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.

I often get people asking how to add text to photos.  Well today we are going to let you into a little secret and that secret is the Labelbox app.

Labelbox is perhaps the most simple app in the world to use and you can create some really great looking text for your photo captions.

It really is as easy as that.  Swipe the tape across the screen to place it where you want, type the text and voila….a really easy way of putting funky text on to photos.  Here is us playing around to give you some examples of the labels you can use.

Best of all?  Labelbox is completely free.  You get eleven free labels with the free version but if you want any of the others you will have to pay for it.  However there is a wide range with the free version as shown above.

We would definitely recommend Labelbox as a quick and easy way to write on your photos.  As always if you use it on any of your blog posts let us know and we will RT your link.

Have you ever taken a photo and then looked at it only to realise that it has a yellowy or blue tint to it?  However when taking the photo the light and the scene looked completely normal?  The reason for this is that images taken in different lights have a different colour or temperature to them.  E.g if you take a photo in artificial lighting it may come across as having a slightly blueish tint.  There is a large range of temperatures and colours and this range is known as the Kelvin Scale.

White Balance is an important part of photography that people sometimes neglect to take into account.  Put simply the reason we adjust white balance is to get the colours in our images as accurate as possible.

The naked eye won’t notice these slight changes in colour, but although our cameras are pretty damn smart, they sometimes don’t have the capabilities of making these adjustments automatically- it might need a little bit of help to get it spot on.  In cooler light, blue or green, you may need to tell the camera to warm things up a bit and in warmer light, yellow or orange, you may need to tell it to cool the colour down.

Many DSLR cameras have special presets meaning that you can adjust the white balance really easily.  Below are the settings on my Nikon camera:

Auto – this is where the camera makes a best guess on a shot by shot basis. It generally is pretty good and can quite accurately estimate the colour and temperature, however for trickier lights I find it struggles.

Tungsten – this mode is usually symbolized with a little bulb and is for shooting indoors, especially under bulb lighting. It generally cools down the colors in photos.

Fluorescent – this compensates for the ‘cool’ light of fluorescent light and will warm up your shots  Really good for artificial lighting such as those horrible strip lights you get in certain places like schools.

Direct Sunlight – This is basically a ‘normal’ white balance setting.  It generally will make the light slightly warmer.

Cloudy – this setting generally warms things up a touch more than ‘direct sunlight’ mode.

Flash – the flash of a camera can be quite a cool light so in Flash WB mode you’ll find it warms up your shots a touch.

Shade – the light in shade is generally cooler (bluer) than shooting in direct sunlight so this mode will warm things up slightly.

It is definitely worth playing around with the white balance settings and not just keeping it on auto as you may find that you like some of the results more.  I shot my little piggy here at around 3pm in the afternoon in the house with a window behind me.

While the ‘Auto’ setting is ok, I much prefer the Fluorescent setting, it just makes the photo slightly warmer and more appealing.  This is just an example but I have seen many shots that would have looked so much nicer if the white balance wasn’t set to auto.  Auto is ok and good for snapshots, but if you want to get more creative with your photography then it is definitely worth having a play round with it.  Be brave and take it off auto!

Access your white balance menu by going into your camera’s menu settings.  The settings available will differ from camera to camera but just have a play around with it and try it out in different lights when you have a bit of time.  You will be amazed the difference it can make to your photos.

We’re all about giving you tips and pointers to improve your photography on I Heart Snapping, and we’ve loved all the great feedback to all our photography related posts and people wanting to be involved with I Heart My Edit. But we also want to showcase some real talents; so we will be introducing you to some lovely photographers and asking them to share their tips and let us all know how they go started and what they love about doing what they do.

For our first ever ‘Leave It To The Pros’ post we have Chloe Bridge. Some of you may know her from Chloe Witters where she blogs all about her life with her adorable little boy Arlo. If you haven’t already done so, then check it out. Expect lots of lovely photographs! Chloe’s photography on her blog have launched a whole new career for her, as she has recently ventured into the world of portrait photography by setting up her own business Chloe Bridge Photography. She very kindly agreed to take some time out of being a mummy and running her own photography business, to let us ask her some questions. So here she is…

First off, can you tell us a bit about you and how you started out in photography?

I am a family and lifestyle photographer based in London. I started my own photography business just a couple of months ago and I’m so pleased to be able to do what I love and, at the same time, call it a career.

