My latest kit is in the store at PBP (actually it has been there for a whole week I have just been to slack to post about it!)

Night Garden - $4.50

And my lovely new guest CT have been very busy creating with it and totally blowing me away with their style and skill… take a look at just a handful of their great LOs!

By Debbie

By Mela

by Jenann

by Toby

by Amandac

By dlynch

by Indaba

by Mamacass

By Busy-Butterfly

by Nee

In honour of the ludicrous amount of cake we have consumed in our house this week (it was my boy’s first birthday) this weeks Flickr Friday theme is - CAKE!

1. Strawberry Törtchen, 2. Cupcakes, 3. Birthday Cake, 4. colored light 3/3, 5. Cake Detail, 6. Untitled, 7. Chest of Drawers, 8. Elmo cake, 9. Day 168 - Happy Birthday, John!
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Join in and scour flickr for the most delicious cake images you can find! Or maybe you have a cake image of your own you want to post! Make sure you link directly to your Flickr Friday post with the Mr Linky thingy below and make sure you go visit some other FF participants and say hi!

So I am signed up to do the lovely Hallie’s Through the Lens Digital Photography 101 online classes and the first assignment has been up for a day or two now… to RTFM or ‘read the bleeping manual’ and take your best shot!

Now I have read the manual from my Nikon d70… a few times actually, but there is soooooo much information crammed into that little book. While I understand most of what I read when I read it, as soon as I put it down I promptly forget how to turn the flash off on manual mode or which button locks the auto focus. When I am in the throws of actually taking a photo I don’t think I am ever going to master the art of remembering the knowledge and actually being able to put it into action. By the time I have figured out which button changes the f-stop and remember exactly what that is and how I want to use it, the child I wanted to photograph is long gone and the sun has moved and the animal wandered away….

I don’t feel like I am ever going to be able to take in and assimilate all of the knowledge in that camera manual, so I stick safely to the auto mode even though I know I am missing out on all of the fun of actually owning a DSLR. I am going to try again though, I am going to read the manual again, play with the buttons, try to get this half empty brain of mine to take in some of the information and make it useful…. but I must admit I don’t have very high hopes!

Wish me luck - I will post my ‘best shot’ for the assignment here soon (as well as in the flick group) and if you are wanting to join in there is still time, just head on over to the blog for directions on how to sign up!

For those of us who play around with photoshop a bit, and like to think we know a little bit, but still have lots to learn… I think this site might make us all feel a little bit less amateur…

Photoshop Diasters - this blog show cases some terrible mistakes people have made ‘photoshopping’ images for ads and publications. I think my all time favourite has to be this one where they photoshopped out her belly button… opps. Or this one which is a High School Musical CD cover… how can they get away with this stuff?

If highly paid professionals can make mistakes like these, then I could so do that job!!

Hours and hours of time wasting fun here!

This week’s Flickr Friday theme is ‘Trees’… in honour of those we are going to plant on Sunday in celebration of my little boy’s first birthday!

1. tree, edited, 2. my christmas tree, 3. wintertree, 4. green trunk, 5. Lost, 6. Inverted Light, 7. Untitled, 8. Gioia al mondo - Joy to the world, 9. Solo maple leaf - San DIego

Join in! Sign up with the Mr Linky below - linking directly to your blog post with your Flickr Friday. It doesn’t have to be a mosiac, a single image will do, but I used bighugelabs.com to create the mosaic and compfight.com to find the creative commons flickr images. I will even let you play if you didn’t post on a Friday - I am that kind of girl! Make sure you leave a comment and go and take a look at everyone else’s contributions as well.

I was browsing the gallery at PBP last night, leaving a bit of comment love around the place (and procrastinating when I should have been finishing some design work!) and this lay-out caught my eye…

It’s by Timkova, using Lazy Kitty’s ‘A lilbit grungy-paper’ and ‘Fun with beads’, Christina Renee’s ‘All stitched and twisted circles’ and her own wings and heart coming soon to Timkova’s blog! (I hope that is the right link!)

I just love this lay-out. It is not really my style of scrapping. I struggle to make circles and main element of any of my pages, I am not good at the realistic layered, clustered style like this, but for some reason I just can’t stop looking at it. The colours, such great combinations. the black and white image with those blue blue eyes as the focus, and those way cool wings. It has depth and vibrancy. It makes me want to scrap like this….

I hope it inspires you too.

I have a Nikon D70 - it’s ace (though not as ace as my old Nikon D50 actually) but I rarely if ever take it out of auto mode. I did basic SLR photography at school, I know the words apeture, and the acronym DOF even if I am not entirely sure how to apply that knowledge…. but I really don’t know how to use my camera. So because I have so much free time on my hands (NOT!) I decided now was the time to get a bit of motivation and inspiration and maybe to actually learn how to shoot in something other than auto mode and I’ve signed up for ‘Through the Lens: Digital Photography 101‘.

The very talented and quite lovely Hallie over at ‘From the Rubber Room‘ is hosting “a workshop for anyone that wants to improve their photography skills”.

Hallie posts amazing photos on her blog, as well blogging about her life and family. What I love best about Hallie is that she takes photos of ‘real things’, beautiful things but real things. You know, she is not in a studio, she isn’t off on some fancy location, quite often she is at home, in her backyard, taking photos of every day life and making them look amazing! I want to learn how to do that!!

You can find out some more information and how to sign up for the workshop here. The assignments start on June 20th and I will hopefully be posting my assignments here at LCD - provided life and/or the camera manual doesn’t get the better of me! So if you want to learn how to use your camera better then join in!

So this week I used compfight to search flickr and popped in the word ‘hands’…

1. Vibrantly Rabari, 2. ????? ???? ?????? ????? ???? ??????, 3. Untitled, 4. Bloom, 5. Port-57, 6. withering depths, 7. Clock, 8. Ira henna, 9. Striking a Chord

If you enjoy looking for inspiration on Flickr feel free to join in and play along…. Or maybe you have your own image of ‘hands’ that you’d like to share? Either way, use the Mr Linky below to link us to your post for Flickr Friday’s - hands!