This is going right back to October ‘09, literally days after I’d taken delivery of the K20D. All of these were shot on the 18-55mm kit lens whilst trying to get to know the camera.

The Reading Party is an excuse for the entire junior honors year group to go to a lovely old 18-bedroom house on the bank of the river North Esk, to give presentations & drink wine. Lots of wine.

The house sits in 190 acres of beautiful woodland, but unfortunately for us it rained for the entirety of the second day, when we had the afternoon to ourselves & could otherwise have had a nice walk.

Nothing of any particular photographic merit in here, just really shapshots with copious application of the rule-of-thirds when cropping.

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Trying to get bokeh & retain subject sharpness with the kit lens…

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Gorgeous interior decor in most of the house.

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The taps in this bathroom were particularly nice.

I would quite happily have taken some of these home, if they hadn’t been attached quite so firmly…

My parents are in town for a few days & this morning we went for a walk along the coastal path heading out of St Andrews from East Sands. Took a few photos of rocks & such & a few panoramas, but haven’t stitched any of those together yet. We were quite surprised at the number of butterflies about though, considering the weather – in fact, one of the reasons that they stayed still long enough to photograph was because they were too cold to fly! This was taken with the Pentax Optio A30 in automatic mode – didn’t want to risk it flying away whilst I was setting up the shot manually! Not bad macro capabilities for an ultra-compact.