In case you haven’t noticed, we haven’t been around in a while.  Have you missed our lovely photography, design and blogging tips?  Well the reason for this is there is a lot going on in the I Heart Snapping camp at the moment.  Lucy only went and had a beautiful baby, and Katie is busy growing one.  Therefore due to a combination of sleepless nights, overactive hormones and baby brains, we have neglected this lovely little space on the interweb recently.

But alas fear not, we aren’t gone for good.  I Heart Snapping is still very much another baby of ours, and we will be back soon to fill this space with all things lovely.   We may not be posting as regularly as before, but we are still chuffed to bits with the amount of traffic and love this blog gets, and we are determined to keep it going.

Expect lots of lovely new tips, hints and exciting posts on their way soon.

IT’S FRIDAY!!!!! Is it just me or do the weeks seem loads longer the week after a bank holiday? But it’s finally here… the weekend and the links we love.

We love seeing people putting our tutorials to good use and will try our best to share your handiwork if you let us know about it. Lauren at Real Housewife of Suffolk County used our Picasa tutorial to make herself a new blog header. Go check it out because it looks lovely.

One of our lovely readers has been showing off some of her art work this week and talking about the creativity in her life. If you haven’t checked out Aly McLoughlin Harte’s blog yet then you should. We loved her post on doing more of what you love.

We featured the lovely Chloe Bridge this week in our first ‘Leave It To The Pros‘ post and she’s been talking work on her own personal blog. It’s great to read stories about people finding happiness in creative jobs.

The fantastic community that is BritMums have been running a fun photography hashtag on Twitter and challenging people to take a photo on a given theme everyday. You can find out more here if you’d like to take part or just search the #snaphappybritmums to see some great pictures.

And speaking of BritMums, the I Heart Snapping team are off to the BritMums Live conference next Friday and Saturday. If you’re going then too then don’t be shy and come and say hi to us. We get a bit giddy with ideas and inspiration when we are together but we won’t bite. You can find a picture of us on the About page so you know who you’re looking for (and the blonde one has a big baby bump too!). Please do say hello.

Last week we launched a fabulous competition for you all and you’ve still got a week left to enter. The lovely people at Blurb who make the most gorgeous photo books ever, are offering some of our readers a voucher towards making their own book.

If you’ve never used Blurb before then this is the competition for you because 3 of our readers will be getting a £30 voucher to spend on any product they like. You can make planners and notebooks as well as photo books of your favourite images, there are so many possibilities. There is one condition, you have to be new Blurb customer to enter.

And all you need to do to enter is subscribe to I Heart Snapping which you can do over in the sidebar).

Plus for extra entries you can like our Facebook page,

follow us on Twitter

or tweet “I want to win a Blurb voucher with @IHeartSnapping http://www.iheartsnapping.com/2012/06/08/links-love-heart-snap-competition-all/ ”.

Make sure you leave a seperate comment for each entry and we’ll let you know next week who our lucky winners are.

So all that’s left is to open up your I Heart My Snap linky. There are no rules, just link up a photo you love; old or new, in it’s own post or part of a larger one. Last weeks linky was a bumper one so get linking up your photos for this week.

Have a great weekend.

Remember a couple of weeks ago we started a little series called ‘Taking Better Photographs’? We talked about the basics of composing a shot; move for a different angle, look at the whole picture, fill the frame. Well this week we’re still talking composition, we’re still on the arty bit of photography before going on to the technical stuff in a few weeks. We’re all breaking in to this business really gently.

So for this week we’re going to be talking about a little trick, and a well known technique among anyone who has ever been on any sort of photography course, called the Rule of Thirds. It works on the principle of you lining up your pictures to a sort of grid which makes your photographs more visually appealing. I’m not personally a fan of the word “rule” because I think there are so many pictures out there which completely ignore this rule and are still appealing and dynamic, but it is a fun technique to play around with; both when you’re taking your photo and when editing it.

The basics are that you envisage your picture as being on a grid. The grid breaks up your picture into three sections both horizontally and vertically. You can then use this grid in a few different ways. I’ve used some examples below of photographs I have taken using the Rule of Thirds and pin pointed how it can help you to take effective and attractive shots.

You can place items of interest at the intersections of the lines. These spots are apparently where your eyes are drawn first when you look at a photograph, so it makes sense to consider that as you take or edit your photos.

The other thing you can do is line up any horizontal or vertical lines in your picture with the lines on the grid. This works particularly effectively with landscape photographs of scenery or if you are photographing people in front of some sort of landmark or view.

You can of course play around with this grid and use it to get some arty and interesting shots of your own. For example you might place the focus of your photo in just one third of the image. Like I said at the beginning; learn the rule, play with it and see what happens. Then feel free to break it.

One of the easiest ways to start getting your brain ‘switched on’ to this way of taking photographs is to edit some old ones. You can make an old photo obey the Rule of Thirds simply by identifying the focus and then cropping the photograph. Once you get use to seeing potential pictures in this way, they you can almost see the grid as you look through your viewfinder and will line things up accordingly.

Something very exciting is happening at I Heart Snapping.  It all kicks off on Monday.