Bees, butterflies and hoverflies are loving our garden at the moment and it’s great to see. unfortunately, whilst taking some of these photos yesterday I fell from the chair I was standing on and have bruised my ribs, possibly broken a toe and am covered in bruises all down my left side. I am feeling pretty sorry for myself today!

I’m glad to say that the cats aren’t at all interested in any of the insects that flutter about in our garden so we don’t have to worry about them getting stung.

I absolutely love this time of year. It’s warm enough to open all the windows so the house is full of lovely fresh air and I can venture outside without wrapping up in a million layers. The cats are happier as they can play outside more and there are flowers! Our garden is just starting to wake up.

One of my resolutions for the year is to use more of my film cameras. We went for a walk today with my Agfa Isola. I dropped the film off on the way home so when it’s back from the developers I’ll post the photos.

I also took a few pictures with my phone.

I’m worn out now so I’m going to snooze on the sofa with some cats.

We went for a wonder by the river today, ended up walking about 2 miles.

There’s been lots of yarn bombing in Bristol recently, this was in Castle Park.

We took a slight detour from the river to go to the Slow Food Market.

Daz had a chocolate and pecan brownie, it looked so good, I wish could have eaten it!

I had a slice of gluten-free almond and blueberry cake.

Hope you’re all having a lovely weekend. I’m off to do more gardening now :)

We visited Daz’s family at the weekend. His mum has a lovely cat called Poppy.

We saw this amazing vehicle – more here Insect Circus

We passed a pig farm and this little piglet had escaped and lost its mum. Daz’s family thought I was insane for jumping over the fence to rescue it and to try and find its mum.

This pig wasn’t it’s mum, her babies were much bigger. Being lost, it was following any pig it could find in search of a drink.

Daz’s mum’s garden was full of ladybirds, I gave up counting after finding 20.

Bristol hosts lots of great events, one of which is the Kite Festival. It’s at Ashton Court (where the Balloon Fiesta was), on top of the hills above Bristol. There are lots of incredible kites, inflatables and some very skilled kite flyers.

I was hoping to see a cat kite but there wasn’t one. There was a giant tiger though so I’ll post pictures of that soon. Maybe I’ll have design a cat kite.

I haven’t had my films developed yet so I thought I’d share some of my photos from the last time we went. You can see lots more on my Lomography Home.

Daz and I went to visit my parents over the weekend. They live in beautiful Devon. My brother and his wife were there too, with my gorgeous nephew and niece. The weather was better than forecasted and we managed a trip to the beach to go rock-pooling, finding all sorts of little sea creatures. We ate lots of my mum’s wonderful home cooked food and had a lovely time. Here’s some of my Instagram photos from our time. I’m Starpixie on Instagram if you want to look me up :)

I *love* instant film. It’s always magical to have a photo develop infront of your eyes. Having a physical photograph that you can stick on your wall, give to a friend or put in an album is great too. With digital I end up with so few printed photographs, everything is on the computer.

This is my Fuji Instax camera, it takes the Fujifilm Instax Instant Film which is easy to get hold of. The negative thing about it is that it’s huge! It’s so bulky and I don’t take it out as much as I would like because of that. I am tempted to get one of the smaller Instax cameras that are more handbag sized.

I got this, and a lot of my other cameras, at a carboot sale. They’re great places for picking up stuff like this for next to nothing. I think this one cost a couple of pounds.

The colours are great, so deep and bright. Some instant films tend to look faded but this stuff is lovely. I have just loaded it with some very old expired film so I expect that might have lost some of it’s colour over time. I’ll post the results soon.

One of my favourite things about using film for photography is the joy of double exposures. I took these photos with my Nikon F55 which is a film SLR that you can pick up for next to nothing. It uses all the lenses that my D300 does so I get all the joy of film with all the modern technology that comes with digital. I used slide film and got it cross-processed at Photographique.

For these photos I shot the whole roll of film around the city of Bristol where I live. I then rewound the film and put it through my camera again, photographing flowers and leaves and other naturey stuff. It’s pretty simple to do, there’s a tool for hooking the end of the film out of the canister once it’s wound back in or you can take it to your local photographic developing shop and they should be kind enough to do it for you.

There are lots more here if you click on the thumbnails.

It’s Daz‘s birthday, the big 30!

Check out the awesome T-shirt I got him, it’s from RCTEES on Etsy.

We tried to get some photos of Daz holding the cats but they were too excited about the packet of Dreamies in his pocket that they didn’t want to stay still.