the dark. It is Christmas Eve here and the kids are very excited. Photos from nights like this are the stuff memories are made of and I always feel under a little extra pressure to get something good. I am not sure that I got what I hoped for.

This week has been a whirlwind of Christmas and our 10 year wedding anniversary. My husband and I got married in New York 10 years ago this year. It was an amazing time and it would have been wonderful to have returned to NY to celebrate. There is no way that we could have afforded it this year though and we wouldn't want to leave the kids for that long anyway. So we asked Granny L to watch the kids for the night while we had a couple of days in London.  Day 12 - I can't believe that I have been married to this gorgeous man for 10 years. It is fair to say that food was a massive feature of our anniversary.  Day 13: Back home again, tired and starting to get into the Christmas spirit. I took a million pictures of the tree practicing with different apertures trying to get star burst lights on the tree. I couldn't get it to work so I just went for an out of focus shot. They can be fun too... Day 14.

First of all can I just say that I am loving the light in our new kitchen. Even though it is no way near finished, it is exciting to have a new space to take photos in. We are having a very relaxed pre-Christmas day today and it is such a relief not to be rushing around for a change. Poor Rexy has been very ill with a vomiting bug, so he is forced to lay low for a while. Roo is currently enjoying a range of puzzles and is delighted with his new found ability to solve the Rubik's cube. I used my 50mm for these pictures and I have to say that I am becoming less and less inclined to use it these days. I love it's wide open aperture but I it so hard to get pin sharp photos even at f/2.8. I would be very tempted to upgrade to the newer version of this lens. I also find it painfully slow when I am trying to catch the kids in motion.  One of my favourite photos in this series suffered badly from camera shake. So I thought i might be a good opportunity to run...

Poor Bear has been begging for days to make some cut out biscuits. She has a favourite recipe from an old Peppa Pig magazine and she calls them her "Peppa biscuits". I finally got the cookie cutters out tonight and let her work her magic. It was the same old story with poor light, but at least there is hope ahead as our new kitchen will have so much more natural light. These were taken after sunset but they are much better than I could have achieved in the old kitchen. A few umbrella lights and perhaps an off camera flash and I will be in a whole new ball game.