On the homeward stretch

Wow, it's the 20th already which means that I only have another 8 days to go in my LOAD challenge. Definitely possible. Definitely some learning points along the way. Definitely very inspired by my fellow loadsters. Definitely now have a long list of (in my head - need to get onto paper) layouts to lift and ideas of subjects.

It's been a lot of fun! And my pile of layouts is enormous! It was worth it for this alone. Although now comes the problem that I need to go through all my layouts now and get them reorganised and put into the right albums as per the Stacy Julian Library of Memories system. I think I have about 7 full albums plus a pile of layouts about 6 inches high to sort and organise. Mmm. Maybe that should be my objective for March...

And I have to confess to going back over two layouts and reworking them a little.

This one from the 10th just kept calling me back, so I made a small journalling block on the computer and printed it out in a soft beige colour - it doesn't shout so much now. It felt too hard compared to the rest of the layout before. Much more satisfied now!

And this one from Friday just made me unhappy. So I have reworked it a little. Removed the journalling, and hand-wrote along the side of the photo. Added another butterfly. Touched up a few spots of stickles and moved one of the small spots at the bottom. Still not 100% but 100% better than it was (for me anyway.)

Being the sad, sociophobe, Billy No Mates that I am, not to mention Poker Widow, I've had lots of time over the last few days and have done nothing but scrap, surf the internet, browse Flickr, look through my photos and generally waste time! Wonderful - a luxury that I appreciate most of you out there don't have, but I have so enjoyed it.

And here are my two most recent layouts:

February 19th

February 20th

The prompt for today was to record something that I had overheard and while it's not overheard, this little story came to mind. Cam is so funny! I find boy pages really tricky to do but anyway, I was happy to break into Archaic which has been sitting on my shelf for the last 12 months, just looking pretty. Rather a "slap on as much as I can" sort of page. 

One last thing. 

Isn't this pretty?

When I posted my bokeh/macro photos last week, Deb asked how I get the background all blurry. It happens all by itself and I am totally smitten with this at the moment. Those spots of light there in the background is a sweet little string of lights that Maddie bought me that are USB connected to my computer and they gave exactly the effect that I wanted. 

When you use the macro lens, it can focus really close - much closer than normal cameras - and because the thing I wanted it to focus on was in the foreground, it leaves everything else in the photo out of focus. This is called depth of field or aperture (DOF or F stop) in camera speak. Using a DSLR with a standard lens and using a fully automatic program, the camera will probably try to get the whole frame in focus and this effect will not happen very often, You can change your DSLR programme to aperture priority and this allows you to set your own aperture which is the depth of field - the lower the number, the closer the range of focus. On most digital point and shoot cameras, you can work on getting this effect by using the option for portrait photos (this might be shown as a head or a flower on your options). The camera will focus on the foreground and leave the background out of focus. Bokeh can sometimes be created in this way. I am still learning and don't accept responsibility for any inaccuracies here (!!!) but this is the general idea. 

However, The Pioneer Woman has a great section on photography and repeated a short series of blog entries recently on exactly this topic. You can find a really good overview of aperture in simple, easy to understand language in this post.

It would be lovely to see your bokeh shots. This could become a new addiction for me!