the easter egg edition meets Mr. Darcy #CountryKids #NationalTrust
Easter Saturday we decided to go out and hunt for eggs! The National Trust and Cadbury have been running the great easter egg trail throughout Easter and so we decided to hit one of these at one of our local National Trust properties. We went to the beautiful Lyme Park which is where the BBC filmed a large part of their classic version of Pride and Prejudice with a certain Mr. Darcy *cough*
It is a really beautiful house and there is lots to do for the kids without adding the extra excitement of a easter egg hunt. We set off on our hunt, the kids answering questions and running round to count things, look for flowers, get faces painted and draw their own version of easter egg heads!
We walked around the Lake, you know….that lake…from that scene *fans face* 😉
Im pretty sure just a few 100 yards down from him was the path on which we walked round the lake *sigh*
It has such beautiful gardens, we are planning on coming back in the summer so that we can see the benefit of the gardens without the snow!
heading off round the lake
 think this was the point that *he* threw himself in the water! 😉 the beautiful house
one happy hunter outside the orangery
This is the staircase that they were walking up in the first picture just the other way round….
After the house and gardens we headed over to the woodland play area. Which is massive with a big rope walk, slides and tunnels to crawl through. We finished it off with a little stroll through a woodland where one of my daughters discovered that putting your foot in the space between a flooded cattle grid is not a good idea! 😉
whats that about white balance? #mamarazzi #photography101
I went for a super 4oth birthday lunch a few weeks ago and I had a conversation with a friend about cameras, her camera in particular and she was saying how she was really frustrated with her pictures that she was taking when she was indoors. We talked around what settings she was using and what lens, then i said
‘have you tried changing your white balance?’ – and then a little lightbulb may have just gone on.
Its a very very simple thing and yet it can be so effective in changing the look of your image.
What is white balance?
It all boils down to the concept of colour temperature. Color temperature is a way of measuring the quality of a light source.
The unit for measuring this ratio is in degree Kelvin (K). A light with higher color temperature (i.e., larger Kelvin value) has “more” blue lights than a light with lower color temperature (i.e., smaller Kelvin value). Thus, a cooler (resp., warmer) light has a higher (resp., lower) color temperature. But we don’t need to get too in depth do we!!
This is a few screenshots of how you can change your white balance…
nikon display
Canon display
The symbols you can see are fairly self explanatory, shade, the little lightbulb for inside, sunshine etc etc. Its fairly easy to follow. You dont always need to swop the white balance though. Sometimes the auto white balance does a great job and others you might just want to have a play and see if it makes a difference to your shot. Here is an example of the same shot, in different white balance modes.
these two subtle difference between daylight and auto. The daylight setting adds more creamy, golden colours…
the other thing to remember is what WB works in what environment.
For example if you are in a really creamy, orangey environment like a pub or a restaurant with lots of artifical lighting then tungsten might be a good white balance to use.
But if you are outside, be careful as it will turn everything blue!! you can see here i have changed the WB to tungsten (thats the little bulb) on the top picture, it looks cold and not at all right.
But inside it can get rid of some of those really orange and yellow tones that can come from house lighting and also from large bits of dark wood that reflect the light coming into a room onto anything that you are shooting. Especially if you are struggling with getting the pictures to look half decent indoors sometimes adjusting the white balance might just help. T
These shots of the cakes, i changed the WB (you can do it in a post processing software like photoshop if you shoot in RAW) and i it has taken some of the creamy gold out of the shots,which is more true to the actual cake.
Of course you can always set your own white balance and that would be a custom white balance.
You can do this by telling your camera what white is. This is easy and don’t be put off by fancy white balance gizmos. All you need is a bit of white paper. Hold it in front of your camera and correctly expose for the shot, keeping your white bit of paper in the centre. Like this.. The little grid at the bottom of the screen with the +1/+2 on it your little marker needs to be in the middle.
then go to the custom white balance but of your menu and press set and it will probably ask you if you want it to use the data from this image for white balance, say YES!
It can make a real difference! look at these two!
Very important thing to remember is that if you are using custom white balance you have to re-set every time your lighting changes, make sense?
Go on, go and have a play with white balance and make sure you have stab at custom white balance and let me know how you get on!
#silentsunday
Unexpected countryside in the city #CountryKids
Sometimes you dont need to be hitting the country side to be enjoying a bit of the outside. Often, because we live in a city there can be some very unexpected places where you can connect with the outdoors!
I had to take one of my girls into the city for a piano exam the other week and as i was concerned that we had to park and get there we set off early and arrived about half an hour before her slot for her exam. Half and hour wait in the waiting room for a piano exam with two wriggly, lively and not asleep as planned, toddlers was not going to happen.
So we wondered further down the road to The Bluecoat chambers, which is an incredible building in the city, which i believe was an old school and is now home to uber trendy craft shops and a museum. We wondered in and used the ‘facilities’ and then went for a nose around their sensory garden area where they have some sweet little exhibits made by local school kids and habitats for insects. Flower beds and cute little baby saplings, no doubt planted to be the dominating great city trees of the future.
Was lovely to see this little garden in the city. It was a welcome distraction and took enough time that my stay in the waiting room with the little ones went quickly and without too much hassle.
She aced her exam as well!!
