Love Your Photos, Love Your Pages. Depth of Field in the Park

Finally! A bright day in which I have time to play. I haven't been able to do any of Shimelle's challenges this week, due to poor weather and lack of time and I was itching to try out her hints for achieving shallow depth of field with my DSLR.
So, having completed all my Mummy-jobs, I took R and M to the park and bribed them with ice cream to let me take lots of pictures.These are my favourites from the session:

And I also love what happened next:

 I'm pleased with the effect of this shot:

I feel a lot more comfortable to play with the settings on my camera now, but I still need to think about it before every shot.

I took this opportunity to point my camera up to the sky as well, as there was a hint of blue:

The last prompt this week was to put your camera on the ground and see what you get, without looking through the viewfinder. I had a few duff shots, but I also got lucky:

 

While we were there I also managed to catch two butterflies on the same bush with the macro setting. Not as sharp as I'd like, but is it my imagination or are there far fewer butterfies around than there used to be when we were kids?

Now I need to get scrapping with them. Shimelle is providing some great sketches to give us lots of inspiration.