I’ve always been interested in photography. I remember the excitement of getting my first film camera when I was 7. Just before my 18th birthday, I announced that I wanted to be a photographer, and so my uncle very generously gave me his old SLR as my birthday present. I learnt so much by playing around with that camera. It served me well throughout university, and I dabbled with a bit of event photography for the University newspaper.

After I gained my English degree, I knew I wanted to pursue a career in photography. I luckily landed a job at a family portrait studio and gained invaluable training and practise with posing, lighting, and working with children of all ages. After that job, I moved into the post production side of photography and worked for one of London’s leading retouching houses.

Portrait photography has always been my ‘thing’. I just love the challenge of nailing that perfect expression and capturing each person’s unique personality. I started a blog whilst on maternity leave, a place where I could share the hundreds of photos I was taking of my son. Off the back of the blog, I started getting requests from friends to photograph their families. More referrals came from friends of friends after seeing my images, and my photography business was born from there.

What is in your kit bag? What camera(s) do you use? What accessories wouldn’t you be without?

I use a Canon 40d. My favourite lenses for portraits are my 50mm 1.8 and 28mm 1.8. My not-so-secret weapons are a white noise machine for newborn shoots, and bubbles for toddlers and older babies.

What do you love most about photography?

Images play such a huge part in preserving memories. A cherished photo lasts longer than a lifetime and will be passed down through generations to come. I can’t think of a way to write this without sounding incredibly cheesy, but to play a part in creating those treasured family memories is pretty awesome.

Can you tell us how you like to edit your photographs? What software do you use? Are there any particular things that you like doing with photographs?

I use a mixture of Lightroom and Photoshop when editing. Lightroom is my absolute favourite (if I could marry a software program…), but there are some things that can only be done in Photoshop. I like to edit my images in a clean, bright style, especially with babies and families – timeless classics that won’t date with age.

Which blogs do you think use fantastic photography?

Gregarious Peach - http://www.gregariouspeach.com/

Georgia is an Australian photographer and founder of the popular Facebook group ‘Documenting Delight’ – my go-to place to see some excellent photo-a-day child photography.  Georgia is brilliant at incorporating stories and conversations alongside her images, in doing so she captures some fantastic images of her two children.

Enjoying the Small Things - http://www.kellehampton.com/

Kelle lives in Florida with her two highly photogenic daughters. I found this hugely popular blog when I was pregnant with my son and I’ve been addicted ever since. My gosh does this lady have a picture perfect life (all down to her amazing photography!)

I read Inspire Me Baby and Let the Kids Dress Themselves for great tips and inspiration for family shoots.
http://inspiremebaby.com/
http://letthekids.com/

Share your three favourite photographs and why you love them. (We appreciate that it’s hard to choose only three!!!)

My favourites change every week, so this was a really tough one!

1. This is one of my favourite shots from the photoshoot that launched my photography business. As that shoot was such a landmark for me, I think it will always hold a place in my favourites.

2. This image of a yawning six day old newborn never fails to make me smile

3. Lastly, I couldn’t help including a shot of my own boy. I took this when he was 14 months old, and it perfectly sums him up at that age – headores his trains.

What tips can you give to our readers?

One comment I hear all the time is, “I’d love to learn more about my camera, but I haven’t got a clue how to use it in manual mode”.  If that sounds like you, then this is my advice:

Read up on shutter speeds, aperture and ISO (this link provides a simple explanation: http://lifehacker.com/5814173/basics-of-photography-your-cameras-manual-settings), and then set yourself a challenge to take a photo every day for a set period of time. A week, a month, or even a year – the longer the better!

Not only will you get to know your camera very quickly, you will learn to see your home from a photographer’s perspective (where to get the best light at which times of day, etc), and manual mode will fast become second nature. Most important of all, it will get you in the habit of picking up your camera on a regular basis, and you will have some amazing photographic memories to show for it. I started a year long photo-a-day project in January (you can check it out on my blog: http://www.chloewitters.wordpress.com), and it’s been the best challenge I’ve ever set myself!

Great tips and food for thought. Get your cameras out people, because you won’t learn how to use them if they are safely in their camera bag.

