OK, nothing much in the way of great artistry is comming from my camera yet; I'm finding out how to control it and working with slave flash units (don't ask!), still here're a couple of rather nice pictures of The Boo!

Flowers and sunlight always seem to provide scope for some creative stuff to happen.

In this first picture I was trying to capture the sunlight on the window as it was filtered by the tree outside and, of course, the flowers add that little extra to the overall framing of the picture.

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The second picture mixes a number of effects all going on at once with the sunlight on the flowers, the sun shining through the perforated copper mirror frame and the mirror effect itself.

This one's not quite right, but it's got some interestng ideas.

Overnight it snowed and so on the 24th of January there were more photo opportunities.

The inevitable snow scene (to remind you all what Derbyshire looks like) but in this case I managed to capture the sunlight on the hills.

It's a shame about Tony's roof in the bottom right corner, still a little work in the digital darkroom will solve this without having actually to pull his house down!

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By the time I'd taken a trip into Bakewell a lot of the snow had gone; there was certainly no sign of any there, still everyone living in Derbyshire has to take a photo of this town, so here's my contribution.

What I've got, as mentioned in a previous post, is this rather nice digital camera and I've been discovering a bit about how to take proper pictures, what with my professional contacts in the industry able to guide me.

It seems sensible to me, then, to publish on the blog any which have worked out OK. What we're looking for, of course, is not quick snaps of babies, etc. but pictures which are heading towards artistic quality; pictures which make you want to look at them. Feel free to comment on what you like and don't like but remember that I prefer comments of a generally optimistic nature!

So let's start with one taken on 23 Jan in the early evening. It was actually getting pretty dark and so I used a 10 second exposure and shot from a low angle to achieve the lighting and framing I wanted.