iphone tour

Hello there!

Recently I've noticed that I am very close to my 50th post (this is the 46th), so I must start thinking of ideas to make it special. Can you believe it? 50 posts! Five zero. Wow... it's so exciting.

Anyways, for today's post I have for you a tour of my iPhone, a blue 5C with a yellow case. I'll show you my folders and all of the apps that I have in each one. Let's get started!

First off, I currently have Harri's wonderfully peachy wallpaper set as my lock screen, and for my home screen I have set the Apple confetti wallpaper. It's so pretty!

Mostly what I have on my home screen are the Apple apps that came with. Photos, weather, clock, maps, app store, the basic stuff. They're not really organized in order of how often I use them, rather it's just how I randomly placed them a while back and now I have gotten used to the arrangement, hehe. I probably use the photos app, the settings, and the app store the most.

Down below are the four apps I use the most: Messages, Safari, Gmail, and the camera, of course!

On the next screen I have all of my folders where I sort my apps by type. First, I have "Extras" and "Photo & Video". Extras is pretty much just a folder where I hide all the apps that I don't use but can't uninstall, haha! Stocks, Compass, Newsstand, Game Center, Passbook, the default mail app (I prefer Gmail), and the calculator (since I can access that by simply swiping up, why would I go to the app tile?).

The "Photo & Video" category is a bit more exciting, so I'll tell you about what each app does:

1// Spark - lets you create quick, simple videos composed of short snippets. It's really simple and a great alternative for when you're making a video with your friends and don't want the complexity of an app like iMovie.

2// Stop Motion Studio - I reviewed this app a while back. I think the name of it pretty much describes it and there's not much else to say except that I tried a lot of different stop motion apps and this was definitely my favorite.

3// Afterlight - I love Afterlight! It's easy to use but can do a lot. It has filters, light leaks, frames, and many, many setting such as brightness, contrast, sharpness, noise, saturation, exposure, etc.) And you can create your own filters for even faster editing! I really recommend this app, I use it for all of my Instagram photos.

4// Studio Design - This app has so many different overlays and design elements that it can honestly get a little overwhelming. But thankfully they are organized into packs, so it's easy to find what you need.

5// Whitagram - A simple app that lets you add white borders to your non-square photos.

6// Hyperlapse - Really simple app for making beautiful timelapses.

7// Self Timer Camera - TimerCamera - Again, pretty self-explanatory. An app for taking timed photos (I'm not sure if I want to update to iOS8).

8// Pic Collage - for creating collages! Lots of different options and you can edit your photos in the app.

In my "Social" folder all I have is Skype and Youtube. In my games folder I have eight apps. Minecraft is one of my favorites. I also have White Tiles 4, which puts lots of really simple games into one app. Recently I downloaded Trivia Crack and it has been so much fun - it's a game where you play against friends or random people and answer questions to try and be the first person to collect the characters from all six categories. So I recommend all three of those. The others, if you're curious, are: Plague, Plants vs. Zombies, Two Dots, Heads Up! and Flappy Bird.

The next category is "Music", where I have:

1// Smule Piano - a game where you play songs by tapping dots that move across the screen, really fun.

2// Chromatik - a music app with some sheet music, a metronome, tuner, etc. I also did a review on this app earlier.

3// Crossfader - this is a really cool app. You choose two songs from the app's library and it automatically synchronizes them so that they sound good together. You can then publish your favorites so others can listen to your mixes.

In my "Education" category I have some things for learning: a bookmark for a website with SAT words, a graphing calculator (it was super helpful last year when I wanted to check the graphs I did for homework), Google Drive, Vocabulary.com, and Brainscape, a flashcard app.

Now for probably the most exciting category and the one I visit most throughout the day: "Blogging"! Here are the apps:

1// Pinterest - for collecting inspiration in the form of beautiful images. You can follow me on Pinterest here!

2// Bloglovin' - for keeping up with my favorite blogs.

3// a bookmark for my blog - I like to click on it whenever I know a scheduled post has gone live just to see how it looks.

4// Instagram - also for wonderful inspiration. I love Instagram!

5// Google Analytics - for tracking my page views and other info. Admittedly, I don't really use this app anymore, I'm not sure why...

And that is all for my iPhone tour! I hope you guys enjoyed this post and if you have a question about any of the apps that I mentioned here, feel free to comment.

Thanks for reading!

my new camera

Hello!

For the past month, I've either been busy or on vacation, so that is why there's been a lack of posts recently, but I hope to get back to regular posting now. Whenever I take a little break from blogging I really miss it and want to get back to it as soon as possible! It's just so much fun!

Anyways, during this break I celebrated my 14th birthday. It took me a really long time to decide what I wanted. Eventually, since I had started blogging that year and had wanted to improve upon my photography, I asked for a camera. I'm the type of person who likes to do a LOT of research about these things, so I read countless reviews and watched so many videos.

I ended up receiving... *drumroll* a Nikon D5200! *fanfare*

I am so, so thankful for it! Thank you mom and dad!

I was so excited to open the box that I felt like I was in a dream. Probably because for the couple of weeks prior to my birthday I would have dreams about the camera only to wake up disappointed, hehe!

There are so many things I love about it, it's just PERFECT, but I thought I should organize my thoughts so that this post wouldn't turn into one long run-on sentence. So I present to you my list:

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT

1// fast autofocus - with our previous camera, you'd have to sit there and wait for the autofocus motor to whir and whir until the image was clear. But with my new camera, when I press the shutter release button halfway down it autofocuses in an instant!

2// good ISO handling - with our Nikon Coolpix P80 (the old camera), even photos taken at very low ISO levels came out grainy. I couldn't use the burst shot mode, even outdoors on a sunny day, because the ISO level the camera chose to compensate for the fast shutter speed always made the photo look noisy! Now I don't have to worry as much about increasing the ISO on a dark day because I know the images will come out clear!

3// zooming + manually focusing - on our old camera, to manually focus, you had to use the up and down arrows, which was really frustrating. Plus, the screen wasn't very detailed so getting the subject in focus was pretty much a guessing game, haha! Zooming was also done with a button/lever type thing. I love that with my new camera, I can do both of these things by twisting the lens. It's so much easier!

4// flip-out screen - I've already used this feature WAY more than I thought I would. For example, on our vacation we walked past a street of really cool, colorful houses. I wanted to take a picture with the edges of the house parallel to the edges of the photo, but, the only way I could do that was by holding the camera above my head. The flip-out screen REALLY came in handy then because I could angle it towards the ground.

There are more things but I don't want this post to get too long, hehe! 

I'm so excited to start photographing posts, because as of writing this I haven't used it for that yet. During my vacation I came up with so many post ideas that I can't wait to write about. I've also been thinking about finding an alternative to the photo editing program I'm currently using, Paint.net. So here's my question for you guys:

What photo editing program do you use and would you recommend it?

I would really appreciate any responses in the comments below!

Thank you for reading!