Thank-you to Chloe for being involved and sharing her tips and beautiful favourite photographs. You can follow Chloe on Twitter as @khloeee so stop by and say hi there or on her blog.

It’s Friday again, although this has to have been the shortest week ever. I definitely think we need more four day weekends and three day working weeks. So the long weekend and the jubilee celebrations means that lots of people got out and about enjoying their families and their communities. And as a result blogland is full of lovely red, white and blue celebrations which is enough to make anyone very patriotic.

Kerry at Multiple Mummy and our very own Katie at Mummy Daddy and Me Makes Three shared posts of their jubilee celebrations with lots of lovely photographs.

We gave you some freebie social media buttons and Keeping Up With The Joneses is showing them off very beautifully. Let us know if you’re using them too. And we’ve got more freebies coming your way soon.

We all have blogging low times when we wonder why we do it. But Dana at The Wonderforest received a lovely email about why her blog is important to someone. So why not share a bit of blog love yourself; write a comment, send an email and let those blogs that you love know.

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 in two weeks 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.

Have a great weekend.

I stumbled across this app a while ago, and while I was secretly tempted to keep too myself, it is too good not to share!

Meet Cinemagram- quite possibly my most favourite app I have downloaded in a while.

If you follow my personal blog Mummy Daddy and Me makes Three you will know that I am a big fan of GIFs- moving images that can spice up your blog posts.  I use Photoshop to make my GIFS but they can be complicated to do if you don’t know how, and also we are aware not everyone can afford the hefty price tag for Adobe Creative Suite- I am lucky I have a designer husband!

However you can make great little GIFS for your blog using Cinemagram.

Here are some examples of some of my Cinemagram’s.

You have started a blog, you have started to get some readers…but how many?  Some people are interested in how many people are looking at their blog and how they are finding it, and if you want to attract PR companies in order to do reviews, then it is useful to find out what your ‘stats’ are.

Blogger has a free statistics tool that you can use if you have a blogger blog.  It is really useful in checking out the basic information you need to know- like the amount of visitors and the amount of page views.

Just go to your main blog dashboard and click stats…

The tool is really easy to use, and has more than enough information.  It is measured in real time, meaning you can see exactly what is sending you traffic and when.

The next tool worth mentioning is probably the most famous- Google Analytics.  Google Analytics is a powerful, free tool that helps you monitor a huge amount of information about you site and it can be used on any blog platform.

To sign up you will need a google account which is quick and easy to set up.  If you then go to www.google.com/analytics you will be able to sign up for a analytics account.  Once you have done this it will ask you for a little detail about the blog you want to track and then it will take you through to a page which looks something like this.

You will need to paste the above code into your website just above the  </head> tag.  If you get stuck then just ask us as it is really easy to do.

Once that is done you are ready to use Analytics!  You can track your visitors, traffic sources, keywords and it really gives an insight into who is visiting your site.

Another great free site is Stat Counter and that is the one I use for my personal blog.  It works very much in the same way as Google Analytics but I just find it a bit more visually easy to use.  It is free, straight forward to use and does the same things as Google’s Analytics tool.

You can see how people are finding you through search engines and break it down either by year, month, week or day…

Here is an example of how people have found my blog via search engines this morning.

You will see that they are really quite random!  But they can be a lot worse than that- I have had literally the most crazy keywords!  If you click on the magnifying glass it gives you some more details about the search, including how long they stayed on the site and what google ranking result you were.

You can also see links of where your traffic is coming from- this is the part I use the most as it shows you how people are finding you- it is always useful as sometimes you won’t even realise that someone has linked to you.

You can do so much but another thing I like is that you can see what each visitor is doing on your site and what links they are using to exit and what posts they are looking at.  For example this one….

You can see how often they have visited the site and what they did on their last visit.

It is certainly worth checking this tool out because you can do so much more than what I have mentioned, it is just to give you an idea.

Finally the last statistics tool which I think is worth a mention is Hit Sniffer.  This site is similar to the others, but it just again looks different.  It is another quite visual tool and uses a lot of graphs to show you where your traffic is coming from.  You do have to pay for it but depending on your traffic, it can work out as just a couple of pounds a month.  You can also have a 7 day trial to see whether you like it enough to pay the monthly fee.

