Winners and Photos and Stuff..Oh My!

I do believe I have some winners to announce! After a little faffing around and some random number generating (always fun), selection of books number 1 goes to Sophie. Number 2 has been won by Vix, number 3 by Chloe and number 4 by Bex.

Please drop me an email and let me have your address. I should be able to squeeze in a trip to the Post Office tomorrow so if you can do it before then, that would be most useful! If not, it'll have to be on Tuesday.

And so onto the main point of today's post. It's time for the May Scavenger Hunt photo round-up. I've taken approximately 90 billion photos this month. Most of them are for work, as I'm currently deep in the process of rewriting the content for our webpages. It's surprisingly fun to do (mostly cos I can write interesting things and don't need to learn HTML or any of that sort of complicated stuff), but this initial stage involves a lot of photography, editing, uploading, tagging, captioning and so on. It probably shouldn't involve quite so much photography but I'm fussy and I want the perfect pictures to illustrate what I'm talking about, so that means taking them myself. Hopefully I'll have the bulk of it done soon and can then concentrate on writing fun articles and so on.

I'm not sure these are the perfect pictures to illustrate the scavenger hunt topics but crikey, this month's list was hard! If I wasn't trying and failing to photograph butterflies in the garden, I was lurking suspiciously near police cars.

Think vintage!

Vintage frock - check. Vintage jewellery - check. Newly purchased vintage bag - check.

A bicycle

I can't actually ride a bike. Luckily there is a cycle shop down the road with a rather snazzy sign in the window, so I didn't have to trek too far to find one.

An emergency vehicle

It's amazing how these scavenger hunt entries start making you notice things. I keep seeing police cars everywhere all of a sudden but it's awfully difficult to take photos of them without looking excessively shifty. Here's an ambulance off-roading it around Chatsworth.

A red door

I felt creepy enough lurking after emergency vehicles so I didn't really want to start loitering outside people's houses... A quick trip into the loft later and out came the windmill. Sylvanian Families FTW!

Something blue

Pots in the garden.

A cartoon character

Altogether now - JIMBO! JIMBOOO! DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH DUH!


A street light

This street light is surprisingly grand - all glossy black paint with shiny gold touches. It's also surprisingly hard to photograph in colour, hence the moody black and white picture.

A butterfly

A very old favourite of mine. I found it at Mr Smith's farmhouse on a holiday in the Lakes when I was about 3.

Texture

Some tree bark.

A sign of the zodiac

The email conversation I had with Char about what to choose for this was a lot more interesting than the actual photo:

"What's Virgo?"
"A virgin holding sheafs of wheat"
"Where on earth am I going to find one of those around here?!"
"You'd have more luck finding a lion."

Scales it is then. I love our scales - none of the retro looking new stuff in our kitchen. These are OLD.


An interesting local building

Work. I feel like the West Range doesn't get as much love as the other 3 sides of the house but I rather like the Victorian weatherboarding over the Tudor brick. And the Moat Garden is always lovely. Wish we had a proper moat though.

A portrait in black and white

Can you tell I've only just worked out how to use the black and white setting on my camera? It's one of those fancy schmancy settings with all kinds of techy exposure numbers which I really don't understand, and so the photos don't seem to be as easy to get in focus as usual. I decided to go with the blurriness and make it more so, with a little help from Picnik.