under the weather

Where did this phrase originate from, does anyone know? It sounds like there's a cloud of rain and misery floating around above your head, that no one can see. It's a funny thing, however it did come about.

On that note, I may as well say that school and life in general are getting to me right now. I officially have Cold #3 of 2015, such a good start, I know! Basically I just feel so drained and tired all the time, and school has just started back so I'm on the go all the time. I just wish I had one extra day at the weekend - right now I only have one day a week at home to relax.

But I can't complain. I get to see my friends, and I still get to dance. I'm just feeling ever more grateful for these little things as revision is slowly taking over everything.


On a completely unrelated note, I've really been loving these flower pictures I took last week. Maybe spring isn't so far away after all!

diy vintage photo effect using gimp

You may have noticed that on Picmonkey, if you want some of the really pretty effects, you have to pay. Which I have nothing against, at all. But sometimes, you just don't have the money to spend on little privileges, especially when you can easily do it yourself with a little effort.

One of my favourite Picmonkey effects is called Shiro. I set it just to see how my image would look.

It looks quite pretty, don't you think? If you would like to achieve this effect on your own images, I'm just about to show you.

Step 1.

Open your image on your editing software. I use Gimp, because it's so quick and easy to use.

Step 2.

You're going to want to head to the Brightness-Contrast option. For this image, I set the brightness to 10 and the contrast to -3. Basically, you just want to make the image lighter and with less contrast. Experiment and find the one you like best.

Step 3.

You could either do this step now or at the very end. Do it now if you feel like you know what you're doing, but you can always readjust if you don't like the final image.

Either way, you'll have to use the Curves tool. I dragged the highlights-counter past the lightest 'bulge' on the histogram to 164. This made the whole image pretty light. Like I said, you could leave this step til last if you like.

Step 4.

For this final step, you need to find the Colorize tool. Because I wanted this to be pretty vintage, I found a brown-ish hue that wasn't too yellow (18), and decreased the saturation right down to 16. Then just to finish I increased the lightness to 7, to lighten the darkness of the leotards and tights.

Here's the final image, and some others in the 'series'.

And there you go, how to get your own 'Shiro' effect from Picmonkey using Gimp! Enjoy :D

into the magical realm

Today I whipped up a quick edit of a shot I took last month. I used this photo I found on Flickr.

wales | day two

It's been a long time since I wrote this, but here you go - part 2! It's a very picture heavy post!

So the first thing we did in the morning was explore the wooded are in the middle of the caravan park. It was a huge sort-of indent in the ground; there was a stream and lovely nature walks to follow.

I was trying to get a family portrait (minus myself and Eben, who chose not to join us), but ended up with this, which I find equally funny. It just shows what our crazy little family is like!

Of course, I couldn't pass this little beauty and ended up with this picture.

The walk took us down to the sea, which was incredibly windy and cold. Sometimes I really regret not taking fingerless gloves everywhere with me!

Ta-dah! A lovely portrait of my parents.

There were three gorgeous dogs  playing around on the beach whilst we were there. They wouldn't stop dancing in the water and chasing footballs that were thrown for them.

The boys were rather proud of themselves here. Gabriel has learnt the art of drawing in the sand.

Here we go. This is my absolute favourite photo of these guys!

Time for a selfie with my beautiful little brother!

And one taken when he was least expecting it!

After the beach, we ate and my family went swimming. Meanwhile, I sat in the café/restaurant with a Slushie and the wifi. As nice as it was to take a break from everyday life, there's only so long you can go without talking to your friends, mainly the ones who live abroad or were holidaying in Italy.

Anyway, then we drove the short distance into town and sat down with good old fish and chips.

We saw these birds perched on a nearby roof as we sat looking out to sea with our food. Nothing like food at the seaside! Luckily, the weather had turned for the better by this time, so we didn't get rained on.

Walking along the quay gave us some spectacular views!

This was probably my favourite part of the day. The boats looked so, so pretty!

We found a lovely little park overlooking the water here, so we sat with ice creams and listened to a local guy busking. Well, he was just sitting in the park singing with his guitar, but then everyone went up to him with money, which surprised him a lot. But he shouldn't ave been surprised; he was incredible!

When we got back to the caravan, we looked at the town we had just visited, and saw this huge amount of smoke! So glad we got out of there when we did!

It was so good watching the sun set over the sea. We'd missed it before, but it was the clearest night and looked amazing.