It does all the same things that the other tools I have discussed but one thing that it does too which is totally crazy is that you can see how many people are visiting and actually live chat with the visitors that are on your site.  I would never ever do this because can you imagine how freaked out you would be if you were the visitor, but I still find it a really clever tool!

So there we have it- our top stat tools for your blog.  All the tools I have mentioned here I have tried at one point and I can recommend them all.  I nowadays just use Stat Counter as it does all that I want it too, but it is worth having a further look into them to see which one suits you best.  They all basically do the same thing, it just depends on the feel you get for them as to which one you prefer.  Some people may get on ok with just the basic Blogger stats but some people may want a little bit more information.

The main thing to remember is that whatever your stats are, unless you are blogging for business or to make an income, blogging is just a bit of fun and therefore you shouldn’t get too hung up on checking them too often.  However when you do want to check, these tools certainly are a great way of seeing who is looking at your site.

I am sure many houses up and down the UK are looking forward to the long bank holiday weekend, after all it is rare that we get two days off in a row.  Even if you aren’t in the UK, I am sure you have seen something about the Jubilee celebrations- HRH Queen Elizabeth has been on the throne for 60 years.  Wowee.  We are looking forward to seeing some lovely photos of what you got up to on the long weekend but without further ado here are my favourite links of this week.

We love these photos that Lauren took at the beach.  So cute and doesn’t it make you want to go and visit the seaside?

We love this post from Charlotte, how cute is her birthday party theme?  And I love that she had a photo shoot for the bears too!

Found this blog via Kelly’s and we love it.  Check out Happy Jax if you get the chance.

It is the last week to vote in the Mad Blog Awards.  If you fancy voting for Mummy Daddy and Me makes Three or Dear Beautiful Boy we would be so grateful.

We are all about sharing the tutorial love- Mammasaurus has started doing tips to help you too- we really like her first post on how to use google web fonts on your blog.

If you ever see any blog posts that you think our readers would love be sure to link them below.
Now do you want to join in the easiest peasiest photo linky in the land?  Just link up a photo or photos that you are especially proud of.  It can literally be anything.  And do make sure you share the blog love and comment on others too

Here at I heart Snapping you may have seen that we like to share things.  Over the next few months we will be sharing a lot of freebies and exciting things to make your blog look pretty.  Today is no exception- below are some lovely, snazzy social media buttons for your blog.  These beauties are for anyone who wants them, but please only for personal use.

We will also be giving away some other free buttons over the course of the next few weeks but these will do nicely for starters.

All you need to do is download or grab the image off this post (I have made them really large so you can resize them to fit in with your blog dimensions)  and then put them in to whatever you use to edit your photos. (e.g Photoshop, Pixlr, or Picasa)  Just cut around each photo using the cut out or crop tool and then resize and add to your blog.  If you need any help in doing this please let us know and I will be happy to talk you through it or help you add them.

 FREE FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY.

That’s all from us today.  Hope you enjoy them.  And please do ask if you need any help getting them on your blog.

We are absolutely loving writing I Heart Snapping for you guys. We hope you’re finding the tutorials useful, the reviews helpful and that you are generally feeling inspired to take better pictures and to make your blogs more brilliant and more gorgeous than they already were.

But now it’s your turn. We are looking for some of our lovely readers to get involved with a new Monday feature. This will be your chance to feature your skills on the pages of I Heart Snapping and show off what you can do.

Each week three different bloggers who decide to join in, will be emailed a photograph. This photograph could be of anything, but it will be unedited. The challenge for those three bloggers is to edit the photo, anyway they like, using whatever software or apps that they like. Then email back the finished article explaining how they did what they did. Every Monday we will share the original image and then the three different takes on it and how they were achieved.

You don’t need to be a photo editing whizz to take part. In fact we’d love to showcase all sorts of different people’s styles and ideas. And don’t feel like you would have to do something completely amazing and outstanding and complex. We want instructions that other people can follow, so that our readers can learn from you.

Next week your I Heart Snapping team will be doing the first ever I Heart My Edit so that we can hopefully give you an idea of what we’re after. So if you want to wait and see what it’s all about, then check back on Monday for the post.

If you would like to be involved then let us know and we’ll be in touch. You can simply leave a comment on this post and we’ll use the email address you leave to get in contact. You can DM us via twitter letting us know your email address. Or you can let us know via our Facebook page (which is very new and feeling a bit lonely so come across and like us!)