Onegav

Can you believe it’s the 230th day of the year! Time is absolutely melting away, it’s frightening.

A sign of getting older, I guess, time speeding up; but it just makes me want to live life and experience it’s wonders more than ever!

Today, Izzy was back at my side, eager to head out on one of our little adventures. Livvy was on a sleep over at her friends last night, and Izzy has missed her so much, so it was nice to take her out and about and keep her mind occupied for a while today.

She’s such great company too, always up for adventure, always questioning the world around her and so hungry to learn about everything. Kids really are amazing!

Anyway, whilst scouting about on Google for the location of the caves I mentioned a couple of days ago, I stumbled across a marker that read “Runcorn Castle” on the map. So today that’s where me and Izzy were heading.

It’s a strange thing you know, I’ve seen signs for the castle before, but it didn’t really register with me that it would be a real castle! I thought I’d just know, if there was something like that just 4 miles away from my house…..

Wrong, it is a real castle, with amazing views!! It’s got some interesting history behind it too, have a read here if your interested: http://www.castlesfortsbattles.co.uk/m/halton_castle_runcorn.html

That said, we couldn’t actually get into the castle today, we could only have a stroll around out side it’s walls, which merge with the sandstone rock it’s foundations rest on.

It didn’t matter, Izzy loved running around the walls, and she was really interested in the church that also sits on the same site.

So, that’s another trip for later in the year, maybe midweek when the castle will be open hopefully, to get a peek inside.

I did take some shots of the walls close up, but as I plan to go back one day I’ll save the castle for another day.

The views across to Liverpool and right over to North Wales were amazing, and the Mersey Gateway Bridge looked awesome; and it was the first time I’ve been able to capture that mega curve it carries as it crosses the Mersey.

Learnings – Not really a learning, but another promise to myself; I really don’t know a lot about my in camera white balance. Indeed, white balance is the only setting I leave on auto.

Everything else I adjust to suit the scene or what or how I want to capture it; white balance though, I have always left on auto.

I do feel though that it would help my with my landscape images. Occasionally, as with today’s image of the bridge, the light is not quite right for me, and I can’t adjust it to where I want it in the edit; I think, it’s because the camera chose a different white balance to what I would have (assuming I knew what I was doing with it!).

It looks fairly straight forward, cloudy sky, pick “cloudy”, bright sun, choose “day light” and so on. It seems so straight forward I’ve just let the camera get on with it, but every now and again I capture images that have a slight “metallic” look to the highlights, and my current thinking is the white balance is off.

I might be wrong, but it’s the last thing I need to learn to have full control over my camera, so I think it’s time to jump on in!