GotPassion?

Welcome!!!

Welcome to my blog, GotPassion? It is a work in progress - I like nothing more than to investigate all that typepad has to offer and trying to put it on my blog. I hope you enjoy reading as much as I enjoy writing... 

Please do leave a comment or email me, comments and emails are GOOD! 

If you prefer a particular subject like portrait photography or travel, just find it under categories and click...

Chris and Ele Married, cont

What wonderful fun it was to photograph this couple, they were pretty much up for anything and so friendly. Before they saw some photos I had taken and asked me to take their photos I didn't actually know Chris and Ele, but I went to take their photos and they treated me as a friend and as their guest. So I hope my photos of the amazing dress, lovely ceremony and reception have done them

 justice! 

 

The first look

Last chance to practise the first dance

The dance was a total hit, all that practising was worth it...

The Wall (or rather the lack of it)

As I think I have mentioned previously our garden wall had a gigantic big crack in it and the housing people have finally decided to repair it. The process at the moment is pulling it down bit by bit each day. Not sure why it is taking them so long but at least they are doing it finally!

The wall is between our garden and the street and now all that is between the garden and the street is a green net. Nice. Mum tells me that you can't see into my room from the street, but they can certainly see in the garden and I can certainly see them and hear them as they walk down the street so I feel rather vulnerable will it there.

To give you  an idea of how much wall has been pulled down, see the bar going across the photo above mum's head? The wall was just a bit higher than that. As you can see street level is actually higher than the ground level so people walking past will look down at us...

Now this photo below you may think is just a pic of a wall. Actually it is a hippo, look carefully - it took us years of practicing our tennis skills against the wall and hitting of the plaster to get that hippo there!

 

Taking off the heel's and an update

Monday's wedding was scorching hot (although not as hot as the rest of the week would turn out to be) and for the guests and the bride it was a liberating moment to take off the shoes...

Update on this week:

It's hot hot hot! With the met office having declared a heat wave, and me not being a fan of hot hot hot is struggling and looking forward to it being 25 again! The worst bit is the afternoon when the sun makes it over the nursery roof and lights up the playground. I have spent most of the time chasing children with water, hats and suntan lotion which has been largely successful as I also tell them they will have to go and sit inside if they don't do all three... Having seen a child having a fit from high temperatures I can tell you it is well worth the 

effort.

Tomorrow we are hoping to take the kids to the local park for the day so I am hoping it will be a little 

cooler for that (fingers crossed!)

Me and the mac struggle on, last night Aperture refused to open and needed to be reinstalled twice 

before finally working which took over an hour. It seems to be working now and all backed up okay 

although my brother tells me instead of external harddrives to backup I should use memory sticks 

(which don't have moving parts which could break as easily) and wouldn't lose so much work in one go.

There is lots of advice out there on backing up so I might just have to think about that and see which works best for me). The idea of lots of little memory sticks lying around doesn't fill my heart with joy though, sounds like an organisational nightmare.

Anyway thanks to the help section and to mac101 online and apple discussions I am learning lots about how to use the computer and Aperture and that is  good thing. Yesterday I learnt not to do a software update on Aperture as that is what is screwing up the vaults (its way of backing things up), thank goodness for geeks who have figured this all out!

FOX UPDATE: 

You will remember my recent post on the Fox we saw in the garden, two of my neighbours also called the RSPCA which spurred them into action and they came without us having to catch the fox, apparently when he came the fox was just lying in the garden and let itself be caught. I am very glad as I think this heat would have been slow torture for the poor animal...

Reminiscing Blue Peter

Dad recently bought the updated Mike Oldfield CD and for some reason I don't think I had ever realised until now that Mike Oldfield also wrote the Blue Peter theme tune. I loved that program growing up so here, complete with MO's video... (Showing my age this was the theme tune used from 79-89, when I first started watching it...)

Fox Gloves, Forty Hall, London 2009

As I try and deal with several big projects of processing photos including the ones from a wedding yesterday (where the bride wore the most beautiful dress - ever!) it is little ones like these that give me a relaxing diversion.

Happily today I have achieved the following things...

8 hours with the lovely lovely children and survived the hot weather

Bought bananas (you would think that we have to do it every week would make it a habit it isn't, every week it is like a surprise, 'oh, we need bananas, again?!' Maybe one day....

Formatted a hard drive and turned it in to a backup for the computer (and praying hard I didn't lose any important stuff when I formatted!) Presently it is half way through the back up and it has taken about an hour I think. Only another hour to go. Sigh!

Processing wedding photos, weeding out the rubbish ones. Still doing it, but I am more than half way through that, then will come editing stage. 

Managed not to go completely crazy trying to figure out why my other external hard drive has only 12 gb free space when I calculated it has 120 gbs used on it (250 gb drive) can anyone advise??? Please!

Ah well back to the deleting

Chris and Eleanora: Married!

and here is a sneak preview!

Fox in the Garden

Amazingly in the middle of the day, this Fox came right up to the house - just outside my bedroom window. We actually think its sick and called the RSPCA who have given us the helpful advice of try and trap it. One question.... Where?!  It is actually a lot uglier than I imagined but we still feel really sorry for it. 

 

Rochester England, 2008

The day following Amy and Lee's wedding I took myself on a walk around the local area. First decision is whether to turn left and right, having gone right for the wedding I decided left would be a little more adventurous and off I went with the camera. Turns out to be a pretty interesting walk... The following photos were all taken pretty much on the same road within a very short time period, you don't have to go far in Rochester to see some amazing buildings.

The sky threatened rain but it held off right til I was photographing the cathedral so I had to call it a day 

and run back to the B+B but was glad the subsequent storms hadn't come the day before at the wedding....

Happy Sunday!

The temperature is heating up here and some of the rooms are getting really hot whilst others strangely are not to bad (even on the same side

of the house). So all this morning whenever I turned around Berry was flopped out on various parts of 

the hallway looking desperately hot. Finally common sense prevailed and he went downstairs (heat 

rises) to the coolness of this window sill in mum and dads room. Where no doubt he was contemplating 

Corinthians 13... or maybe just enjoying the coolness. Sorry Berry I think it is only going to get hotter 

this week.

London June Storms, 2009

Yesterday Metcheck told us there would be storms and rain in the afternoon, so I set out the playground at nursery accordingly (only plastic toys and bikes) and what happened? No rain, nothing, nada. 

So this afternoon as I desperately try to concentrate on processing photos, I briefly considered taking the laptop into the garden but noticed the clouds looking a little on the darker side of nice. So took my place by the big victorian living room windows with a front seat to see the storms rolling in. Now here I am sidetracked again, because of course I had to get the camera out and take a few photos and of course I had to blog about it. 

So this is our garden this afternoon, it's starting to clear up a bit although we can still hear the thunder and see the lightning. But the hail has stopped and now we are just watching Wimbledone, waiting to see if the rain will make it over and make them close their new roof for the first time...