I’ve been keeping this quiet as I wanted to get a few cards listed before I said anything but… I’m back on Etsy!

Concentrating on the art greeting cards right now – But also have ideas to do painted ATCEO’s plus when I get back to England I have blank canvases awaiting me… May also do framed pieces as well…. We’ll see!

I had a time at Artfire but didn’t like the limits they put on the free version – and for the paid version… I see no point in it when I still have the website. So yes, back to Etsy part-time as a hobby!

The emelegifts site? I still don’t know… I have paid advertising on there at the moment so don’t want to take the site down totaly but I do need to do something with it… remove some old pages. Perhaps link to my Etsy items… Yea, still as undecisive as ever when it comes to what to do with it as I just don’t know!

Remember last week when I said I was going to start practising what all the buttons do on my cam and move away from auto-everything? Well here’s my first couple of days experimenting with the aperture priority setting. Now before any pros look and say how bad it is – Please be gentle – I’m learning – Gotta start somewhere!

For those who are in the same boat as me -The aperture setting controls depth of field… Look…

Left Pic – F8 – High DOF background flowers and path more in focus… and Right Pic F2.8 Low DOF – Background is blurred.

Now in my notes I wrote down Big Aperture = Small Number i.e F2.8 – Small Aperture = Big Number i.e F8 (or F22 in pro terms but my camera isn’t that good). That’s the bit where I get confused… Like my brain can’t process it. How can a big apperture be a small number which produces a low depth of field. So to get around that I’m taking two pics each time – One F8, one F2 – Or as high / low as I can get. Hmmm I hope I got that right – If you’re a newbie please double check all that incase I messed up on my notes!!

So, continuing with the practise…

Left Photo – F8 —————————————————- Right Photo F2.8

I have to take one each on the opposite end of the scale right now just to see for myself what the differences are! One background in focus… one background outa focus… Ok, I’m getting it now!

Right, last practise shots for the moment!

Left Photo – F8 ———————————————- Right Photo F2.8

Those were all shot with the ISO at 200, hand-held and I think that’s where I went wrong – Quite noisy when viewed large at 100%. So next I have to figure out this ISO thing… and buy a new decent tripod as my old one just isn’t stable enough for the big camera. Also would quite like a remote control shutter release thingy whatsit.

If you’re reading this on the site then you can already see that I’ve made a few changes on the blog design – But if you’re reading this in a feed-reader pop on over to the blog and see the new tweaked look.

Nothing major… Since I’ve had the new laptop fixed width websites have been driving me mad – I re-did my web-design site to make it fluid (so it fits whatever size screen you have… within reason) but didn’t reallllly want to setup a whole new theme on this blog so have just made it that bit wider for the moment. This also meant I had to widen the header image – So I updated that a little with the wording. Although want to edit it further, perhaps with a camera graphic on the bottom right corner…

Also changed the blue background to a pale lilac/purple – It was too blue before… Felt kinda cold. Hopefully I’ve warmed it up a little now. Also increased the font sizes slightly… and I think that was about it.

Then I realized my About Me page was all out of date so that’s also been semi-updated… Lol I hardly dare look anywhere else

If it looks totally wrong (my pc and old laptop are both kaput so can’t test properly) or there are any “issues” could you let me know? Thanks

Hmm I don’t really have just one theme for this post hence the roundup title…

Here’s a card I made at Zazzle which is my newest favorite – Why didn’t I think about putting it on a card before?!! Have been playing around with a pink flowers square version as well but it’s not quite perfect yet… Need more pink flower closeups I think!

I’ve been twittering away like a mad thing – and also re-started my Facebook fan page for the photography so if you’d like to follow me / be a fan please do so — I’ll be forever grateful

Wednesday night I was online looking at photo courses for the summer in England… But A. I don’t know if I’m a beginner or an Intermediate and B. they cost so much so I’ve left that on the back burner for now and am attempting to teach myself all about Fstops and umm what all those buttons on my camera actually do.

Yesterday, with the help of an article, I learnt about the A button – A stands for aperture. (Yea, before I was mostly an automatic settings girl but if I want to succeed at this I have to go manual… I mean, my camera does manual focus for hecks sake – but it’ll take me a while to use that I think – Auto focus much easier ) So anyway, once I have my practise pics off the cam I may well blog about them here and show you what I’ve learnt about depth of field. We’ll see… they might be awful which means they get instantly deleted!

I  also got invited to a writers group on Helium – For a computer / website / techy publisher person – $32 per article… 30 articles available a month (although I have to fight other writers for them!!) but it sounds pretty good to me.  I already grabbed one writing assignment about how to change webhosts.

So that’s me…. What’re you all upto?

I’m still on that roll! My latest “playing around with photoshop” design has lead me to Valentine Cards! I’ve got red roses, blue roses and pink roses – On white and black backgrounds at my Zazzle store.

I have no idea why I didn’t come up with this idea for Valentine’s before… Better late (as in years late) than never though! I was wondering what I could do for Easter cards with my photos but concluded that I have to spend atleast 1 spring in England before the “Easter Collection” can be created – I need pics of lambs, baby bunnies and daffodils… All hard to come by in Crete.

Ok, I better get back to it… I’m slooowly SEO’ing all of my items at Zazzle (or attempting to do as many as possible) plus re-doing all items with text… Didn’t realize until last week that I wasn’t making it easy for customers to customize – Plus I’m also going through every    single    photo (w h i c h t a k e s f o r e v e r !!) to make sure I have it available on each suitable item.

Why all this Zazzling all of a sudden? A. This is the year I make a proper go of my photography (100 photo prints for proofing are on there way to me as we speak). B. I want to become a Zazzle pro-seller.

I think I’m on a roll! I keep coming up with new designs and photos… Here’s my latest work for my digital art galleryat Zazzle.

Originally it was a photo… taken close to two years ago at a guess. I was on one of my “photo day trips” in a village here in Crete and saw that some old Christmas lights had been left up all year, attatched to the electric / telephone wires.  Took a snap… Wasn’t quite sure what to do with it… Until Now!

I didn’t even mean to make these last night, I was  supposed to be making another piece for the “circle collection” but I got side tracked! Photpshop’d out the misc. wires, changed the background color… edited the light bulb colors… and hey presto. I’m pleased with how they have turned out

Perfect for party invitations, announcing celebrations and save the dates…

What am I going to come out with next week I wonder??!

Edited some of my beach photos yesterday and started to upload them to “all my places” (zazzle, redbubble, stock etc) – Reallllly like how this “collection” is turning out so I’m off to the beach in a few minutes to snap more!