Photography and Housekeeping

“It’s not what you look at that matters. It’s what you see.”

-Thoreau

I’ve been asked a few times in comments and emails about my photographs and what equipment I use. Well for a start I have to explain I’m a bit of a point and shoot gal; I have zilch technical knowledge and I’ll have to get  the camera out of the bag tell you what model it is, other than a Cannon.

It wasn’t many weeks after I started writing this blog back in May 2007, that I realised photos were going to key to what I wanted to do with it: not that I knew at the outset, what I wanted to do, or where it was going; I just felt I might be starting to out-stay my welcome on other peoples blogs.  I think it was when Inspector Gadget referred to me as ‘a rural blogger’, that I realised that is sort of my ‘genre’, its sort of what I do, I think.

Most of my photos are taken with the camera settings on automatic, apart from using manual focus occasionally or the sports setting for things on the move

the only other things I do is to crop the photo, (cut out the bits I don’t want) or I might poke about at the exposure and contrast afterwards. I know I should could ‘take control of the camera’ and that I could do lots of whizzy things to my images if I bought a suitable editing package (and more importantly learnt how to use it.)

But for the moment I’m having a lot of fun doing what I do. I’ve got plenty of things that I have to work on (there is more to the world of the Uhdd’s that appears on this blog; one blog friend described me as ‘being as busy an octopus with OCD’ which is a pretty good summation.)  So if you are thinking of having a go at blogging or digital photography, don’t be put off by a fear of the technicalities. Setting up a WordPress blog costs nothing and is fairly easy, you don’t need any specialist computer or code knowledge   (I managed it all on my own, just think of it as a washing machine, it will come 20 programs, but you only need to use one.) The camera did cost, but has been worth every penny.  So if you still want to know the details

The camera is a digital SLR (single lens reflex) Cannon EOS 400D

I have 2 lens a 18-55mm and a 70-300mm

I use a Lowepro ‘Slingshot 100AW’ camera bag, which I think is the bees knees,

I find it easiest to write my posts in Windows Live Writer and even if you don’t want to write your own blog, but you like reading them, you’ll find it really easy to keep track of your favourites by using a ‘RSS feed’ all this  is  is an ‘online list’ of the blogs that you like to read, so you only have to look in one place to see their latest posts, I use Bloglines (again it’s free) It saves loads of time and effort, so you can read twice as many blogs.