Every year Lisa asks me to take some pictures of James and Abi for our annual Christmas Card.

Now you would think that this would be a fun task, I mean, I like taking photographs and I love my kids right? Well yes both are true but wow do they not go together.

For many years getting a smile out of James was a major challenge, these day’s he’s miles better, but still capturing shots of my kids that look nice for a card is a major challenge for me.

I’m really bad at “keeping my cool” and “being nice” and have found myself losing it a little which really doesn’t help the shoot.

So that’s how it usually goes anyway. This year however was a surprise. James had a shower (he’s always showering he’s the cleanest teenager I’ve ever met – but he never does this kind of thing for me when I ask) and put on a nice shirt. He smiled when asked at all the right times and I got some nice pictures of him.

Abi also played along, she smiled also when asked and even posed in different locations around the house.

At the end we got some lovely shots – even got one of James and Abi holding the Dog!

Maybe the bad years are behind me and things will be better from now on 🙂 – yeah right!

Here are the four pictures we picked.

It’s been a few years since I’ve visited the UK, so this year I decided to head back and spend some time with the family. I decided to go back for my Dad’s birthday (so that meant November) and also decided to visit on my own.

Taking both James and Abi out of school is never a good idea, especially for James as he’s a junior in high school. Add to that the fact that a UK trip for the kids is not a real vacation. For them a vacation requires a pool and (usually) nice weather. Visiting family and friends houses and drinking tea doesn’t really count. Sure they’d like to see the family (grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins etc.,) but I can’t afford two major vacations a year so they didn’t come. Not too bad for them but crappy for Lisa who I know would have loved to visit family. Oh well.

So once I had the date I needed to decide what I was going to do – who to see and when. This is slightly complicated by the fact that my family all live in different parts of the country.

Amazingly my first attempt at an agenda was accepted by all and saw me doing the following:

• Meet my sister Jane at the airport and spend the weekend with her in the Cotswold’s
• Drive to Wokingham in Berkshire to spend some time with Nikki, one of Lisa’s sisters
• Drive to London and get some pictures in the city (1 day of selfish photography)
• Drive to Royal Tunbridge Wells in Kent to spend some time with my Dad
• Drive back to London to spend some time with my younger sister Kate

What made this itinerary great was that my whole family was going to join me at Kate’s for Dinner on my last Sunday, and my brother Alex was going to accompany me on the entire trip, taking a week off work himself.

This was going to fantastic!

I should say here (as my family will read this 🙂 that this was a family visit. Any opportunity to shoot was purely a bonus; it was family first, pictures second.

That said, everywhere I went everyone said, “Let’s go and take some pictures I know some great places”

So how did it go? Well I have to say I had a blast, it was lovely seeing my family face to face – sometimes Skype (while good) just isn’t enough. I won’t bore readers of this blog with sloppy family stuff but needless to say I’d been away too long and it was good to visit everyone.

On a pictures front (that’s what people really come here for) I had a load of fun. I’ve never really been to the Cotswold’s and I have to say it totally lived up to its beautiful reputation.

Going into London was also a lot of fun and I got some cool pictures there too.

When visiting my Dad’s house in Kent, we also drove down to Hastings for the day and I got some great pictures there (even found time to get some proper British Fish & Chips and cup of tea in a “chippy” – took some pictures of that too 🙂

My last day with the family ended with some family shots that I’ve included here so they can download some copies.

This was a 10 day trip and I took a LOT of pictures, I’m posting here just my fav’s, and to show you where each image was taken I’ve broken the images up into location categories.

Some of these are just fun pictures for me, but there are some nice shots of the UK (for those who haven’t visited).

Hope you enjoy viewing these as much as I enjoyed taking them.

A small aside before you view the images, I should call out that just before visiting the UK I made the bold (very scary) decision to change all my camera gear. I’ll be posting what I did and why, but needless to say, ALL these pictures were taking with a mirrorless 16MP APS-C camera. If you want to find out more, check out my (soon to be posted) “Going Mirrorless” posting.

Enjoy

P.S. For some reason my Blog won’t let me post a posting with 50 images 🙂 – what a surprise – so this posting contains Family Pictures, other postings contain images from places I visited in the UK.

Family

 

I think I pushed my blog too far when I tried to upload a posting with all my favorite pictures from the UK, so I’ve broken the posting up into three separate posts.

The main one “UK Trip – Part 1” tells you all about the trip and show you the family pictures I liked.

This Posting “Part 2” shares the Hastings and London Pics.

Hastings

 

London

 

Here’s the last of the UK Trip postings.

The main one “UK Trip – Part 1” tells you all about the trip and show you the family pictures I liked.

Posting “Part 2” shares the Hastings and London pics.

This posting “Part 3” shares my favorite Cotswold’s pics.

The Cotswold’s

 

So the other day I was sitting in our family room with Lisa when she pointed out that we had a woodpecker on a tree just outside the window. Now I’m no wildlife photographer so I have no idea what make and model it was but it looked pretty cute so I grabbed the camera.

I got out the Nikon D4 and the 70-200 lens and walked outside to get a picture. I was convinced that as I got closer it would just fly away so stayed back pretty far and started snapping.

The bird didn’t seem to care I was there so I slowly moved closer – again expecting the bird to take flight. But this thing was brazen, it didn’t seem to be bothered at all by me so again I started moving closer.

At about six feet away the bird clearly decided that I was getting a little too close but rather than fly off, it decided to simply move around the tree trunk so it couldn’t see me – or more precisely I couldn’t see it.

I just followed the bird around the tree and continued to shoot away. I have no idea what was so good about this particular tree but it must have been pretty special, as the bird wasn’t going anywhere.

Eventually, I just got board! I’d taken around 200 pictures and decided to go in and see what I had.

I’m told that to really capture wildlife you always need to focus on the eye, so it’s tack sharp, and I was doing this while taking pictures but clearly I’m not very good as a lot of pictures were soft focused. Sure one of the wings or the tail looked great but many didn’t have a sharply focused head – and really that’s what I wanted.

Also I needed to get a picture where the bird wasn’t backed by the tree. Because they were colored pretty similarly if the tree was behind the bird it weakened the composition. Sure you knew the bird was the subject but it didn’t really stand out.

Eventually I found some images where I caught the bird in profile clinging to the tree. I think I actually ended up with around 30 OK images.

The best of which is below.

What I learned from this is that wildlife is definitely NOT for me. I think I got an OK picture but I know I don’t have the patience to do this too often.