Snow day

We had the first snow of the season today. Only a light snowfall but it was so pretty!

A view up my street:

And in my garden:

Playing with Light

I have been doing Cheryl Johnson's 12 Days of Christmas photography class this week. It was 12 days of tips for taking better photos of the festivities. One tip was to make a cheap star filter by using a piece of mesh from a tea strainer and holding it in front the camera lens. I actually used my big colander/strainer-but it did the trick, as you can see here:


And here are a couple of the lights on the mantel piece(without the strainer).

Oh Christmas Tree..

We put our tree up on Sunday.

Some close ups:



I like this photo best!

More lamposts

Today there was a heavy fog all over Edinburgh-as there was yesterday, and is forecast again for tomorrow. I thought I might get some atmospheric shots, but I don't think there was enough tonal variation, and the light was very flat. I converted most of today's photos to black and white-well those I didn't delete!
Anyway, here are some lamps at Duddingston.

I quite like this silhouette:


This one lacks sharpness:

And this is my favourite-and it's not a black and white conversion. I like that it looks black and white until you focus on the leaves! I'm not sure whether a different crop might be better though.

Lampost

In the market square, Alnwick

f1.7 50mm lens

Treehouse

This is the tree house at Alnwick garden.
It contains a restaurant, and gift shop, and has some swinging bridges. It's well worth a visit.

Barter Books....

....is probably the biggest secondhand bookshop in Britain. It is in the lovely market town of Alnwick in north east England. We went there last Sunday, and I was playing around with my new (to me) f1.7 50mm manual focus prime lens. Now this is so different to my usual autofocus zoom lens, and I am struggling to use it well.
I need to practise lots!!
Anyway, here are some photos of the bookshop-most have been deleted!!