All Things Lovely

May Photo A Day

Here's how my May Photo A Day looked. Sadly...I didn't love with all my heart a lot of these photos but you can't win them all! You can check out the rest of the year here, here and here. You can follow along with me on Instagram as well!

God Save The Queen

Happy Monday! Today is a public holiday in Australia to celebrate the Queen's birthday, so, in honour of Her Majesty, and the fact I'll be finally visiting the motherand in Setpember, here' some of my favourite images of England.

 

One The British Monarchy Two London Dream Three Tryppyhead Four The Salty Sailor Five Jane Emma Photography

 

Vintage Inspired Science Posters At Vol25

I've always been a big fan of the work of Jesica Rose from Vol25 fame. I have a few of her prints in my home, and on my photo wall, but her new vintage inspired science posters have made me really excited!

I'm planning a big new redo of my lounge room, taking away some of the frilly girliness, and changing it to a bit more industrial vibe. One of these posters will fit right in.

I'm struggling to pick my favourite, but I think it's the top butterflies one. What's your favourite?

April Photo A Day

Here's how my April Photo A Day looked. For Autumn...a surprising amount of time at the beach and a mini holiday! You can check out the rest of the year here and here. You can follow along with me on Instagram as well!

Tote Bag Gifts And Wrapping

Happy Monday! Hope your weekend was lovely. Mine was busy but fun. The weather was so horrible here in Sydney, so not many fun outdoor activities.

I've been away from blogging for so long that I'm about to show you something I made for Christmas 2011. Yep, 2011. I love making a small gift for my close girlfriends each year. Half the fun is dreaming up what to make about twenty of.

Inspired by the beautiful tote bags made by the talented people at The Purl Bee (side note, that blog is so lovely! I want to make everything!) I decided to make up a bunch of their great 20 minute tote bags for Christmas gifts. Using home decorator weight fabric from my favourites; Heather Bailey, Joel Dewberry and Amy Butler, I whipped them up. Well, whipped is probably not the word! They took me a bit longer than 20 minutes, but once you get on a roll you can get them churned out pretty quickly.

When it comes to wrapping gifts, I'm incredibly fussy and I really prefer to wrap things in boxes! I couldn't find any cheap enough, so ended up sucking up my OCD and wrapping everything in brown paper bags. Much cheaper!! Plus I actually loved the look. It's amazing what a brown paper bag, doily and some string can do.

Are you a handmade gift person? I love seeing people get all excited about it, and especially seeing them using their bag, makes it very special.

My Favourite iPhone Photos Apps

I am little obsessed with Instagram at the moment, especially since I'm doing the Photo A Day challenge. Friends sometimes ask what apps I use for all my photos so I thought I'd share my favourites. This isn't a sponsored post, just my favourite and most used apps.

I take the majority of my photos just with the camera on the iPhone. I never use the camera in the Instagram App, and will only edit my photos in Instagram if I'm in a hurry. I do love the Brannan filter though. I want my photos to start in a high resolution for printing later on. 

Mt first normal step is to open the photo on Afterlight. This app is awesome. I crop and add a filter generally through this app. You can actually do pretty much everything in it. Change the brightness, edit the contrast, sharpness, shadows etc.

Once I've done that I often want to add a filmy grain to it. Especially for my Photo A Day projct, I try and have some consistency with the grain and the frame. For my grain I use Blender. I've downloaded lots of overlays such as Mextures by Merek Davis, NDPATTERNS by Simon Fletcher and brenoverlays by Bren at Shalecubs. I am a little in love with overlays. Blender basically merges two photos into one, so you can do awesome edits with other photos. I'm a fan.

Once I've jazzed it all up, I'll either move it to Snapseed or Camera+. Snapseed I mainly use if I want to add some nice soft focus, and fiddle with some other things.

Last step is moving into Camera+ to add the border. I decided to stick with a thin black border for all my photos but they've got some other really nice frames. You can also add some more great filters through this app.

What are your favourite apps? I'm always on the look out for more! Happy iPhoneography!