This week in pictures: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

It’s been a while since I posted the weekly picture round-up. I’ve been taking a photo most days, but especially through November there were a handful of days I skipped. I missed it, though, and though I should have finished my third 365 project tomorrow, I’m running about a week and a half behind. Call it 365 in 375.

I’d had the idea for this photo in my head for literally a year. I was inspired by a version I saw last Christmas, and for the whole year I noodled the idea of tying up the boys in Christmas lights and taping their mouths with a bit of duct tape and printing the text “Silent Night, indeed!” in a festive red font. I even bought old-school white lights during a Boxing Day sale and put them away especially for it. Except, it turns out every other photographer in the western hemisphere had the same idea. And on the only day I had the right combination of good light in the house and the time required to put together the set-up, Tristan was sick with a bad cold. He gamely played along, but not in the best humour and it was not at all the fun shoot I had envisioned. And we had run out of duct tape.

Christmas torture

This is not even close to the shot I had been imagining all year. Really, I only took about three snaps before I realized it wasn’t going to work out and called the whole thing off. But then I went back and looked at these and decided I loved them anyway, for all the wrong reasons. I love the evil delight of Lucas, who was SO into the idea of tying up his brothers and taping their mouths. I love Simon’s perfect expression. And I love Tristan’s expression, too: annoyance, with a hint of “seriously?” and a goodly amount of “I’m only doing this so you’ll let me play video games when we’re done.” I tell you, it’s not easy being the kid of a photographer who’s creativity is always just a wee bit outside her ability to execute.

This photo was a remnant from that amazing ice fog we had a little while back. This is a little patch of holly I found in a concrete planter on Elgin Street. I love how festive the frost makes it look. Would you guess it was on a sidewalk beside a busy urban street?

Frosted holly

There is something about the overwrought cliché of a holiday photo that I just can’t resist. Crank up the romanticism and bring on the glitter. See?

Vintage Christmas bell

And this one, a Santa my mom gave me years ago and still one of my favourite decorations. I took this on my kitchen table, and just threw a string of white lights in the background, then used the shallowest depth of field (lowest aperture number, in this case f1.4) to throw the lights out of focus.

Ho Ho Ho!

I kinda liked the set-up, so I milked it for all it was worth! And then I added MOAR GLITTER!

Bokeh ball

More ice fog pictures from downtown. You can see I’m still not too picky on actually *taking* a photo so much as *posting* a new photo each day.

Christmas lights

And then it snowed!!

Snow day!

My Getty statement came in this week, and I found this one of Willie I thought I’d share. You might remember this photo appeared in the December issue of Good Housekeeping magazine, and it’s also being used this month on NBC Universal’s Petside website.

Found in the wild - Misbehaving Willie

Willie the misbehaving cat. Yep.

So tell me, bloggy friends: should I keep these weekly photo posts up in the new year? I toyed with simply posting my photo of the day every day as its own post, pretty much duplicating what I put on Flickr, and I toyed with not blogging them at all. I figure I’ll keep taking photos in the new year, cuz I can’t seem to stop. What do you think? Do you like these posts?

Author: DaniGirl

Canadian. storyteller, photographer, mom to 3. Professional dilettante.

5 thoughts on “This week in pictures: It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!”

  1. me, too. just my preference, but I love the MP with star watermark, though I can understand if you want the c symbol and/or your real name. I think the MP one is so pretty, and is a more fanciful name that suits some of your scenery pics especially.

  2. Okay, two in favour here and at least two on Facebook – the ayes have it. Guess you’ll have to keep scrolling past them, Sam. 😉

  3. And Valerie, thanks for your feedback about the watermark. I think I’m going to go with the danigirl.ca watermark for a while anyway. I like the old one too, but it was hard to read sometimes and it is kinda busy. I can always revisit it later, right?

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