daily shutter – Page 2

Sarah August 4, 2013

Where they are. right now. #motivationalmonday #themondayclub #whatsthestory

This months theme on motivational monday is children. Hey..guess what…

I have a few of those 😉

So i thought i would give a little run down of each of the little folk who dwell here in this dwelling.

So first up. My guy. My only one.

Yes..thats right he is the only boy..

yes he is surrounded by women, yes he has lots of sisters, no he isn’t henpecked…

blah blah blah…

you can tell i have heard those sort of comments LOTS before right?!

We all know a baby doesn’t come with a ‘tick the box’ option don’t we. *stares*

A-n-y-w-a-y (thats a whole other blog post) 😉

My pioneering child. Breaking all those first boundaries of parenthood. He is the one that we have had to scale that steep learning curve with and i reckon that fact that him and us are still all alive and vaguely sane is the sign of a success!

Yes?

Anyway our not so little boy is now staring down the barrels of 11.

Sweet. mary. jo.

We are so close to teenager it could spin my head clear off my shoulders!

But right now he is 10.

and right now he is:

Very very much into Minecraft, which is a game that i cannot understand the attraction in. He is asking me to download all sorts of guides to it on the Kindle and then spending hours working out how to make houses. The graphics remind me of something that was around in the days of the ZX-81 😉
Finished year 5 this year and waved goodbye to one of his favourite teachers. The teacher is leaving the school as well so there is no chance that my girls will have him which is a shame. We liked him a lot

He loves formula one. You could talk to him for ages about cars. He knows so much about cars, their makes, models and how fast they can go. Largely fuelled by his father’s interest in formula one and all things a bit petrol head ish.
He currently wants to work for Nintendo and has taken it quite personally that the Wii U has bombed slightly! 🙂
He is a great big brother to his sisters and is pretty balanced about being a big brother to a bunch of girls. He is especially close to our youngest girlie.
He loves movies, and scripts. He remembers dialogue and quotes it often! Currently we are all about dispicable me 2 and Monsters U.
He is after a phone…we are resisting..we might meet middle ground with some walkie talkies 😉
He still likes trains
He has no love for girlie pop groups such as one direction and the like. Usually a point of conflict in our house!!
He has never ever tasted tomato Ketchup, he used to tell people he was allergic to it. He now develops a big kinship with anyone who comes to our house who feels the same. 😉
He is a natural musician and plays by ear, which sometimes frustrates his music teacher. He isnt, however, a natural practicer (is that a word?) so we have to use increasingly inventive ways to get him to practice!
He can be a bit ‘chickin lickin’ Which we laugh about but we sometimes have to have very serious conversations about how the wind outside is not going to turn into a tornedo!
He is, to date, the only one of my children who has had to endure a general anesthestic. (thank God). He fell onto a coffee table when he was 2 and has to have surgery as it had gone across the line of his lip. He now has a cute Indiana Jones type scar.

He is also turning into a little bit of a photographer and this weekend asked me to help him take this sort of shot. I think he did a pretty good job.

c themondayclub Motivational Monday

Giveaway this month is for a fabulous luxury box of cosmetics from LUSH, that shop you can smell from all the way down the street. Just follow the rafflecopter instructions. Good LUCK

a Rafflecopter giveaway

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Sarah June 23, 2013

#365 #photooftheweek #silentsunday

TheBoyandMe's 365 Linky OneDad3Girls

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Sarah June 14, 2013

Lens love challenge #mamarazzi #photography101#CountryKids

I am very very lucky to have a few lenses which i really really love but i don’t use that often. I have my work horses that pretty much do just that, they are functional, do the job and i have three lenses which are never far from my camera bag. They are the 50mm 1.4 ( this is the mid-range) 24-105 f4.0 ( my go to studio lens and its pretty good for days out as it has a bit of a zoom) and the daddy 70-200mm F2.8 ( this is a killer lens in both quality and size) Out of the three it is the one i use least for personal use but when im shooting for a client..it is pretty much the front runner. every.single.time.

I know there will be people out there thinking ‘well why dont you use it for personal use if its that good?’

