Month: August 2013

This week (or two) in pictures: Part two of a rambly catch-up post

Toward the end of July, I had the pleasure of back-to-back portraits on the porch: one little guy dropped by for pictures to celebrate his first birthday, and then a few days later a lovely lady honoured me with a visit to commemorate her 100th birthday. How awesome is that?

And how cute is this little guy??

Porch portraits for his first birthday!

portrait of a little boy on a red wagon

I laughed when I was downloading the photos from my camera and saw this one, the very last shot I snapped that morning. Although he was sunny and agreeable throughout our session (truth be told, he made me ache for the days when my boys were wee like that!) I think he was clearly done with me and my camera by this point!

Porch portraits for his first birthday!

Isn’t he adorable? And then a few days later, I had the great pleasure of meeting Mrs Walker. The last time she sat for a formal portrait was, I kid you not, when her husband went off to war. Could I be more humbled? She was clearly a little less than comfortable at the beginning of our session, but as we chatted about her life and family, I could see her relax and her personality began to shine through.

Portrait of a lady on her 100th birthday

Mrs Walker’s daughter, who had commissioned the portrait, sent me a lovely essay about her interesting life called, and I love this, “The first 100 years”. 🙂 Imagine the work these hands have done!

photo of hands of a senior citizen

But there was more than porch portraits going on this week! There was, as I mentioned, a fun trip to the Museum of Nature:

"Hey boys, pretend the giant ants are attacking you!"

I think this is one of my more unique family portraits. Next time I’ll have to bring a tripod to make sure mom gets in the picture.

Nature Museum family portrait

I have not been able to resist the gorgeous flowers blooming all around me!

This is the new “matte” look that photographers seem to be gaga over right now. It means making the blacks very flat, almost grey, to pull the contrast out of the photo. I’m not a fan but I wanted to play with it. Hmm, not sure – what do you think?

Matte daisies

Now textures, on the other hand – I love the texture effect!

photo of coneflowers

(I love it even more since I got RAM for my computer as a birthday gift and Photoshop doesn’t choke when I try to open more than one file at a time!)

photo of coneflowers

These are straight out of the camera – too bad they’re invasive weeds, cuz they’re lovely.

photo of purple loosestrife

And squee! The best flowers of them all – sunflowers!!

photo of a Sunflower field

(I will have a great story about sunflowers later this week. Stand by!)

And of course, I love best of all the photos of the boys that will tell the story of our summer for years to come. Not formal portraits, not staged, not usually planned – just boys being boys.

photo of boys walking on a boardwalk in summer

photo of brothers sharing ice cream

photo of boys playing in a treehouse with a dog

picture of a boy learning to knit

(What, you don’t think that last one qualifies as ‘boys being boys’? One of his goals for the summer was to learn to knit, so I taught him!)

What’s your summer been like so far?

And by the way, I have a great family portrait session booked for next week (I am really excited about it!) but do have a few days left for summer portraits, or some early back-to-school portraits. The fall is lovely but insanely busy, so if you’re thinking of autumn portraits with the fall colours, please get in touch soon!

Summer staycation: Choose a direction for a fun family day trip from Ottawa

No big vacation plans for you this summer? No problem! Whether you want to go north, south, east or west, here’s four suggestions for great little family-friendly day trips that you can take from Ottawa. A change is as good as a rest, right?

1. North to Wakefield, Quebec

We discovered Wakefield on my birthday last summer. It’s about an hour’s drive from our place, but probably less than half an hour from downtown. The scenic drive up Autoroute 5 is straight off the King Edward bridge and easy to find, and the drive is lovely! The red covered bridge for which Wakefield is known is a wee drive outside the village core and a bit too far to walk, but worth the extra effort.

Wakefield

If you go, don’t miss the covered bridge, the bakery, the candy store, the eclectic little shops, the great little restaurants (we liked Kaffe 1870) and the old-fashioned round-about for the old steam train (which I hear will be running again in 2014!)

2. West to Almonte, Ontario

Our trip to Almonte last year was a Mother’s Day present to me. (Do you sense a theme here? Oh yes, I will totally play the mom card to coerce the kids into tolerating a road trip on my behalf!) Almonte is a picturesque little town maybe 45 minutes due west of here. You can get there off the 417, but I prefer the back roads that march through farm and forest as the Canadian Shield fights the Ottawa Valley for dominance.

We were antiquing in Almonte and found lots of cute little shops in which to browse. My favourite by far, though, was my main reason for wanting to go: the Tin Barn Market. It’s a good thing this little shop is a two-hour round-trip drive from Manotick or I swear I would have no money left for groceries each week. They have the most amazing selection of eclectic used, repurposed and vintage things you could ever imagine. We also checked out the Almonte Flea Market, looking for a replacement for our old favourite the Antrim Flea Market, which ceased operations in 2011. It was still early in the season when we visited, but there were a good number of vendors with interesting items there.

