Project 365: The penultimate post!

Only one week left in this iteration of the 365 project! Of course, the big question now is what comes next. I’m still not sure of the answer to that one myself – stand by and I’ll let you know when I know!

I had a great time with fakery and rule-breaking this week! The end of the project seems to find all my standards dropping like flies. Like this one – it’s true we’ve had an unseasonably mild month, but does this look like a picture that was taken in December in Ottawa?

I found it in my archives when I was looking for something else. I’d taken it back in October and for whatever reason didn’t like it enough to even post it, but when I saw it this week I loved it and wanted to share the bright, warm colours. And that ended up being such a busy day that I didn’t actually take any pictures even remotely as lovely as this one, so I just decided this would be the photo of the day.

And then there’s this bit of fakery. I wanted to revisit Watson’s Mill in Manotick one last time before the end of the project, and I knew it would be lovely all decked out for Christmas. When I was setting up my tripod last night, to my great delight it began to snow. But, to capture the lights and detail on the Mill the way I wanted to after dark, I needed a 30-second exposure, which rendered the snow completely invisible — so I added it back in with an overlay in Photoshop. I’m quite pleased with my growing facility with Photoshop and PSElements! What do you think? Would you have guessed it’s not authentic snow?

Then again, sometimes no fakery is required — you just have to point your camera in the right direction to capture the cuteness.

(The expression on Willie’s face slays me. You’d never guess that he had willingly gone to sit beside Lucas, would you?)

Speaking of Willie… sigh. He seems to be going through some sort of teenage rebellion, or maybe someone is feeding him mischief pills. He’s a complete and utter PITA lately. I was playing with the Christmas lights, trying to get one of those sentimental shots of the tree lights all blurred out in the background with a favourite ornament in the foreground (it’s rather astonishing that I’ve never attempted that particular cliché before, as it’s so clearly in my bailiwick) but this kept happening:

I’m not sure that I like this shot. Sometimes looking at Lensbaby shots makes my eyes itch.

This shot, though? Instant fave. I specifically went out at dawn (which is some time just before lunch time at this time of year!) to go shooting on that very foggy Wednesday morning this week. I turned down a road just south of Manotick I’d never been down before, and just ask I was making the corner I noticed the canted speed limit sign and the telephone poles on either side of the road that disappeared into the fog, and got out of the car to take a few shots. I was just clicking the shutter when I saw the headlights resolving in the fog in the distance and at first I was ticked, thinking I’d have to clone them out of the final shot because they’d messed up my lovely composition. Then when I got home and saw the picture on my monitor I realized that the headlights actually make the shot. This is one of my fave B&W shots of the year, and ended up popping into Flickr’s Explore, too (which is now more than a nuisance than anything – can’t believe how I used to covet having a picture in Explore!)

Such a contrast to the warm, colourful shots above, eh? 🙂

And, I got a nice early Christmas present from Getty Images last night. They send out their sales invoices once a month, and mine popped up yesterday. I sold five images in four countries! My signature “puddle jumper” shot sold twice, including one to a local artist who bought the rights to turn it into a watercolour painting. How fun is that? Here’s the images that sold last month:

One more week to go!

Edited to add: how fun is this? I just found the source for the buyer that used the Willie and Lucas picture. And you know what it was used for? To illustrate the question “what’s the cutest pet picture/slideshow ever.” Bwhahahaha! It’s on an NBC Universal pet site (!) called Petside.