The thousand picture project: beauty hides in the oddest places

So I have to admit, I haven’t exactly been taking pictures every day. Some days I take a dozen pictures, and some sad days, I don’t even touch my camera at all. (Well, that’s not quite true. I still lug the poor thing around with me everywhere I go, I just don’t always remember to stick it to my face as obsessively as I did all through last year.)

Aside from birthday parties, here’s some of the other ways beauty crept into my life in the last couple of weeks.

Discovering the toddler’s secret lair under the kitchen table was a treat, for instance.

And speaking of treats, we had a family dinner at a friend’s place recently, where she endeared the kids to her forever with a make-yer-own-cupcake dessert. I’m surprised the boys didn’t pack their bags to go live with her on the spot!

Beauty hides in the oddest places. I found the light falling on these dirty towels irresistible!

After that I entered what will now be known for all time as Dani’s Late Winter Tulip Period. (Yanno, like Picasso’s Blue Period?) I got a bouquet of tulips to welcome my folks home from a trip and filched a few, then got a surprising amount of photographic mileage out of them in the subsequent week. Who knew tulips were so versatile?

You’ve got yer tulips with a texture overlay here:

You’ve got yer through-the-viewfinder tulips here…

… and here:

And then you’ve got yer straight-up-with-a-side-of-overexposure here:

If you were paying attention, you might have noticed an earlier version of this shot a few weeks back in TtV format. I particularly like this one because I finally managed to get the white background exposed well enough that it more or less disappears into the background.

Sometimes, the simple shots become your favourites. I like this one because it tells a whole story, and invites you to ask a little bit more too.

The weather around here has been uncannily beautiful lately, and we’ve been taking every opportunity to play outside where we can enjoy it. This is what springtime looks like in suburban Ottawa:

It’s been a lovely couple of weeks!

Related posts (automatically generated):

1. The Thousand Picture Project – it’s been a while! Holy cats, it’s been more than six weeks since I posted an update about my thousand picture project! Don’t worry, I haven’t stopped taking pictures — far from it! While I haven’t quite kept up the 365 project pace of one photo every single day, I’ve still been carrying my...
2. Project 365: dying flowers and magic places Well, either it was a particularly beautiful week in the universe, or I’m actually getting good at this 365 thing, because I liked the pictures from this week a lot. A couple of days, I had a hard time choosing from very disparate shots (let alone the 16 shots I...
3. Thousand Picture Project: Spectacular sunsets and snapshots You know how creativity ebbs and flows? Lately, I seem to be all gummed up. I’m really enjoying taking pictures, and I always enjoy writing. Well, almost always! But my head seems far more full of ideas and images than I am capable of turning into prose or pictures. I...
4. The Thousand Picture Project: Jumping into June Last year, I discovered the June is for Jumping group on Flickr late in the month, but so enjoyed looking at everyone’s shots (really, click through, they’re quite impressive!) that I looked forward all year to this year’s edition. I was full to the brim with enthusiasm as I headed...
5. The Thousand Picture Project: Loving that summer light! I don’t know what I love more about the month of May — the soft scent of flowers perfuming the air, or the return of the gorgeous, soft light of late afternoon and early evenings. Like this: It’s a sweet subject, but the way the light falls on them really...