Retreat is actually the name of the farm my uncle owns. 

We went over there a week ago to celebrate my granny’s 80th, while wandering the farm I discovered a ladder leaning against the main shed. It did not actually occur to me to climb up there until my other uncle (not the one who owns the farm) suggested we could, he also offered to hold the ladder while I went up. It was slightly terrifying, but I got good photos, which is what matters right. There are a lot of chooks at the homestead too so of course I took a lot of pictures of them as well. So without further ado, here are a very few of the hundreds of photos I took at the farm. 

The chook pen is beside the Homestead but you have to go through this really cool gate and vine covered arch to get there. It makes me think of portals to other times and book covers, but it is terribly hard to get a photo of it that looks any good. This one turned out okay though, thanks to the chook. 

 The old homestead at Retreat has recently been done up and is a lovely place to stay, all our family actually fit, with rooms to spare! Which is just not possible anywhere else, because there are so many of us.

Said ladder, that I was not going to climb.... because it was way too high.... but I did anyway.

 The photo below is probably  my favourite shots I took, well today anyway.

And from on the shed roof...

 I was very pleased with how this panorama worked out it is a 180 degree, shot from the corner of the roof.

 even solar panels make nice photos.

 The morning we left I walked out to the hay shed and got some photos there, before hurrying back for breakfast and to help pack up. 

Where have you gone for recent holidays?

Do you have a favourite photo?

My family recently came back from holidays and since then I have had four photo shoots in seven days, (One of which was a wedding) so that equals a lot of photos and when you count all the photos from holidays as well that is a lot of editing to deal with, I have completely lost count of how many photos I am up to now. But I have got some shots I really like. And so to apologize for my almost silence, here are some nice photos for you to look at from my holidays.

As the title says, here are a few little bits of beauty I have noticed and photographed in the last few weeks. Sometimes we can get so much from just stopping and enjoying the beautiful things around us instead of always rushing past to wherever we are going. 

Of course I write this to myself just as much as anyone. This though is one good thing about photography, you have to stop and look around and sometimes even seek out the beautiful things God has here for us to enjoy. Look around and make sure you don't miss out the beautiful things he sends you each day, because you forget to look and really see.

 What lovely things have happened in your life recently?

When did you last notice and thank God for the flowers he sends you?

We have new life in our saviour! What a blessed day, the day we remember how he defeated death. Easter is just a wonderful time of the year. It is also an excuse to take photos (not that I need excuses), so I did an Easter photo shoot of my littlest sister the other evening and she is just the cutest ever so I had to share the photos. 

I did a photo shoot of Ann last Easter with the same basket of chalk eggs, and since those eggs had survived a whole year without being used I decided we better do it again you can see last years post here. My photography and editing has improved since then. And of course I rarely took photos in RAW then, but all these were taken in RAW before I edited them and saved them as jpg. files. Sorry about all that technical talk for those of you who do not understand such things. You may now scroll down and enjoy the photos.

And for anyone who is interested in the photography side (technical talk) of these photos, as I said I took them all in RAW and then edited them in Lightroom. In these two last shots you can see the original shot in the corner and how it turned out after editing. 

You may have noticed that I took nearly all these photos with the camera facing towards the sun which would probably be a mistake if I was not taking them in RAW. But in a RAW file there is such a great range of information and I could bring back as much light as I wanted, and fix up the white balance to be nice and warm. And in this next shot actually make it look a bit hazy. RAW files always need editing, but the final result is so much better and they are much easier to edit without loosing any information than jpg. files are.

The main edits I have done to all these images were adding exposure, some to the whole photo and other parts just over Ann, also adding a little contrast and obviously sharpening them, as all RAW files need to be sharpened at least a little. Anyway I hope you enjoyed those photos, happy Easter!

Does your family have any Easter tradition?

Have you ever tried taking photos in RAW? or do you always shoot jpg. If you have not tried it you seriously should!