The Jungle Experience

The Jungle Experience is a huge greenhouse at Manor Heath Park, which I blogged about in my last post. It is extremely hot and sweaty in there, but because of this it can house some amazing plants and even some terrapins! As said before, we went to the park with the two youngsters, so some of these were taken whilst holding my 20 month old niece, so it was pretty tough!

1. A water lily

2. A pink flower

3. A flower that looks like baby birds feeding in the middle

4. A terrapin with a red head

5. Patterned leaves

6. Flower buds

7. A red flower

this was shared on:

Manor Heath Park

Manor Heath Park is my local park that I have played in throughout my entire childhood. The week before Easter and for Easter weekend we have had my two nieces and their mum at our house to spend some time here, whilst my brother worked back at home and then came up for Easter. We took the two kids to the park, and whilst I was there I took the opportunity to take some snaps!

Also at Manor Heath is a Jungle Experience, which my next two posts cover, which will be linked here once they are up!

The Jungle Experience 

Mt. Saint Bernard Abbey

As mentioned before in my previous two posts - Grace Dieu Abbey and Grace Dieu Abbey Photoshoot! -  me and my buddy Rex went on a cycle ride to go and discover an abandoned abbey. We then took a different way home and stumbled across this one, a real working monastery! It is an extremely impressive building, so we chained up the bikes and went for a wander round the gardens, which were immaculately kept and took some great snaps.

1. The front path leading to the front door

2. The building

3. A stone in the garden wall

4 - 8. Flowers in the garden

Photographer Spotlight

Today I have been featured in the Photographer Spotlight over on Stephy Lee Photography. It's a great blog and she posts some wonderful photos on there, you should go check her out! 

Also, read about how I got into photography, my favourite thing about photography and see my three favourite pics that I have taken, it was such a difficult choice!

Photographer Spotlight - Quick! Get my camera!

Grace Dieu Abbey Photoshoot!

As mentioned in my previous post - Grace Dieu Abbey - me and my mate Rex went on a cycle ride. After we had both taken our proper photos, we decided it was the perfect setting for a joke photo shoot! So with Rex as my model, we set up some hilarious shots taking the mickey out of the people who pay for extremely cheesy photos! After Rex had worked his magic, I whacked out the tripod and we both got in on the action!

Please remember that these are JOKE photos, as you can tell by the wry smile on some of them, as we struggled to hold ourselves together even for just the split second it took to take the photo! Enjoy!

Grace Dieu Abbey

A couple weeks back, myself and my buddy Rex went on a little cycle ride to a place called Grace Dieu Abbey. The ride there was pretty tough as there were some pretty monstrous hills to climb, but we did make it eventually!

As you can see it is an abandoned one that is in ruins now, but it still gave us some good photo opportunities! We also took plenty of joke photos, and they will be in my next post! After this we decided to take a different route home which was through some woods and on little country roads and we stumbled across the working monastery - which will be a further post in the next week or so!

Anyway, these are the photos of Grace Dieu Abbey:

Cycle Ride to Zouch

First of all, sorry for not posting in a while!

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago we had a really nice spell of good weather, so I hopped on my bike and went for a little ride to a place called Zouch. Funny name but I had never been and it turned out it was really pretty. I got quite into the bike ride so I decided I would cycle along and pic places that I thought would make a good picture, then on the way back I could snap them! This seemed like a good idea at the time, however as I got to the where I was about to turn around, I noticed a quiet little road that would lead me back home, and would have been nice and peaceful to cycle down. This however meant I missed all the photo opportunities on the way here! Doh! So I cycle back to where I had seen some opportunities I definitely wanted to get, then had to leave the rest as I carried on home.

In the end, I only got a few good photos from the trip, but it was really good exercise so that is a bonus!

Here are the photos from the ride:

This was shared on:

Fun in the dark

Unfortunately, this post is not as seedy as the title makes out!!!

Have nothing to do at 11 O'Clock at night? go out and take photos! At least that is what me and my buddies did. We cycled over to the multi-storey car park in Loughborough and started to shoot photos of things about! Having never really shot before in the dark, it was a huge learning curve, but playing with exposures, shutter speeds and apertures it started to come together. It was especially good because I got to use my new tripod and remote shutter!

After we had taken photos of the only good thing we could actually see (the tower below), we decided to ride the bikes with the lights on whilst using a fairly long shutter speed. As you can see from the photos we played around with different colours and flashing lights and different patterns to try and produce loads of different effects.

Eventually we moved onto the basketball court near to home which was so dark I had to use a torch to set up my equipment, however in the photos you would have no idea as the street lights in the distance bring everything to life.

Shooting at night is now going to be a new challenge of mine, as I love the way things can be seen in photos when in reality things were very dark or pitch black!

This was shared on:

Five Locks

After going to Kirkstall Abbey, Hana, her parents and I went to Five Locks. For those of you who don't know it, it is 5 locks in a row on a canal, pretty simple. And for those of you who don't know what a lock is..... well, for boats to go up and down hill on the canal, they have to enter a lock, close the door, let it fill up/empty out, then open the second door and they can carry on going as they will be level. It's really quite clever!

Anyway, enough of that engineering/canal lesson, here are the photos! Don't forget to check out the other photos from the day here - Kirkstall Abbey, Flower Power.