I'm back! Hope you had a good weekend? Sorry there was no Friday post last week as we were flying home. Regular posting will resume as soon as I've caught up with everything. Anyway, for today a photography post! 

As I've mentioned, I'm officially in love with my new camera {this one} and a few of you have asked if I'd recommend it. But I also wanted to update the photos of our kitchen on here. When I put up our kitchen makeover post it was Halloween so the house was filled with pumpkins and it looked really autumnal, instead these photos are filled with spring... 

I'd been thinking about getting a new camera for a while now after I realised that my trusty Panasonic Lumix is now five years old. It's still a good camera but it's quite big to carry around so I tended to just be lazy with my iPhone figuring that it took good enough photos. But then with So You're Getting Married I was invited to try the Olympus Pen for a day at The Savoy and really loved it. So easy to use, of course much better than an iPhone and it has wifi to transfer photos straight from the camera to your phone. But the main thing putting me off was the zoom, you'd have to change lenses if you wanted a good zoom. I didn't want a camera that I'd have to buy extra lenses for {they cost more than the camera itself} and especially when travelling I didn't want to have to carry a bag around with spare lenses to change all the time. I started to research a few different types and models with fixed lenses but you then lose out on the quality etc. It's a minefield. But then after talking to a few people I realised that the pancake lens that it comes with would be good enough for most things and given how much I'm obsessed with photos and really, truly love photography I decided to go for it. If I go on safari again or something that really needs a zoom I'll invest in a new lens but for now I'm super snap happy and can't stop taking photos. I know, as if I needed another excuse... 

You can read my review that I wrote for SYGM here when I first used the camera last October which gives an overview for all of the snazzy features, the vintage filters, the wifi and app to link to your smartphone, how really easy it is to use by just tapping the screen for where you want to focus it etc. I also love how how retro it looks. In America last week a guy actually thought I was using an old camera! 

These are some of the photos I took with it before we went to California, I'm obsessed with depth of field at the moment. Focusing on whatever you want to slightly blur the background. 

As I mentioned, probably the only drawback would be having to think about buying additional lenses if you need something more than the 14-42mm pancake one it comes with. Last week it was great for everything apart from if I wanted to zoom in on a seal on the beach or something far away. My old camera had a 24x optical zoom so I was used to being able to see things from a distance. Also the lens doesn't come with a cap on a string so I ordered one from eBay as I'm paranoid about scratching it if I don't have the lens cap to hand. So if you get one then it's worth protecting it with a cap on a string to always keep it with you.