Dining Room

Continuing with my attempt to share the rooms that I haven’t officially shared, today you get a look at the Dining Room. There is nothing special happening in the dining room right now. I have dressed it up for many seasons, Fall, Christmas, and Easter but on all those occasions you saw the dining room from the other angle. The reason was, our dining room is surrounded in windows and I was never able to get a good picture of it from the other direction….until now.

Our dining room is a feature of our home that I loved from the first time we set foot in our house. The house wasn’t done at that point, but I could picture myself standing in our kitchen and looking out those dining room windows at the beautiful view. I really had to lighten this picture up just to show you the features.

So, how did I finally get a decent picture of our dining room?? When I was taking pictures of my craft room, I was struggling with the same problem. The windows were blowing out the picture when I took it from a certain angle. Instead of getting frustrated, I just started playing with the features on our cmera. We have a little point and shoot Sony Cybershot. All of the cameras we have owned are Sony’s so I am pretty familiar with the features, but with this camera Sony changed up the options. I found a “SCN” option of: “Backlight Correction HDR” with the description – Correct shadow detail and highlights to as it is.

If you are better at photo editing than I am, you may want to try this solution for Fixing Blown out Windows on Censational Girl.

Since I found the new to me feature on our camera, I went around the house taking pictures of other rooms I had struggled with before. I’ll share the other rooms later. For now, here is another angle of the dining room.

It’s nice to have the dining room pictured very true to how it is in real life. I’m excited for any upcoming events and holidays when I change up the décor in the dining room and get the opportunity to photograph it from other angles now.

Anyone else use a Sony Cybershot? What other neat features do I need to try?

I really was trying to cling on to the last bits of Summer, but the weather is changing and it is almost officially Fall. Plus, blogland has become filled with Fall decorating ideas, so I thought I should begin to decorate our house as well. The leaves really haven’t started to change here yet, and I haven’t gone out searching for pumpkins and gourds yet….although I did pass a farm stand that was new to me in my work travels today, so I may have to go back there. But, since nature has not helped me yet in my decorating, I started to work with what I already had. I had picked up a few new to me Fall items at yard sales this summer, so I did have some different decor to work into what I have used in the past.

When I pulled out all my Fall decor and supplies, I found several picks that I had yet to do anything with. So, I took the easiest route first and just put them under glass to see what I thought, and it worked for me.

I added the leaf holding a candle, a recent yard sale find, and the large candleholder which I stole from my everyday decor in the basement.

I knew I needed something else with height and none of my other Fall items were tall. I remembered I had some Fall themed scrapbook paper that I had forever and never used, so I pulled that out and popped it into one of the random frames from my closet. I added some ceramic pumpkins and called it a day….well, after I moved them all around several times and waited until this morning to decide that it would work for me. Its not as beautiful and detailed as some Fall decorating I’ve seen, but its simple and seasonal, so I think our foyer now is ready for Fall.

I also worked on changing up the dining room table centerpiece as well. The centerpiece had been the same, for the most part since Easter! Before Easter I had collected some willow branches on a walk during my lunch one day knowing that I wanted to spray paint them and put them in a vase. I did just that, and then for Easter I hung colored eggs from the branches and put it between some candlesticks and on top of a colorful runner. After Easter, all I did was remove the eggs and it stayed like that through the Summer.

I decided to keep the same structure and just update it for Fall. I pulled out our neutral tablerunner, took the branches and rocks out of the vase. I replaced the rocks with corn and put the branches back in the vase. Then, I used more of the picks I had on hand from yard sales and ripped them apart. I used the leaves and acorns from the picks and their individual wires to hang them on the branches. I added two painted craft pumpkins and swapped the white candlesticks for wooden ones to give me a simple Fall tablescape.

I did add a few other Fall touches to the house, but I’m sure I will add more once I can bring some pumpkins and gourds home. Anyone else work with what they have to decorate for Fall this year?