Mother's Day in Almonte

If vintage and repurposed isn’t your thing, you’ll still likely enjoy a walk along Almonte’s river walk, where you can see some of the textile mills that contributed to the founding of the town. It’s a lovely walk in any season! And if you’re in the mood for a truly gorgeous scene, just zip another 15 minutes along the Mississippi River to Pakenham, where you can see the old five-arch stone bridge.

One autumn day in Pakenham

3. East to Lachute, Quebec

You might have sensed a theme here. We love flea markets. LOVE them. I don’t even need to buy a lot of stuff, I am just completely fascinated by the browsing. But the buying is fun, too, and the boys like the treasure-hunting aspect of perusing a good flea market. It’s a bit of a surprise, then, that before this year we’d never made the two-hour trek out to Lachute, Quebec for the Lachute Farmers Market, the “largest flea market in Western Quebec.” (We knew we had to go when we saw it featured on Canadian Pickers last year!)

It was a zoo, the biggest, craziest, busiest flea market we’ve ever seen. We had to wait in traffic for 10 minutes just to get near enough to park, and people were parking *everywhere*. It turns out that the day we went (it runs Sunday and Tuesday, but Tuesday is the bigger day) was during Quebec’s annual construction holiday, so that may have been a bit of a tactical error on our part. But crowds aside, I have never seen a flea market like this – they had the usual grey-market knock-off stuff, but rows and rows of it, so much that we couldn’t at first find the vintage stuff we were looking for. (You know it’s a big flea market when you can’t get oriented and wish you had a map!) They had live music, a little restaurant, stupidly long lineups for the washrooms, pony rides and even livestock among the trash and treasures for sale.

Flea market

I seriously regret not buying the old wooden spindles I saw ($4 each) and the vintage tin spinning top ($20). And I wish we’d had more time to take in this advice I got in reply to my tweet about the madness of the flea market, but it was just too crowded to linger and we didn’t want to leave Bella in her crate too late.

Next time we go, we will head out much earlier. By noon many of the vintage and antiques sellers were already packing up their tables. If you love flea markets with a festival flavour, you’ll love Lachute!

4. South to Morrisburg and Upper Canada Village
At least once a year, we make our way down Highway 31 (otherwise known as Bank Street) past Metcalfe, through Vernon and Williamsburg (be sure to admire the crumbling beauty of the Picadilly Theatre on your way by!) and then down Highway 2 to Upper Canada Village. Just before you get to the 401, if you’re out on a Sunday it’s well worth a gander to poke around McHaffie’s flea market since you’re out there. (Big, but not as crazy as Lachute, and well worth the drive!)

Here’s our trip to Upper Canada Village back in 2010, which conveniently coincided with a civil war re-enactment. (Taken through the viewfinder of an old Duaflex twin-lens reflex camera. Remember when I was obsessed with TtV?)

521:1000 Back in the day, TTV

Aside from Upper Canada Village, which is always an adventure in itself, you can hop on the wee train out front and extend your trip to Crysler Beach. And one of these days we’ll get around to checking out Prehistoric World, now that Lucas is in a dinosaur phase.

So there’s a day trip worth of adventure on every point of the compass from Ottawa. Stay tuned, I have a new one to share with you soon!

What’s your favourite day trip?

This week in pictures: A long and rambly catch-up post (part one of two)

Oops! Didn’t I used to post a weekly post with all the photos of the day? I got a little sporadic with the daily photos around the end of June and although I’ve been posting most days, I kind of forgot to do these posts. We’ve been having too much fun for me to get it all down on the blog! Okay, here’s one of two posts to catch up the photos from July you haven’t seen yet, and a story or two (ahem) to go with them.

This is my friend Todd teaching Tristan how to do a backflip off the diving board. I love this photo for several reasons. On a technical level, I love it because I love the tension in the photo, how you can almost feel how coiled Tristan is. It’s also the first day he mastered backflips! I remember trying to master flips off my friend’s diving board through most of my 17th summer and being woefully unable.

Backflip!

Todd and I have been friends for SO long that he is more like a brother to me, and I trust him like a brother. When each of the boys have been wee and just learning how to swim, Todd has convinced me to let them jump off the diving board in his pool (it was a lot harder to convince me with Tristan than with Lucas!) and either sink or swim to the ladder while Todd supervised in the deep end. Dads, even when they’re not your dad, are so much better at encouraging learning through risky activities, aren’t they? That’s how Lucas went from diving to backflips (with a helping hand) all in the same sweaty July afternoon. (Also my first Vine post!)

No story here, just purty!

I heart coneflowers!