One reason…

well five..actually 😉

It is a very heavy and valuable lens and when we are on days out and have all the kids, their stuff, the packed lunch, the dog, uncle tom cobbly and all along with me..adding the stress of a large lens bouncing around on my hip and threatening to give a small toddler a head injury..its just not going to happen. You have to be sensible about lenses when you are talking capturing your own family memories. A large, monster of a lens that might be fabulous but gives you chronic back pain is going to be left at home in favour of your iphone.

Go..on..you know im right. 😉

Getting something that works for you is the key.

Anyway there is a point somewhere.

So one of my lenses that i am lucky enough to have on a borrow from my dad is the 15mm Fisheye.

It is beautiful even down to its perfectly styled non-plastic camera cap. Really..its metal. I dropped it on the floor at the Olympic games (the cap not the lens!!) and the lady in front thought id drop a flask or a mug of coffee! Its small but mighty and i love it. One of the things that i regularly do with the lenses that i dont use that often is challenge myself to only shoot with that lens for a day, a week or a couple of days…some time..so that i get used to using the lens and also a new way of looking at my composition and imagery.

This is SO worth doing. It really stretches you and takes you out of your comfort zone, you might even find that you fall in love with a new type of lens and way of shooting your subject. I know its more money and camera equipment is super expensive as it is BUT it will give you experience of getting an idea of just how different these lenses are and what they can do to an image. I get asked all the time..’So what is actually the difference between these lenses then?’ I went a bit more in depth about that here

Here is your chance to find out!

I know not everyone has access to more than one lens BUT there are companies that hire out these lenses for a few days and they are not that scary prices either. I would totally recommend shopping around and grabbing something that maybe you are toying with the idea of owning or maybe even you just want to see what they would be like for the hell of it.

Its playtime 🙂

Some companies worth thinking about are: lensesforhire lenspimp lensfettish

Thats just a few, there are loads out there!

So.. here is what i got up to. It was an awful day today and it rained…a lot..so we went for a quick bike ride and fed the ducks. The thing about the rain is it makes the greens take on an luminosity that is so attractive..which is probably the only good thing about rain…well you know apart from that we need water to live ‘n all 😉

This post is linking up with the Country Kids too…so welcome all linky followers!

Family Farm Holidays Cornwall

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Sarah May 31, 2013

France en Scouse. #Countrykids #Springcarnival

We have a beautiful beach about an hour from where we live and this week on half term we have had a *few* days of lovely sunny weather. But not too many. So we made the most of it. It is a really beautiful area and we walked to the beach through the woods which so reminded us of our holidays in France. Those lovely tall trees with dappled sunshine and sandy under foot. Made us hanker after a cheeky bottle of red, a freshly baked baguette and some smelly cheese.

There was a little bit of posing by a certain little girl who had just got herself some new gigs 🙂 I think these are the best yet!

Formby is the home to the endangered red squirrels, you can walk along a lovely boardwalk area and try to see some of them. We usually do get to see some of them, they are quite friendly although obviously you are encouraged not to feed them!! The beach is owned by the national trust so there are plenty of signposted areas with little bits of information about the squirrels and why they are endangered. We had a lovely walk through that part of the forest. Including finding the most bizarre looking tree stump that looks like it just came straight out of the water in a scene from Captain Hook!

We walked to the beach which is wide and sandy for the kids to have a play, inevitably we had a toddler faceplant in one of the pools of seawater but she was pretty game about it!.

Wet kids meant home time eventually, once we had climbed the dunes out of the beach and a stop off for some tea on the way home.

All in all pretty good!

Family Farm Holidays Cornwall

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Sarah May 24, 2013

The red rock walk #countrykids #springcarnival

last weekend we went off with some friends to find the red rock on Thurstaton common. It is always nice being being with another group, the kids keep each other entertained and they forget that they are actually walking! Also big bonus for us is that there are a couple of older girls who like to play big sister to our little ones, when sometimes their own sisters are not really that interested in watching out for them. There had been some concerns over whether the weather would be okay but we were blessed with blue skies and sunshine. Pretty good for a walk in the woods.

Putting the world to rights..or probably trying to talk her out of stripping off because she has got dirty knees

when we got to the rock it was time for a little challenge for the kids. One of the adults in the group had gone ahead and tied lots of small bits of wool to the trees and the kids had to go and find them. Bringing them back to the rock where the adults were waiting and gaining prizes for their team. It was a great way of wearing them out too!