Skies

Most of the time, if I'm stopping to take a picture of a nice landscape, I'll stop and take a picture of the sky too. I find skies particularly pretty. There is so much variation, and you never see two skies that are the same.

Below:

- Starry night sky at holiday cottage

- Fair weather over Blythburgh

- Southwold (or thereabouts) getting a soaking

- Cloudy sunset at holiday cottage

Marsh Harriers

During our holiday in Suffolk, we visited a large amount of nature reserves and marshland. Almost every time we visited one of these places, we would see Marsh Harriers. We also saw them very close to the cottage we were staying in at the time, and would sometimes hear a pair calling.

Since we only really saw these birds as distant flying blobs, I don't really have any award-winning photos. However, the ones I do have give a vague idea of what the bird looks like from below.

The first picture is a male, as you can tell from the white patches on the underside of his wings.

The second pictures is a female. The female is a much darker bird, but with a pale forehead.

Dragonflies

Due to being away, being busy, and then being somewhat distracted, my blog seems to have been rather neglected of late. So, today, I have made myself a cup of tea, and now I am going to blog.

Now, onto the post!

Whilst I was away, during the first two weeks of the summer holidays, we went for a fair few walks around nature reserves. We found that most of these areas were heavily populated with dragonflies and damselflies. These were two of the main things I took (or attempted to take) photos of, and I developed a certain interest in them. After buying a little fold-up guide to dragonflies, I am now successfully on the way to calling myself a Dragonfly Geek.

Below are a female Common Darter, a Blue-Tailed Damselfly, and a male Common Darter.

Drawing again!

With it being work experience next week, I finally had a free weekend! So, immediately, the pencils came out...

I've done a total of 3 portraits in the past few days, all from requests people have given me.

Some were a little rushed, and could probably have been a lot more polished if I'd have spent more time, but I didn't really want to spend ages on them. Portraits like these tend to take me between 2 and 4 hours.

I've had fun drawing these, and it's nice to be able to find something that is productive AND relaxing, two words rarely used in the same context for me!

In case you're unsure:

1. 10th Doctor (David Tennant) and The Master (John Simm)

2. Gerard Way (singer from My Chemical Romance)

3. Florence Welch (singer from Florence and the Machine)

Anyway, any opinions or feedback on these is welcome! Thanks for reading... :)

Exams are over...

Finally. This summer, I've had 7 GCSE exams, and it's certainly been tiring. Sorry I haven't been posting recently... there hasn't been much of a gap between revision and having no motivation to do anything.
Although I still have controlled assessments and coursework to do, I think I will definitely have some time off now to blog, and do some other things I've been itching to do.
I've had a fair few drawing requests, which I might try and do over the next week or two, which I will post on here.
I've been writing a little too, mainly focusing on little projects like short stories and poetry. I've also been doing a few video editing projects, which has been fun.
Next week, I've got work experience, which should be an interesting change to the daily routine, and after that I begin my Year 11 school timetable for the last two weeks before the summer holidays, just to check no timetable changes need to be made for next year. I'm counting down to the 6 week break now, where as well as going on holiday for two weeks, I should be doing a couple of big projects. I've written a short horror film script, called Divided Souls, which I am hoping to get together with a group of friends to film... as well as being a director, I am going to edit and produce it on DVD. I don't think I'm going to put it on Youtube when it's finished, like I do a lot of my stuff, but I might post a few previews or trailers here and there.
I will make sure to update soon, so watch this space! :)

New Microphone!

This week, I was welcomed home by a big exciting cardboard box.

It turned out to be the Samson CO1U USB Studio Condenser Microphone that I had ordered from Amazon... and here is it set up with my laptop in all it's glory.

It being only around £70 for a proper professional microphone, I honestly didn't know what to expect from it, but I'm actually really impressed. Assuming you're close enough to the microphone, or the noise you make is loud enough, there's barely any background hiss at all, despite all the horror stories I'd heard. It makes sense I suppose- if you have to increase the volume of the singer, you have to increase the volume of the background noise too.

Renee and I also covered 'You're Gonna Go Far Kid' by The Offspring using the new microphone on Friday, which you can find on Youtube here. Beware, there's a fair amount of bad language in this song!

Another bit of band news, we've started talking to a couple of other people about forming a proper band (as in singer, guitarist, bassist, drummer) and we may be starting something on that front- but it's still probably a long way away.

Thanks for reading!

Editing Stuff

One thing I find really relaxing and rewarding is editing photos. I often accept requests from friends asking me to edit photos of themselves for Facebook, and I do my own too, but as well as that I like to edit drawings, and existing pictures from the internet.

I use a combination of PicMonkey and Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 (and occasionally Paint, because it's actually a pretty useful programme!).

On the left is one of my drawings, which started life as a rather messy scanned image. After a fair bit of work erasing mistakes, fixing broken lines, improving colours and exposure and cutting out I got it to something a bit more like what you would expect in a manga comic. Not an award-winner, but it was pretty rewarding nonetheless.