We went to Harrogate for a friend’s wedding, and decided to stay for a week and make a little holiday out of it. All of the pictures of the wedding dress are on Paul’s new camera, but he needs to download a software update before he can get the camera to speak to his computer. I might have to wait a while before I can show you the wedding dress in all its glory!
As a result of Paul buying himself a new camera, I inherited his old one. It’s a Canon 350D, and this is the first time I’ve used a digital SLR. I hadn’t used my old film SLR for about eight years, so I was a bit out of practice.
On the Wednesday we walked around Harrogate’s Valley Gardens – recently named by Alan Titchmarsh as his favourite public gardens. I can see why – the gardens are huge, and beautifully looked after. Paul took some beautiful photos of a very friendly squirrel.
These are my pictures from the day.
I’ve just uploaded everything I took that wasn’t actively out of focus. This was the first time I’d used the 350D, and I was mostly fiddling about to see how the different lenses worked.
On Friday we walked all the way through the Valley Gardens, into the Pine Woods, and out the other side to RHS Harlow Carr. We followed their Winter Interest Trail, which took us all the way round the gardens and included the bird hide, where there were dozens of feeders set up. We saw lots of different types of tits and finches, and Paul managed to take some pictures of a greater spotted woodpecker, which was rather exciting!
The half hour we spent watching the birds was the most relaxing thing I’ve done in a very long time. It was beautiful to sit quietly and watch them fluttering about.
These are some of the photos I took on Friday.
They’re a bit more edited in the sense that I’ve left out a lot more pictures, but I’ve done almost no processing on these. Two (above) have been cropped, and only one’s been fiddled with. The rest are exactly as they came out of the camera.
Despite the fact that the weather was very grey and drizzly, I’m amazed at how bright the colours are in some of these.
I don’t think any of the pictures will be good enough to use for my 2010 calendar project, but I think they’re a pretty good start!