Month: January 2015

Time travel – the 2015/10th anniversary edition

Can you believe the blog is TEN YEARS OLD this month? I’ve been blogging for a decade.

header history collage

And that’s not the only milestone anniversary I’m celebrating in 2015. Mothership Photography is five years old this summer. In March, I’ll be celebrating the 25th anniversary (!!) of my first day of work with CRA and Beloved and I will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of the day we met. That’s a bonanza of things to celebrate, so I’m hoping to do a whole series of retrospective posts in the next little while. I figured I’d launch it with this little meme I first published in 2005 and revisited in 2006, 2009, 2010 and 2012 – heh, I have always been a little guilty of repeating myself.

So, here’s the 10th anniversary edition of the time traveller meme!

25 years ago today I would have been:

  • Still in the “practice marriage” to my first husband
  • Just moving back to Ottawa after a failed attempt to move back to my hometown of London, ON
  • Unemployed (for the only time in my life) after having quit my job as a cashier supervisor at Zellers in hopes of getting a job with the government. I’d quit university to work full time at Zellers a few years before.
  • About to move out of my in-laws’ house to an apartment in Vanier

15 years ago today I would have been:

  • A newlywed, coming up on our first anniversary and our infertility diagnosis
  • Freshly graduated (magna cum laude, no less!) from the University of Ottawa
  • Living in a tiny condo townhouse off Hunt Club
  • Working on assignment with Industry Canada in my first comms job in government

10 years ago today I would have been:

  • Just coming back to work in public affairs at CRA after my maternity leave with Simon
  • Wondering how I’d ever balance work and life with two toddlers
  • Living in a townhouse in Barrhaven
  • About to launch Postcards from the Mothership

5 years ago today I would have been:

  • Finishing up my first year of working part-time four days a week, and (temporarily, as it turns out) working with Army News on web and social media
  • Just about to move from Barrhaven to Manotick
  • On the cusp of launching Mothership Photography

1 year ago today I would have been:

  • Starting my “one decade to retirement” countdown but still enjoying my work as the social media lead for CRA
  • Scouring the internet for PEI cottage rental information
  • Finding out about my photo being used on the first of three book covers last year

This year I am:

  • Super excited to have booked not one but TWO weeks in PEI later this summer
  • Pretty much obsessed with PEI
  • Celebrating 25 years since my first day of work with what was then Revenue Canada Customs, Excise and Taxation
  • Still in love with my camera, and blogging, and social media in general

Today I:

  • Am proud that I’ve also learned in the past year or so how to cook and eat real, whole foods and cut processed foods out of our family’s diet almost entirely
  • Am cooking recipes for dinner I learned from Chef Michael Smith
  • Met my activity goal of 10,000 steps
  • Feel like I’m pretty much on track on this whole “lead a good life” thing – and am so grateful for that fact

Next year I hope:

  • That my life has more PEI, more photos, more gratitude, more family joy, more home cooking – and maybe five less pounds 😉
  • And — maybe a kitchen reno, finances willing

In five years I hope:

  • To be within four years (gasp!) of retirement
  • To have nurtured the blog and photography business to greater successes
  • To have taught myself graphic design skills I can use for both the photography and blog businesses

And speaking of time travel, you know what else is significant about 2015? It’s the year Marty McFly visited when he and Doc Brown visited the future from 1985. We just watched Back to the Future parts I and II with the boys over Christmas – speaking of revisiting, if you haven’t seen them lately, they really do stand up to the test of time! Turns out that’s what I was doing 30 years ago – watching Back to the Future for the first time in theatres as a shy, awkward, boy-crazy dreamer who only wanted to get married and have babies. If only I’d had the faintest idea how much more awesome life would turn out than I could have imagined back then!

Photo of the day: Pups in a pile

Our darling old dog Katie arrived in our lives long before any babies did, and I think that’s why she always acted in a very maternal way toward them.

Bella, on the other hand, arrived into a pack of noisy, playful boys, and it’s clear she thinks the boys are her littermates; never moreso than when given the choice, she will choose to lie on top of one of them rather than just about anywhere else.