No story here either, just cute! A boy, his dog and his DS. It was a “pick up the camera and hope they don’t notice you or move before it’s too late” kind of moment.

Lazy day

So this is a fun story that also needs a bit of background. I’ve been following Ottawa photographer Tony Fouhse ever since I got serious about taking pictures three or four years ago. He’s probably best known for his street photography, especially his USER and Live Through This projects. I find his work fascinating and I think it’s neat that such a creative mind prowls the same streets that I do. That’s what makes his latest project, “Official Ottawa”, so compelling to me. You know I love to try to express my love for Ottawa through my photos, and I think they’re mostly a love letter to the city. Tony is quoted in the New York Times’ Lens Blog (see, he really is a big deal!) as saying, “Most Canadians, when they think of Ottawa, they think of the Peace Tower or skating on the canal, or talking heads standing in front of the Parliament buildings. I think maybe by trying to keep things plain and simple, what I’m trying to do is strip it down and show the bones of the thing, rather than all the hype and the myth and the fairy tale that people usually project into this city.” Neat, eh?

So when I saw that Tony was looking for “civil servants” to photograph for the project, I was immediately intrigued. The word “subversive” came up in our e-mail exchange, and I knew I wanted to be a part of his project, but I was very nervous. I mean, doing social media for the federal government is already just a little bit subversive, right? But when Tony said yes, he would like to take my portrait, I was immediately overcome with doubt. I am not a typical civil servant. I don’t think. I mean, what is a typical civil servant? And how do I dress like one for the photo? In the end, I tried not to overthink it too much, although on top of the “how do I properly *look* like a civil servant” conundrum, I was also just a wee bit nervous about meeting Tony. If you read his blog you know he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and I was somehow anxious that I had misrepresented myself in my e-mail. (I know, I know. My inner and deeply insecure 14 year old is never far from the surface.) All that to say, I fretted for nothing because it turns out Tony is the. nicest. photographer. ever. He and I chatted for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, he posed me where he wanted me and took exactly two photographs, and we were done.

One of the reasons he only took two photographs is because he was using a gorgeous medium format camera that, in Tony’s words, costs $7 every time you click the shutter. You can see the negative in his hand. So cool!

What fun to meet and be fotographed by amazing Ottawa fotographer @tonyfouhse - incredibly nice guy and not scary at all!! :)

And here’s how my portrait came out. He sent me a scan of the photo itself, but I love it more in context with the other portraits he’s taken for this part of his Official Ottawa project. Here’s the chief of police, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, Jeffrey Simpson (national affairs columnist with the Globe and Mail), a tour guide with the NCC and me doing my best civil servant impression. 🙂

Photos by Tony Fouhse
Photos by and © Tony Fouhse

I can’t help but contrast my experience with Tony against the encounter I had with another prominent Ottawa photographer last year. You might remember he called me a “mamarazzi” and “an icon of the ill direction towards which I believe photography may well be headed.” (Seriously!) And here you have Tony, an entirely better class of photographer and human being, who was not only patient with me pointing my iPhone at him, but treated me like an equal and spoke to me with simple respect as I scrambled hard to talk to him about photography without sounding like an idiot.

And finally (phew!) a few quick photos from our trip to Toronto last week. We started at the Ontario Science Centre to bring the kids to the Game On 2.0 exhibit. It was, to be honest, a bit of a reminder of just how awesome our Ottawa museums are and how lucky we are to have them. But did you know that if you’re a member of the Agriculture/Science and Tech/Aviation museum here, you get into the Ontario Science Centre for FREE? That saved us $80!! And teaching the kids to play Pac Man and Space Invaders did make for a fun afternoon!

Game On 2.0 at the Ontario Science Centre

The next day we headed to Canada’s Wonderland. I hadn’t been since I was a teenager (1987, to be exact!) and we’d been meaning to take the kids for a while. We had the BEST day!! Number of roller coasters I expected to ride? Zero. Number of roller coasters I actually rode? SIX! My brother and I started the day on the Leviathan, and after my knees stopped shaking I was suddenly back in touch with my long-dormant inner adrenaline junkie. Even the boys, who don’t particularly like rides, got into the act.

You know what else was amazing? I actually forgot my camera in the hotel room — and it was so liberating!! I took photos with my iPhone all day and didn’t have to worry about hauling my Nikon around everywhere. Here’s some of my favourite shots.

Canada's Wonderland 2013

And finally (did you think this post would never end?) on the way home the next day we stopped for lunch and a wander in Ganonoque. I love the timelessness of small-town Ontario!

Downtown Gananoque

So that’s four or five blog posts I’ve been meaning to write crammed all into one. Can you see why I’ve been too busy to blog lately? And that’s just the FIRST week of my summer vacation – I’ll try to catch up with another photo post in a day or two.

What have YOU been up to this summer?