Little Corner of Ania

The winter edition of Scrapbooks & Cards Today are out and available in PDF format - they do both print and PDF - which can be downloaded here (part 1). Why I'm excited? Well, I've got a layout in there!! OH yeah baby! Page 36 - sharing the same page as my fellow Bad Girl designer Cari Fennell!!!! YAY! I *love* Cari - if you've been to the Prima blog you've probably noticed the most gorgeous stuff from her in there - she's one of my faves in that team...well...maybe *the fave* one (shhhh!) - so being displayed at the same page as her was like *wow* and *too cool*! I'm looking forward to my very own copy in the mailbox - they were going to email me two copies I think. Fun! :D Tbh I don't really like looking at sb-stuff in pdf, but while scrolling hastily past the pages (I was looking for my own layout duh!) I did notice a lot of gorgeous stuff in there making me go *uhoh and they really did publish my layout among all these fab stuff??* ..... can't wait to flip thru the mag irl to have a proper look at all the wonderful layouts in that one :)

Any news in this home? Well. The last wall is done. And on a whim hubs decided that we needed to finish the last part of the ceiling tonight too, starting around 9pm. We're getting guests tomorrow and can't really paint then which means we have to wrap it all up tonight - 3x layers of paint, 3hours to wait between each layer..yay :p

Hm, don't have any new piccies to show so I'll put up a layout I made quite recently just because! Kinda still in the middle of a number of different deadlines and stuff and that always makes me antsy and thus makes me go "bleh Ill scrap something totally different just because!" :) Kinda like me rebelling against the deadlines and stuff I have to make =) Look! I made a layout with stripes!! (I love shopping striped pp but I pretty mcuh never use them....)

And on the subject of sharing tips for those nightshots... well....I personally found that going totally manual was the best way to get the pictures the way I wanted them.. did a testshot, adjusted a few times then pretty much stuck with what I got with minor adjustments accordingly.. ISO 1600, aperture between f/1.4 and f/1.6 (with this wide aperture you have to mind your focusing and your distance to the subject) and shutterspeed between 1/50 and 1/80.
With my 50mm lens I had to make sure to try hold the camera extra steady on such slow shutterspeeds... as far as I know the rule of thumb is that a shutterspeed equal to the lenswidth = good base to take sharp photos...but because of some tech stuff (don't look at me - something with the format of the card or something) I have to multiply that number for my camera/lens so for a 50mm my "safe" shutterspeed would be 1/80 not 1/50 as one would think...to be able to take sharp photos in normal situations kinda. If I understood that stuff right ;p So I was trying to keep the shutterspeed at above 1/50 at least to not get too blurry stuff :p

I've shared some more phototips on the Bad Girl forum here; basically just saying - turn off the flash if you want some nice and cozy seasonal photos - experiment with manual modes (which is pretty much the best way to go for such a photosession where there's like, huge contrasts (dark surroundings vs bright lights), put the camera to lock the lightmetering only (I believe that the default is that it'll lock both lightmeter+focus) and use that when shooting in aperture, shutter or programmode...provided youre using spot/center-metering...not sure if that would work for matrix-mode too?? And oh - if you have to use flash - try slow-synch flash...it should make some interesting photos at least :p

Jeje...time to start painting again - 2nd layer!! :p