Kitties, Cupcakes and Christmas Presents.

Well, today was a nice day.  This morning was spent on the usual "Monday Jobs" that I always have, but after lunch we went to Northampton, to see my niece, her husband and the baby.  Other niece was also there with her bf, so it was a real family afternoon.

This is Tilly the Kitten.  She is about 4 or 5 months old now and is getting very tall and long.  She's a really beautiful cat, with amazing markings and some wonderful red and orange colours in her fur.  Some of her markings remind me of a leopard or a tiger, she's got such lovely stripes and spots.  I couldn't resist taking a few shots of her, though only the last one gives any idea of the gorgeous colours of her coat.

The baby had a ball-pond as a Christmas present from her uncle and auntie.  Her daddy put it together this afternoon, as she'd been playing with the balls with him and J. She loved it. 

Here are our two girls.  The colours are a bit washed out, but they are lovely girls and we are proud of them.  C's baby is due in about 8 weeks now.  It's getting very exciting!

K. Showed us round their new home, which is a lovely Victorian house and quite a bit bigger than where they were living before. They moved here in November, but we haven't been able to go over there til today.

K. had made us all vanilla cupcakes, with pink icing.

 

Aided and abetted by a certain young lady...

We were also given lovely stew and dumplings for our tea - I haven't had stew for ages and it was a real treat!  We came home feeling very well fed!

And can you work out what this is? It's the Christmas present that K. ordered for me online, which only arrived on Saturday. I had it to unwrap this afternoon - I love extra presents!

It's fab! I really wanted one of these, as the light is often very poor here and I hope this will help with taking pics for my shop.  I'm so pleased with it!

Lots of space inside for my books and stuff.  It even has a front that velcros on and has a little gap to put the camera lens through, so you can make best use of all the available light inside!

I had to try it out.  These were various settings on my camera.  I don't think the flash version is very nice - obviously the trick is to switch off the flash, which I did for the second version - it's the "Portrait" setting.  I also tried the "Baby" setting, which is designed to use natural light with no flash.  I use it a lot, as it takes very good pictures - so long as the light is okay. The colours are always very true to life with that setting.

So here's a cropped-up version of the "Baby" setting.  These were all taken in my workroom, with artificial light and with the layout set up inside the new light-box.  I think the results will be even better in natural light. Better colours I should think.  Anyway, I'm very pleased with this and will be experimenting with it a lot in the next few days.  I may be able to re-shoot some of the pictures for items in my shop. 

Happy, happy...