Hello Autumn!

As much as I love sunny days, I'm so glad autumn is here. I mean, we are one season away from Christmas, and that in itself is very exciting. I love the whole Atmosphere autumn has. The dark nights, cold days, rain, woolly jumpers, and boots. I love the feeling you get after coming home from school, drenched from the rain, jump into a onsie and have a hot chocolate while curled up on the sofa.

Autumn also means Halloween, pumpkin carving, candles that smell like apple and cinnamon (I have one lit now), blankets, the change of colour in the leaves, switching out your wardrobe for sweaters, walks with cold air, beautiful sunsets and sunrises that we get to see (why does the sun rise at 4am in summer?!), and of course the fab photos that can be taken!

I can't wait to start posting autumnal inspired bakes, Coffee cake, spiced apple upside down cake, and a whole load more! I'm hosting a Macmillan coffee morning and will of course blog about that!

What are you most looking forward to this fall, as we say goodbye summer, and hello autumn!

 

Leave a comment below, or tweet me @ellaunderhill your favourite things about autumn!

Review || Real Techniques Brushes

Hello! Today I have a little review on Real Techniques makeup brushes and what I think each brush is best for!

The Core Collection

The core collection is a set costing £21.99, that contains four brushes; the Buffing brush, the Contour Brush, the Pointed Foundation brush and the Detailer brush.

The Buffing brush is probably the most used in my collection, it buffs in foundation or concealer really, really well and I can't imagine finding a brush I like better for my base than this one any time soon!

The Contour brush, can obviously be used for contour, but I like it for powder, if I want to be precise, the size of this brush allows me to be more precise while applying powder! I've heard that a lot of people like it for concealer as well!

Now I have to be honest, I never use this Pointed Foundation brush. As I said my favourite brush for bases is the buffing brush, I never have liked the classic foundation brushes for applying makeup as it's just like painting a layer on top of your face rather than being able to blend it in well, but everyone is individual  and some people may love this brush, it's just not my cup of tea.

The Detailer brush is perfect for applying concealer very precisely, and I also like to use it for inner corner highlights or just eyeshadow in general!

Finishing Brushes

I have two, the Blush brush and the Stippling brush. A Stippling brush costs £11.99 and a blush brush costs £9.99. For some odd reason I forgot to take photos of the stippling brush for this post - sorry! I find the stippling brush is great for bases, before I bought the Core Collection I used to use it all the time! It's also great for products such as cream blushes and other cream products!

The blush brush is not the greatest for blush application, it's so big! I'd recommend it if you're wanting to go for a bronzed look to apply some bronzer around the perimeter of your face!

Eye Brushes

The two eye brushes I have are the Fine Liner brush and the Shading brush. The Fine Liner brush is £6.99 and the Shading brush is £7.99.

The Fine Liner brush is quite self explanatory really, it's good to use for gel eyeliner. I don't use it much because I prefer using liquid eyeliner as its so quick but when I have used it, it's been good.

I recently bought the Shading brush, it's fantastic for blending eyeshadows, it fits perfectly in the crease of the eye. A dream to use.

Duo Fiber Collection

The Duo Fiber collection is a set of three brushes, costing £23.99. It comes in black and white and they're extremely soft!

The Eye brush is quite big, but good for blending out the edges of an eyeshadow look and making sure they're not too harsh!

The Contour brush is very similar in size and shape to the contour brush in the Core Collection, it's good for contouring, I like it with highlighter as it applies product more sheerly therefore you don't look like there's been an explosion at the highlighter factory!

The Face brush is good for bronzer again, the same as the blush brush, it's great for the golden look! It's also good for sheer powdering!

I hope you found this helpful if you were thinking about starting or adding to your Real Techniques collection! 

What's your favourite makeup brush?

Lots of love,

Emma xxx

Blog Photography and Tips!

Hello!
Today I thought I'd take advantage of another snow day and write a blogpost. I was originally planning to get this posted in a few weeks as I did not know when I'd have time to take any photos for it, but along came more snow so I have time today (woo! Give the snow a pat on the back;) ) Any way, I'm going to take photos of how I take photos for you! I hope you enjoy!

I'm not a professional photographer, but I enjoy photography a lot and I'm sure that my photos have improved since I started my old blog year and a bit ago.

I always think the quality of photos is important. This doesn't mean you need a camera, while you might find it useful it really isn't essential. Most phones have good cameras these days, and I often will use my iPhone for photos mainly when I'm baking.

This is my Nikon D5000, the larger lens is the lens it came with, the 18-55mm and the smaller lens is one from another camera that used to belong to my Granddad, the 35-70mm. 

This is an Olympus SP-720UZ. It's a bridge camera and the first camera I got when I started getting into photography a couple of years ago.

If you're wondering which iPhone I have, it's the 5C.

The first thing is finding somewhere to take your photos, I take mine around my room, as you can probably tell, I love fairy lights and I love having them in the background of my photos because i think it adds a bit more interest to them.

I think when you're taking photos, you should try a few different angles and backgrounds because if you don't try then you'll never know whether there's an angle that looks amazing will you?

what's annoying is when it's too sunny and the photo is either bright white sunlight or really dark in the foreground and really bright in the background! I often have to close my blinds while taking photos on a sunny day! 

As you can see, the Olympus and the Nikon pick up light and colours differently and have different depths of fields.

Having more than one product in a photo and then trying different angles and compositions is something I do very often!

changing the composition makes a bigger difference than you think to the same products!

If you have a camera that has manual focus, I suggest you use that, it allows you to have more control over where the main focus of the image is, which can always be something that annoys me with auto focus, it doesn't always focus the way you want it to!

with a 35-70mm lens you can capture an image this close at the distance above!

Make sure you take each image a few times, refocusing each time, we all know how annoying it is to take a photo and be really happy with it until you see it properly and realise it's not in focus! It happens to me all the time, especially if i take the photo on my shelf, I'm not very tall so half the time i end up on my tip-toes trying to take a photo and lets say they don't always turn out successfully...

My last tip is lighting. Try to use natural lighting and no flash, this will make the colours show more true to life and they'll be good quality! It's best to take photos at the brightest time of day, around midday! I took mine at about 2.30/3pm (I was going to take them earlier but i got a bit distracted with lunch and tv) so it was bit later and I didn't edit any of them if you were wondering! Also, if you're thinking of editing, try to keep it to a minimum because it can decrease the quality of the photo a lot!

Couldn't not show you the snow we had today, it nearly goes up to my knees!!

I hope you found this post interesting or useful, if you want to ask me any questions, leave a comment or look how to contact me in the 'Contact us' page!

I hope you've had a good week so far, nearly the weekend!
Lots of love,
Emma xxx