A few weeks ago my good friend Ramón recently starred as the butler in The Importance of Being Earnest, set in the beautiful surroundings of New College Cloisters in Oxford. I was somehow coerced into filming the play since my college has a great camcorder that students can borrow. I then edited the footage using iMovie – my first experience with it, but it was so easy to use and I think it came out pretty well! You can check it out on my Vimeo page.

I then went along again the following night and took along my camera with the old manual lens I bought a while ago. It was the first time I’ve really used it properly and it took a while to get used to the manual focusing but I got some nice photos that would have been impossible with the kit lens! Ramón is in the background of the first one…

More at Flickr.

In other news, tomorrow is Handm@de Winchester! If there is one good thing to come out of Andy Murray losing at Wimbledon, hopefully it means people will be out and about rather than watching the final! Hopefully I will see some familiar faces there

Just going through some photos, I am quite pleased with this one! Taken from the garden of St Hilda’s College while we were setting up for the ball photography last weekend.

We had some folks round for brunch on Sunday for belated pancakes since I didn’t make them on pancake day itself (although we have them often enough around here that pancake day isn’t really a novelty! Any excuse though) and also my favourite blueberry muffins from the old-school Joy of Cooking. Yum!

I’ve just added Think Bakery which looks like a great new blog for crafty businesses – check it out! (via Asking for Trouble).

So I’m off to NYC on Thursday, yippeee! See you next week

My new camera lens arrived from ebay yesterday so I had a quick play with it last night. The manual focusing and exposure were surprisingly easy to get the hang of, I followed the tips here.

Here’s a shot of my shepherds pie in progress (great recipe by Gordon Ramsay if you’re interested!). I focused on the spatula handle and pretty much everything else is out of focus because of the shallow depth of field! One downside of this lens is that because it’s old (originally designed for manual film SLRs) it doesn’t pass the aperture details back to the camera, but I’m guessing this was at the maximum aperture, 1.8.

Here’s a picture of my camera with the new lens attached; it’s so cute! I had to take it with my old Sony camera which I can only now appreciate how rubbish it was!

Port Meadow is beautiful at any time of year, but especially in the snow.

More at Flickr.

Alice tagged me to “open the 6th picture folder on your computer, open the 6th photo and blog it. Write something about it. Then tag 6 more people to do the same.”

How fun! I just backed up my 2008 photos onto DVD and deleted them from my hard disk so the 6th photo in my 6th folder is a bit random…

A couple of years ago I attempted to scan all my grandparents old photographs; I did around 100 of them which took a whole day and that barely scraped the surface (I really need to get the rest done soon). I’m not sure exactly where or when this photo was taken, although it’s likely that it’s from Palestine where my grandad was stationed for his national service in the late 1940s. I really love this photo; it’s so striking and mysterious. I wonder where the children are now? My grandad died last year and I haven’t looked at these photos for a while so thanks Alice, it was nice to take a look again!

So now I’ll tag:
Monda
Sinta
Lazygiraffe
Swell Vintage
What Katie Does
Celestefrittata

Have a great weekend

It snowed again in Oxford last night! A lunchtime photoshoot with Ramón ensued and we managed to sneak up to the roof at Oriel College to take some photos.

There are more at Flickr. All this snow is definitely good practice for my new camera, although I’m petrified of slipping over and smashing it!