Like this:

Pups in a pile

I can’t figure out what I like more, the fact that Tristan is tolerating this or the expression on Bella’s face as she looks directly into the camera that says, “What?!”

Photo of the day: Family fun on the Rideau Canal

When the last of your Christmas family visitors happen to arrive on the first day that the Rideau Canal is open for the season, and they’ve never visited the world’s longest (or is it largest?) outdoor skating rink, and the temperature rises above minus 10C for the first day in a week, an extended family excursion for Beavertails seems almost inevitable!

Family fun on the Rideau Canal

(Can you believe that my wee baby Tristan is the second-tallest person in this photo? It’s been a fun holiday game seeing which adult family member he has outgrown over the holidays!)

Photo of the day: Owl in motion

You might argue that this is not a photo at all. It’s bits of two photos, actually, plus a filter, and a colour tweak, and some contrast.

The snowy owl is from a photo I took about this time last year. Have you ever driven the roads south of town, around Eagleson or Barnsdale or Leitrim, and seen the clusters of photographers with their ginormous lenses, shooting towards farmers’ fields? They’re likely on the hunt for a capture of the snowy owl, which is such a highly sought after prize in the local photographic community that people guard the locations of their photos with a ferocity matched only by the pride they exhibit in sharing their captures. I got lucky – we were on our way home from a ski trip and I had my camera in my car when Tristan noticed this snowy owl perched at the top of a telephone pole on Moodie Drive near Brophy. We’ve seen them often since – if you’re driving the rural farm roads south of town, just watch the tops of light poles and farm fenceposts and you’re likely to find one.

The background photo was one I took a week or so ago. Once again, it was Tristan and me in the car – he seems to be the one most indulgent of my occasional need to pull over and take a photograph. The sun was setting on a moody, chilly day and I loved the texture in the sky as the sun poked in and out of a film of clouds. I stopped on Eagleson just south of Fallowfield to snap a photo of the sunset with the silhouette of a farmer’s field in the foreground.

As we drove further south on Eagleson toward Manotick, we laughed to see not one but three clusters of photographers with massive lenses pointing towards tall poles. We drove by too quickly to be able to resolve the owls, but I’m quite sure they were there. I had only my wide-angle lens with me, and no mittens on a raw cold day, so it was easy to resist the temptation to stop. But I was inspired – how would my previously-captured snowy owls look against this dramatic sky?

Here’s the answer!

photo of a snowy owl against the sunset

I wasn’t completely in love in love with the composite, partly because the light on the owl was coming from the wrong direction and partly because I was a little sloppy with my selection and extraction but too lazy to go back and re-do it. I wanted something a little more dream-like and moody, so I added the painterly texture, and then played with the tones until it had this low-contrast, blue vibe.

Not so much a photograph as a digital painting, but I’m happy that I achieved the mood I set out to convey. Have you seen the snowy owls? It’s a fun afternoon out to go looking for them with the kids!

Photo of the day, #TBT version: Pining for summer in PEI

It’s minus stupidly cold with the wind chill, and my darling Nikon has gone back to the mothership for service, so I decided to post a warm summer #TBT (Throwback Thursday) photo as today’s picture of the day. Then I realized that somehow I had missed including this, probably my favourite photo of 2014 (it’s hanging as a canvas in the living room!) in my end of year roundup of favourite photos. That made this an excellent and easy choice for my #TBT photo of the day:

No really, the clouds actually looked like this! ;)

We’re counting down to TWO weeks in PEI this summer. Twenty-seven weeks and counting!!

Photo of the day: Typebars

When I asked Beloved to digitally sketch me a camera for my new photo website design, the original idea was a vintage typewriter for the blog and a camera for the photography site. And maybe, just maybe, a tattoo of each on my left and right wrists. We ran out of time (and, ahem, attention span) before he could sketch my typewriter, but since I had it out on the table I figured I’d point my camera lens to it instead. I never get tired of taking typewriter pictures!

