BritMumsLive 2013

I have been lucky enough to attend BritMumsLive twice now, my first visit was in 2012 & I came away from the event knowing I wanted to return next year. I started my hunt for a sponsor rather early because I know how hard it can be for a blogger to find a sponsor that they are passionate about. I was very lucky to have Cosatto agree to being my Sponsor, I had been a Brand Buddy for them for a year & love their products. I think the Yo Golightly is still my favourite, I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it for the first time. They also have new products coming out that I know you will love but I shall save that for another post. 

My husband spied pictures of me with various characters, the penguins & Alex the lion from Madagascar(well I think that is his name).  

The penguin from Madagascar whispering sweet nothing to me. 

He then saw the picture below, Hedwig and I. Now I wouldn't say I am a big Harry Potter fan, however the children and my Husband are so I knew who the owl was & I thought it would be cool to have my picture taken with him(when else would I get this chance). 

Hedwig and I 

After seeing these pictures, and hearing my stories of lusting after a pair of shoes that were in TK Maxx & my night out drinking with the girls, my Husband said "It is just a girls weekend out really isn't it" I shot him a look and replied "NO" he asked "so what did you learn" I did a quick reply of "lots". This led me to wonder what I did learn & if in fact I learnt anything that I didn't already know.

The answer is yes I did learn new things, I learnt lots

I attended a session called Is your blog camera ready, now this session was not what I originally thought it was going to be about.

Leading this session were, Robin Houghton @RobinHoughton, Peggy Poyser @PerfHappyMum & Emily Quinton @emilyquinton.
I learnt quite a bit from this session, the main lesson learnt is I now resize my images so my page can load quicker, I have a great camera that takes great pictures but the file size is always huge & in the past I have not bothered resizing. From now on I will, I promise. 

The next session I took away knowledge from was a session called Become a You Tuber. Leading the session were Christine Beardsell VCCP Content, Claire & Lucy Mcdonald @crumbsfood & Lindsay Atkin @liliesarelike. In the session I learn how to make my videos searchable, I very often forget about the description but I learnt that this and the title are very important if you want people to be able to view your video. I shall put this to test on my videos. They mention google analytics for You Tube, I shall be looking into this as I have never really paid any interest to the stats of my You tube.

A session that was on my must list was Photography #britmumsphoto, this session was led by Julia Boggio @juliaboggio. Now I attend many sessions on photography and often don't learn much but this year I have learnt something from the 2 photography sessions I have attended one being this one and another being from Jay Mountford from when I attended Cybher .

On this session I learnt how to take pictures with no natural light, i learnt tricks that I will try to put into place. I learnt how to make our images searchable for google by filling in the alt text, Julia said to describe the image like you are describing it to a person who is blind. 

I learnt about filters, now I am a filter fanatic and often go over board but Julia said something that will stop me killing my images by the over use of filters.

"Why does this photo look like a cat has pissed on it" 

I will be kind to my pictures from now on!

Last up is one I already do, now I think everyone should know this so i am sharing it with you. Always save the original image, so if you edit it and save you always have the original image to fall back on after you realize your over use of filters makes your photos look like a cat as used it as a urinal. 

BritMumsLive 2013 was amazing, I met up with great friends and even managed to make a few more. I drank till I became Merry and slept in the most comfortable bed ever at The Montcalm.
I met with some amazing Brands, Britax, MAM, Parragon Books, Soda Stream, Panasonic, Vitamix, Butlins, CocaCola & Argos just to name a few.
Thank you to BritMums and all their sponsors for another great event, see you next year.