It's been a busy weekend so far!

On Friday, Jason and I went to Liverpool so that I could take some photos around Liverpool One and Albert Dock. Waking up in the morning to a clear blue sky, completely cloudless, was an excellent start – better lighting, after all, means better shooting conditions. We got ready to go, played Skyrim a bit to pass the time, and when it was time to set off, the day was suddenly overcast.

We'd originally planned to go on Thursday, but that had been called off due to poor lighting, so I decided we'd take a risk and go regardless; we needed to get some shopping done anyway so it wouldn't be an entirely wasted trip. On the way there, the sun came out again – it would turn out to be one of those days where it was in and out of the clouds all day long.

( Liverpool, Family Visits and Other Stories... )

I'll get replying to your comments tomorrow, chaps, once I've had some much needed sleep. <3

I'm only just back in the house, having seen Jason off for the weekend. The initial plan was for me to go to his (or, to be more precise, Lee's – where he and his Mum are still staying) on Wednesday, then for him to sleep at mine Thursday, Friday and go home early Saturday, but since he's now only working two days a week he was done for the week on Wednesday and so there was a last minute change of plans.

( That, and I think Lee has started to go out of his mind with the number of people always knocking at his door... )

It be NaNoWriMo day the sixth! This afternoon my stats are as follows...

Chaos: 3442
Soul: 4136
Corn-Cob: 4063
Total Written: 11,641
Total Remaining: 78,359/90,000

I'm hoping to get another 2000 words done before the end of the day. I still won't be on par according to my 90k goal (I should be at 18,000 words today) but meh, I just need to keep writing at least 3k every day and try and gt little bits extra in here and there to make up for my behindness. See, that's how frazzled all this writing is leaving my brain. Somehow I think that 'behindness' is an actual word. I know it probably isn't, but sod it, this is NaNoWriMo, where sense is thrown to the ravenous seagulls, reality breaks down and weird words suddenly pop into existence.

Yesterday was pretty good! I went down to Bachelor's Park with Shannon, Sophie and my niece, Amy. While they were in the wee playground area I scuttled about taking photos, since I got ten rolls of film through the post the other day. The night before I was poking about on the internet trying to look up a tutorial on how to use a camera properly - as in, working with shutter speed and lens aperture to get the pictures just right. I figured out that you could see whether you had the correct exposure by looking through the little viewfinder at the top of the camera and holding the shutter release down gently, but not enough to take a picture. There's a little gauge to the left with a plus sign, a circle, and a minus. If the red plus sign flashes, it's overexposed (too much light getting into the lens). If the red minus flashes, it's underexposed. If you've got it just right, the circle in the middle should flash green.

So during my Bachelor's Park shoot, I made sure that the green circle flashed as often as possible by tweaking the shutter speed and the lens aperture. I used a whole roll of film (including two pictures I took of Cheeky the night before and one I took looking down the street of my childhood home - the latter of which turned out to be quite an eerie picture). It's a great time of year for nature shoots anyway; being autumn there's some beautiful experimentation to be done with colour, and in the park there are a few lovely wood carvings of characters from 'Alice in Wonderland'. There's a little birdhouse up there as well - as in, a greenhouse with birds in it - but we weren't able to get in. Some nice, up-close pictures of the birds would have been fantastic.

I got the pictures developed the very same day, at Imaging Solutions in town. £9 it cost me! Compare that to the £7 I'd normally spend at Max Spielmann's in St Helens... blimey. Film photography is certainly an expensive habit. I'm probably going to get a DSLR with my next studet finance payment. Photo printing is only 15p a picture from a digital camera.

Thursday was a much more eventful day at work, since the paper had gone out and we were starting to get once again swamped with people writing in. All the same, I went on a little walkabout at lunch time - the weather was gorgeous; too nice to sit in the office all day; plus I was hungry and had some photos to pick up.

The black and white prints turned out satisfactory, though a lot of them were blurred due to inadequate light. This didn't surprise me as a lot of the pictures had been taken on a winter evening. I'd try to defend them as having an almost spectral quality to them but - well, they're a bit naff. You can see what's on them but it's all fuzzy and vague.

The colour film was my main concern. Because my camera had faffed up and the film had detached itself, I hadn't been able to rewind it. I'd realised in Blue Planet that something was horribly wrong. At home, I made the crucial mistake of opening it up - and even though I did it with the curtains closed, the film was still exposed to white light. I was expecting the worst when I picked up the film, but the result wasn't terrible. The Perry shot survived, as did the rather ironic one of Anna sulking because I wouldn't take a picture of her. I lost all the Blue Planet and museum photos, but got a few of the rather arty ones of a heap of my jewellery. I'm hoping to turn those into a large-scale painting.

The funny thing is, I didn't see these travesties until I showed Jason later on. So this is the first glimpse he's seen of my photography, and they also happen to be totally not indicative of my skill. Excellent. So now I look like a crap photographer!

( Anyway... )