If you’re prone to frizzy hair you wouldn’t want to have stayed with us at Kaitoke Acres for the last couple of days.  We’ve been shrouded in a blanket of mist, drizzle and rain.  If however you’re desperately trying to repair your lawn such moisture is welcome to water in the grass seed.

The weather has scuppered most of my plans to play with one of my Christmas gifts.  A wonderful new lens for my camera.  Instead I nipped out to take a couple of snaps after I spotted out of the window whilst I was washing up. I can tell I’m going to have a lot of fun with this new lens.

Its main benefit is that I can take more pictures where the light is low.  This is going to be very handy for my food blogging.  Even with the skylight in the kitchen it can still be hard to take great pictures but this lens should help me get a cleaner sharper image.  It’s also going to be fantastic for taking close ups on lots of things.  Like bassets who were my first portraiture guinea pigs.

My Christmas book about Exposure is also helping me understanding more and more about the principles of photography.  I’ve worked out that what baffles me most is that cameras operate using a number system and numbers are just not my friends.  I know I need to overcome this phobia of numbers and as far as photography is concerned this book explains the numbers using other concepts and all of a sudden a new world of possibility is opening up on the photography front.

Amongst my many goals for 2010 being more dedicated to my photography is high up on the agenda.  I’ve noticed in recent months how I’ve not made time to get out and practice.  That is going to change next year.  It would be folly to commit to a 365 photography project (you take a picture every day) so I’m instead going to focus on 12 monthly assignments and see what themes interest me over the course of the year.

As well as giving me more focus it will force me to be more organised where filing, processing and printing photographs are concerned.  With 15,000 images on stock already but not one printed for display it’s time to change all that.  Not sure whether it will be a monthly book or framed.  Or it may be both. I will also set up a new gallery area on my blog where I’ll post just a few photographs rather than the long photo blogging posts. That’s the plan at least.

With good weather planned for the rest of this week we’ll be down in the garden clearing grass, planting vegetables and building a new fence for the bassets.  Let the summer holidays begin.