Christmas is over.....

...and we all seem to have/have had colds.  I currently have a very sore throat but it doesn't seem to stop me eating chocolate or drinking wine !

The snow has all but gone now, we have had a big thaw and everywhere is slushy and wet.  So I am glad I got out when I did to take the snowy, frosty photos.

My 365 project is almost complete now too - only 1 more day to go. It has taken a lot of discipline to make sure I take a photo each day, and some of the photos are a bit....erm.... random!  But at least I have (nearly) completed the project.  I do hope I remember to take tomorrow's photo !

Today, for the project, I photographed a tulip from a bunch I have in the house at the moment.  I have said before that flower photography is my favourite type of photography to do, and I did enjoy myself for half an hour or so today while shooting it. 

This is one of my favourites.  I started off using a black card for the background, but there wasn't really enough light to shoot hand-held using natural light, even though I was shooting in the morning.  So, rather than get the tripod out or bump the ISO up really high, I used a lighter coloured background card, which I had forgotten I had, to bounce some of the window light back.  It also fitted in beautifully with trying to shoot flowers against a similar coloured background, as I have mentioned before. 

Hope you all had a lovely, relaxing and peaceful Christmas time - see you in the New Year

Sx

Busy, busy, busy

Hi

Not had much time to get anything done recently really.  Just busy generally.  Think it must be "that" time of year, not that I've done much preparation for Christmas yet.  My older son was 16 the other week, and that signals the start of a long line of family and friend birthdays which carries on to February.  And of course Christmas is in there too.  And there's school exams to get the kids ready for, the cold weather and darker evenings to deal with, general coughs and colds and sniffles to sort out... 

So today, while I was at Tesco, I treated myself to a cheap bunch of flowers, to try and lift the mood a bit.  Lovely, white chrysanthemums.  Plain and simple in their beauty.  Now, as a child, I never particularly cared for chrysanths, even though my Nanna used to grow and show them, but now I adore their simple daisy-like form. 

When photographing flowers, I used always to put them against a contrasting background, but I was flipping through a flower photography book some time ago, and the photographer used backgrounds almost identical in colour to the flower, and I adored the effect.  This is something which I now try and do, the effect is so relaxing to the eye.

In this one I tried lighting the white background to enhance the whiteness, but the effect was too "glary", so I reverted to natural light for the whole image.  I rather like it, I hope you do too.

Sx