Only in Kenya

For the first time in months I’ve had the twin luxuries of time and energy to do some tasks that I’d been putting off for ages – the main one being to finally finish editing and uploading my photos of our holidays in Kenya!

I’m really, really pleased with the way they came out. I took over 1500 shots over the 10 days we were there, picked out the best ones and did some minor tweaking. I shoot in RAW, so I can correct the exposure and white balance before converting the images to jpegs. Then all I do is make minor changes to the contrast and colour saturation, maybe sharpen a bit, crop and possibly convert to black and white. With monochrome I usually use the “split channel” option and then select the red channel, which I believe gives a similar effect to using a red filter, which is commonly done when shooting with black and white film.

I love shooting in digital. I used to get so frustrated when I would send a roll of film to be developed, and it would come back overexposed or with the colours looking dull and lifeless. There’s a lot that happens in the developing stage, and without a darkroom, one has no control over that with film.  Not to mention the fact that with digital you can take as many pictures as you can fit on your memory card!

Here is a mosaic of some of my favourite Kenya pictures:

I’ve organised my Flickr set and tagged it with each day and location, although I’ve not yet gone through all the pictures and given them titles and descriptions. So if you’re interested in the different places we went to, you can look at the photos for Nairobi National Park, Mountain Lodge, Aberdare, Lake Naruku, Samburu and the place that completely blew me away, the Masai Mara.

It wasn’t an easy holiday – I found it hard to reconcile our status as Western holidaymakers, staying in beautiful safari lodges, with the poverty in which the majority of Kenyans seem to live. Being an active person, I also found it very difficult to be in the van for hours and hours every day. But it was definitely an incredible experience, and I’m really pleased with my pictures!

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A Very Important Cake

The fruit had been soaking in brandy for over a week, the ingredients were all to hand, and after I got back from taekwon-do I had the whole afternoon without a pressing reason to leave the flat (apart from the sunshine, but hopefully that will still be there tomorrow). So it was time to start work on our wedding cake.

My friend Jackie gave me an awesome fruit cake recipe that she used for her own wedding, and I trialled it at Christmas. It was probably the best Christmas cake I’d ever tasted; dark, moist and richly fruity (and alcoholic).  So today it was time to make the real thing. Jackie lent me her cake tins, and I wrote up a spreadsheet in Excel to scale the recipe to the correct quantities for each tin.

Today I made the small and medium tiers – the large tier will require the entire oven to itself. I made up a huge batch of mixture (thank heavens for the large mixing bowl I inherited from Auntie Frida).

From top left, clockwise:

• Flour, ground almond, bicarb and spices
• Fruit (soaked in brandy for a week) in a little flour
• Eggs, treacle, zest and marmalade
• Butter and sugar

Assembly took some time as it involved folding in a spoonful of flour mixture, followed by some egg mixture, ad infinitum.

But eventually it was spooned out into the tins and smoothed down:

After this, the tins were wrapped in brown paper and placed very carefully in the oven for the whole afternoon. They’re still there, in fact, but they’re nearly done.

In other wedding-related crafting, I am now on the outer border of the Print O’ the Wave. I’ve done 11 repeats – one short edge and a corner. Ironically, despite putting in lifelines religiously, I haven’t needed to frog once (so far!), while Vivian (not wedding related) is totally kicking my ass at the moment. The yoke section of the pattern has no stitch counts at all, and I’ve already screwed up the decreases once and had to rip back (I foolishly didn’t put in a lifeline on the joining row, and couldn’t get one in straight, but as the yarn is aran and pure wool picking up the live stitches was quite easy). It’s further complicated by the fact that I’ve made sleeves 3 sizes bigger than the body, as they were too skinny for my arms.  Hoping someone on Ravelry will reply to my plea for help in the Vivian KAL!

Back to wedding crafting. I have knit 3 little roses out of the purple Fyberspates Scrumptious leftover from my Rose Red beret. I think if I’m going to make all the corsages and buttonholes out of the same yarn I’ll need a new skein – what hardship! Then I need some green yarn to make the leaves. And brooch pins. And a pretty bead to put in the middle of each rose.

I’m also in the process of taking photos for the invitations. We are hoping to get Moo postcards with a collage of meaningful photos on the front. The main one will be of the rings. To this end, I borrowed our friend Ben’s macro lens and spent some time playing around with it the other day.

All I can say is, macro photography is MAGIC. The letters on the engraving are only a few millimetres tall. And you can even see the weave in the pillowcase I used as a background! I’m going to have another photoshoot, hopefully tomorrow, and I plan to make a few changes:

• Use something smoother (paper?) as a background
• Stop it up a bit (or should that be down?) – the depth-of-field is a bit too small at F2.8
• Polish the rings! They look shiny and clean to the eye, but the macro lens reveals all my grubby fingerprints
• Wait for a time with more diffuse light so I don’t get reflections of the sunny window.

And now it’s less than 3 months to the date (woo!) I can get on with filling out the boring paperwork…

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Snow

It was snowing pretty heavily yesterday afternoon when I got home; I managed to grab a couple of photos from our living room window before the light faded completely.

High Street roofs, February.

High Street, February.

This morning, despite the forecast, the falling snow had turned to rain. Very disappointing!

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Mull and Iona

A couple of weeks ago The Fella and I spent the weekend on holiday with his family on Mull and Iona. It was incredible – particularly Iona. Now I see why artists and religious types are so inspired by the island.

Click on the mosaic to see more pictures.

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Over the sea to Skye

Last week The Fella and went on holiday to the West Coast of Scotland, specifically Lochalsh and the Isle of Skye. It was fabulous and I absolutely must go back there for some serious hillwalking and island-exploring one day.

In the meantime, click on the mosaic to go to my Flickr gallery for the week.

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October holidays

It’s taken me ages to get round to processing these pictures, but I’ve just uploaded a whole load of photos to Flickr of my holidays in October 2007.

Click on the mosaic (made using the spiffy tool here) to see all the photos from that holiday. Most are of our weekend away near Inverness, and there are a few taken in St Andrews and Crail when we visited with my parents. All are taken with my fantastic Canon Eos 400D.

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