Black Sheep

June already!!

Barbara — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 11:18:47 +0000

OK so work and family issues have conspired to ensure that I haven’t updated this, or the website – or most of my outside work interests (the music publication etc) for a couple of months. With any luck, I am back on an even footing now and can get back to the things I love doing.

The photography is fun, although I am not destined to be a people photographer, I can see I will have to curb my enthusiasm a bit or I will be buying the teleconverter lens for the Panasonic sooner rather than later. Need to get more walking done though, am in danger of becoming a blob …

On holiday

Barbara — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 15:38:21 +0000

Glorious day – we drove up the M6 and round a bit of the lakes – Kendal, Kirkstone Pass, Ullswater and Aira Force and then back to Tebay. The sun shone and the air was clear – and Wordsworth’s daffodills (or their near relatives) were flowering more-or-less where he is reputed to have seen them!

Glad I had a practice with the water photography before hand – what fun this is, I am probably going to bore everyone silly, though!!

The moving water writes …

Barbara — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:16:49 +0000

Have spent an entertaining afternoon trying to understand how photographing moving water works. I read about it and tried it out variously on the water coming out of the shower head – very unsatisfactory white background – and then some deeply unpicturesque and pretty unsuccessful attempts at the weir in Emberton Park. Came home and then read some more – and found that my camera has a few helpful settings already programmed in!

So here one extreme (fairly slow) and the other extreme (fairly fast) with the camera sorting out the rest – taken at the Olney Mill race.

… and then …

Barbara — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:55:26 +0000

And then I bought a new camera. I was going to buy a little compact point and shoot with more zoom than the Pentax – but John had watched the Gadget Show – and they did a bit on digital bridge cameras. The Sony came out overall best and most expensive, naturally – but the Panasonic did really well too and I couldn’t afford that either so I bought one!

And it’s great! It seems reasonably simple to use, I don’t speak f-stops and ISO levels and stuff – but it has pictures and presets and joysticks and nice easy buttons to press. The results may not be especially great phtography, but it is fun.

I took this hellebore picture in the garden and then took out the background – and that was fun too. There will be no time for blogging from now on!!

Websites

Barbara — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 01:18:19 +0000

Life seems to have been too busy to update the blog (or the website!) recently – and I really should be in bed.
Have taken on a commission to do a website for Jennys fledgling business and I just need to link to it here. Found what seems to be the ideal = cheap but with good reviews specialist WordPress host – which means that I can gradually handover control of the CMS to the client and be on hand for technical support.

Hope it works – in the meantime here it is:

Jenny’s Gardens

Beware of free themes!

Barbara — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:00:11 +0000

I upgraded my WordPress install to the latest version – and it broke my theme! Something non-standard in the CSS I presume – so I have found a different theme to work with and am in the process of making it my own – could be a long and painful process – in the meantime I am learning much more about CSS than I knew originally so it’s a benefit. Must lose the indent on this style … success (although you haven’t seen the change!)

Later

Barbara — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:55:48 +0000

And then I thought I’d see about making a music index page – and lo and behold, there was a plugin to do that too!

Busy

Barbara — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 23:10:28 +0000

The initial flurry of activity has died down – as work and social committments and some much needed DIY in the house have taken over for the next week or so, then I’ll be back to this again with renewed enthusiasm (I hope)

Widgets

Barbara — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:25:55 +0000

There’s a widget or a plugin for everything – whatever you want wordpress to do!

Scorched

Barbara — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 00:39:19 +0000

Tried for ages last night to get the Scorch plugin to work – unsuccessfully – it wasn’t until I tried the old website pages I realised that at some stage, the hosting company had managed to disable the .sib MIME type on the webserver. It’s IIS so I couldn’t do it with .htaccess and had to get them to do it for me. All sorted now and working – now I have to work out a consistent size for the plugin on the page.