At the beach

After remarking one day that it would be nice if there was a beach I could easily get to after work, my friend said that actually there is one I could explore! Sure enough the beach was very nice with enormous sand dunes, though its perhaps on the side of the estuary more than by the open sea.

 Below is the view from the beach across the estuary. It's actually really nice being able to see mountains across the other side. There were a few warning signs about straying too far across the sand as the tide comes in very quickly, I think it's a bit like Morecambe bay but slightly smaller.

 My husband was having fun throwing himself down the sand dunes. I notices the sand made a cool splat when he landed. I put the camera on continuous shutter mode so that I could get lots of pictures of the splat. The wave shapes the sand makes are really interesting.

Sunset and HDR experimenting

It's finally felt something like Summer this week! I went out for an evening meander on our nearby hilly patch. I think I've previously put pictures I took here on my blog. I ws expecting there to be a nice sunset as it had been such a nice day, and there were some intresting ripples of cloud in there sky.

I wanted to take some pictures so I could try out a technique I've been learning about called HDR photography. You have to take a series of pictures with different lengthen exposures, so you have a dark picture, a medium picture and a light picture. You load the pictures into a computer programme and it combines them, using the different details picked up in the different pictures to create an enhanced image. The picture below is the middle one of the first set of three I combined, and the one below that is the final result!

The computer software I have used is a free trial, which is why it has writing on it, but it was still fun too play around with. I think I might have made the colours a bit too bright on this one it looks a bit too unrealistic! I like how orange the sky is though.

These two pictures show the before and after in my second attempt. I think because this one has such a bright light in the centre, the HDR technique has really helped to show off details in the darker areas of the picture that would have just looked shadowy otherwise.

Wedding!

I was lucky enough to be invited to another wedding this week. Here is a small selection of pictures that I took. I was able to get an aisle seat in the ceremony so I managed to take some nice pictures.

 These heart shaped biscuits were a noce afternoon snack after the ceremony.

For the cake they had 'cake pops'. A very tasty alternative!

The bride had created reems and reems of bunting, as well as loads of cushions from a mixture of exciting African fabrics.

The party was mainly a DJ, but one or two ceilidh songs were put on to get everybody dancing.

I read about a technique which can get some fun disco pictures. You have to use the flash, but with a long exposure, and after the flash has gone off wiggle the camera around. The subject appears to be frozen by the flash, but the bright lights on the background create some interesting lighting effects. 

Holiday fun in the Lake District and Wales

 One evening I went for a little walk from the campsite in Wales, as it was in such a scenic part of the mountains it seemed a shame not to. Here are some things I discovered! Above, a rather large hairy caterpiller!

 Below is a picture I took of a stream coming down from the mountains. I wanted to make the water look blurry and I think it turned out pretty well. I took quite a few pictures of different parts of the stream, but this is the one I think came out the best.

  At the end of my walk, I came across some sheep lurking in the long grass, the weren't too shy and I managed to get quite close to them.

At the end of our Welsh holiday we went for a bike ride in a forest at Llandegla. My husband likes trying all the big jumps, but, at the risk of sounding like my mother, I prefer taking the pictures! I had to play around quite a lot to get a picture where he didn't look blurry.

Lots of pretty flowers

I've been taking more pretty flower pictures out and about this week! Here are some of my favourites!

The Land of Magical reflections

On the way home from some adventure or other, we drove by this delightful little tarn. It was dead still and the reflections in the water were almost perfect! We stopped for a quick look at to take some pics. It was nice as I've driven past this little tarn on many occasions but have never stopped there before.

A walk in the woods and other local adventures

 The bank holiday weekend was pretty much a wash out. I spent a large amount of time inside, but on the Sunday afternoon things cheered up a little bit so I thought I'd go for a mini adventure. I went to the 'Swarthmoor Hall Woods', the secret little wooded area ten minutes walk away. I thought there'd be some nice bluebells and indeed there were along with some lovely fresh green leaves that looked almost too bright to be real!

 These lovely leaves were lurking in the hedgerows on my walk back from the woods. They looked like they'd been painted!

 Here is a rather interesting cloud pattern that we saw just arriving home from work the other day.