You're my type

I wanted a vintage vibe with a slightly grungy feel and I knew as I was taking the photo that it would be in black and white. Usually I like a lot of contrast with rich deep blacks, but in this one I went for a more “matte” effect – I pulled the black sliders to the right so the data in the histogram stops well short of the left side. Then I boosted the grain to enhance the old film feel. I can picture this one as a big canvas over an antique desk in writer’s garret. 🙂

What do you think of the new watermark? I fear it’s a wee bit too busy, but I liked the idea of incorporating the camera while keeping the copyright symbol. I’ll have to see it on a few more photos to decide one way or the other, I think.

An outright ban on toboganning – is that where we are headed?

Remember waaaaay back in 2007 when we had a great conversation about a proposed helmet law for toboggans? Here’s the next iteration of the bubble-wrap-your-kids movement: apparently some cities are banning tobogganing altogether.

Front yard sledding-2

According to this article in the National Post, a ban on everyone’s favourite winter pastime is going viral across US cities. “Dubuque, Iowa, is set to ban toboggans in nearly all its 50 parks. Other cities, including Des Moines, Iowa; Montville, New Jersey; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Columbia City, Indiana, are following suit by restricting certain runs or posting signs warning people away.”

This is, of course, a liability issue, so it’s no surprise that our more litigious southern neighbours are more trigger-happy to ban tobogganing than we might be (although apparently some Canadian cities like Hamilton have implemented similar bans.) I would not argue that tobogganing can be a dangerous activity – I ended up in the ER and on crutches for a week or so myself in Grade 9 after trying to surf down a hill standing up on a sled and severely spraining my ankle when I jumped off to avoid a tree, and I was probably six when the sharp edge of a toboggan split open the skin on my nose when I collided with a kid pulling his sled up the hill I was sliding down.

But I would still in no way support a blanket ban like this. I very much agree with the expert doctor cited in the article. Dr Charles Tator, a brain surgeon who works with an injury-prevention charity, acknowledges that tobogganing can be as risky as diving, snowmobiling or parachuting. However, the article says Dr. Tator does thinks rather than banning sledding, cities could take steps to make sledding safer by removing obstacles like trees from designated sledding hills. He also encourages kids to wear helmets.

Winter activities seem more fraught with peril than summer ones. While biking and skateboarding and tree climbing have their own risks, injuries seem both more likely and more severe from activities like skiing (ask me how many times I wiped out on my first runs down the green run last year), skating and tobogganing. Anything that involves hurling yourself across a slick surface is just a little bit crazy, right? But so is living in a climate where we live with ice and snow for so much of the year. On days like this, even going for a walk down an icy sidewalk in -40C windchill is fraught with peril, but we’re not going to ban that, are we? (Ahem, except in the schools, where apparently outdoor recess gets cancelled if the temperature falls to -20C with the windchill. But I digress … that is a post for another day.)

What do you think? Is banning tobogganing the answer? Is the onus on the sledder or the owner of the hill to take precautions and minimize risk? Or should we just hop on a sled and get over ourselves?

A new year, a fresh start

Some people head to the gym in January to work off those extra cookies. Some people put away the Christmas decorations and use the opportunity to clean house and purge. Not this girl. Nope, I spent hours on my arse staring at my computer this weekend – but I’m pretty darn happy with the results!

First, I overhauled my Mothership Photography site. That’s a task I’ve been meaning to take on for years, almost right from the time I launched in back in 2010 or so. My graphic design skills have improved immensely in the past few years (did I mention I even toyed with the idea of going back to school part time for graphic design?) and I love the bright clean new look.

Here’s the before and after:

new website banner for Ottawa photographer Danielle Donders

Much improved, right? And how much do I love the little camera logo that Beloved sketched out based on an idea I had but couldn’t quite pull together? I love it so much that it may just be my next tattoo! 😉 I’d love it if you took a little tour around and let me know if you see any problem areas or if, yanno, you just want to heap me with lavish praise for my mad web design skillz.

And speaking of mad design skillz, the bloggy header had started looking a little stale to me a while ago, too, so while I was at it, I freshened that up too. I think it’s much cleaner and I like that the two sites have matching fonts. Here’s the new headers:

Worth the investment of six or eight hours on a snowy January weekend, right? Now I’m ready for a terrific 2015. And about that neglected house cleaning…. 😉