The day pink died #motivational monday #springcarnival

One of my favourite books when i was growing up was The Lorax, used to love the line ‘I am the Lorax and i speak for the trees’ It was one of those books that i can still remember reading as a kid. Recently the kids got the DVD version of the film that came out last year. They totally love it., it has big numbers in it and some big hollywood names voicing the characters. But what i love is that the message is still the same. Unless. Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, its not – Dr. Seuss.

Now speaking of trees….As we live in a city sometimes trees can be a bit scarce. Well to be fair this city in itself isnt too bad. There are quite a lot of green areas. But in our own back yard its a bit different.

We don’t have a huge garden, when we moved in it had been fairly well landscaped with a family in mind and the only tree in the garden was a small, shocked, apple tree that had been hacked and trimmed within an inch of its life and its pretty much still trying to recover.

But the house that backed onto our neighbour was owned by an elderly lady and it had two beautiful, rambling and stunning pink blossom trees. Im sure there is a proper name for them but all i know that every spring we would all look forward to the bottom of the garden being accented with pink. The branches leaned over into our garden in such a generous way. Like the tree knew i would appreciate it. 🙂

I cannot count how many pictures i have of this tree. It was so pretty i used to go out and photograph it a lot….playing with settings, lenses and filters.

The girls would bounce up and down on the trampoline which was under the tree and grab the blooms, giggling and threading the pretty green leaves through their hair.

At the end of spring it would slowly loose all its blooms onto the tramp and the deck and we would have a pretty pink blanket.

Truly such a lovely tree, it bought us pleasure every year. We watched it, enjoyed it, interacted with it. It was part of our seasons.

Sadly the lady who lived in the house passed away and the house was sold and a few weeks ago we heard that high pitched squeal of a chainsaw and our beautiful neighbour tree was gone. 🙁

Just like that…

and being honest with you, and i do understand the reasons why the new owners have got rid of the tree, but i really miss it. Now its like looking at a picture and constantly wondering whats missing and then going ”oh yes…”

Even the kids have missed it. We miss our adopted pink tree. It had been largely uncared for by its owner but for years we loved it. It was part of our story and history in our garden.

thanks pink tree 🙂

Im going to finish with a clip from the movie, we all love this song. Watch out for  ‘you greedy dirtbag!’ My giveaway this week is a copy of  The Lorax on DVD. It really is a lovely family movie. So to be in with a chance head over to rafflecopter below and follow the instructions and be sure to check back next week to find out if its coming your way!!

Last weeks winner of the Captain Calamari developmental toy was Helen Dickenson Anette! Congratulations. Please get in touch to claim your prize 🙂

 

 

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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! 😉

 

 

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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!

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So what else do you do? #motivationalmonday

This week has been an all round rubbish week that has left me feeling like, out of all the ‘roles’ i have in my life, im seem to not be doing any of them well. *sigh*

This week I had an interview, it was at the place i work for a job that i had about 2 years ago and then lost through the delightful NHS cutbacks and is now being offered again…its a long story, a long, boring and miserable story that i won’t bore you with. But the interview was this week and it wasn’t the nicest experience ive ever had i have to say, runs up close to root canal or another such painful event.

My interview was delayed by over an hour and then during my presentation prep a fire alarm joined in and banged around in my head for half of the time. Nerves jangled somewhat i stumbled through a presentation based on a practically impossible scenario and then was asked a bunch of questions. A few of which i did sort of okay on i think and some i totally BOMBED. You know, in the, ‘shall i just get my coat’ bomb.

But there was one question that just irritated me….and continues to which is why im moaning about it here. I was asked what extra CPD (thats continuous professional development) i had done in the past two years. Extra, as in, extra to the standard stuff we have to do to maintain professional registration. I answered with a few things then she looked at me, i think with a little sneer (though i may have imagined that) and said ‘and what else have you done?’

hmmmmm…just let me think a bloody minute. I dont know…maybe..raise five kids, turn up for every single shift i’m supposed to regardless of sleepless nights, vomiting bugs, stressed out husbands, broken cars, car accidents or snow with a bloody smile on my face. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!

Of course i know she wasn’t asking me about what else i do outside of work. But it may be a mad crazy thought but your life outside of work can effect your ability to throw huge amounts of commitment and time at your work. Its a tricky balance for all us working mums i guess.

It was the only question that actually upset me, how funny is that. Even the ones that resulted in a ‘nothing happenin’ here’ look on my face as mortifying as that was..i can shake that off. But what pisses me off is that some people don’t realise that actually just showing up with your game face on takes all you have on some days and sometimes that is just all you can give.

I wanted to shout the above tirade in her face and see what happened but of course i didnt.

and i didnt get the job.

cherry on top  😉

So in a bid to lighten up this post and because what follows demonstrates a little bit of ‘what else i do’

Here come the girls ….two of my bunch. Just hanging out with the girls while we get frozen by the spring 😉

This is a little bit of what else I have done.

 

She is telling me in that bottom picture ‘ there are no monsters here mummy’ – just in case you were wondering!

My giveaway this week is another lovely sunshine box of goodies from LUSH. You don’t have to leave a comment this week if you don’t fancy it but if you do that would be nice. Remember to come back next week and check who snagged the prize!

Jane Greenfield you win the Rob Cowen signed book please get in touch! Congratulations!
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