Photography

I realized just the other day that every single one of my pictures last week featured flowers somehow. This week, I very nearly did it again. Hungry for colour much? The colour of the week seems to be pink, inspired largely by the lilacs and apple blossoms that my camera (and my nose!) simply can’t resist.

And of course, these two lovely girls who came for porch portraits last weekend are also pretty in pink.

I bought myself a Mother’s Day present with some of my Getty earnings and it finally arrived this week even though I’d bought it on eBay weeks before. (Argh, now I know why I don’t buy stuff from eBay more often. What a convoluted, annoying process!) I have a few favourite prime lenses, notably a 50mm f1.4 that I use almost all the time. As I found myself occasionally tripping over branches or running out of space in a room trying to “zoom with my feet”, I began to covet a decent zoom lens to upgrade the 18-55mm kit lens that came with my Nikon D40 back in the day.

Everyone seems to love and recommend the 24-70 mm f2.8 lens, but the price tag near $2K put it way out of my reach. Way. After quite a bit of searching and researching, I found a used 35-70 mm f2.8 for sale on eBay. Nikon stopped making these back in 2007 or 2008, but all the reviews I read said it was nearly equivalent to the 24-70 mm at about 1/5 the price (and it weighs less, too.) I was very leery of buying camera gear via eBay, but I lucked out. The lens arrived in perfect condition, and I love it. It’s a beast compared to my tiny little nifty fifty, but it’s a sweet lens and it has something I’ve never had before – a macro feature. So now I can get up close and personal with my lilacs!

I liked that one so much, I went back for more later in the week, and stacked on a texture, too.

(You wish Flickr had smell-o-vision for these ones. Heavenly!)

Speaking of Mother’s Day, this is how our Mother’s Day adventure in Almonte looked. (There is a blog post to be written with much more detail. Consider this a teaser.)

This is me in the grass. I spent a while thinking about how to do this one, but I’m still not sure about the self-portraits.

The caption on Flickr says it all for this one. I called it “happy”. Because I am. (And that’s a good place to be.)

Tristan is taking a few extra guitar lessons to make up for ones that had been cancelled earlier, so last night I walked him over to the music school after dinner. On the way home, I put the new lens through its paces, and came up with this – “an evening walk in Manotick.” It’s a kind of a companion piece to the collage I made almost exactly a year ago.

Here’s to wishing you a picture-perfect long weekend to launch the summer season!

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It’s been one of those weeks when I look at the pictures from earlier in week and think, “No way, that wasn’t this week. Surely that has to have been longer ago than just a few days!”

It’s been so crazy that I have two full blog posts to write about photographic fun, one about a great porch session with a fun family of five-year-old triplets and one about a fantastic walk I want to tell you about – but I haven’t had a chance to write either one yet. And then there was stuff that I didn’t take any pictures of (gasp, scandalous!), like the fabulous Kym Shumsky’s Les Nôtres vernissage, the stuff we did and I will probably never get around to blogging, like the seasonal opening of Watson’s Mill, and the pictures I can’t show you, like an amazing Grade 4 class trip to the National Gallery, the Ottawa School of Art and Sugar Mountain. Phew, what a week!

Here’s a teaser of the pending blog post about a capital walk that you simply must take. I promise I’ll pony up the details next week. This is, in my humble opinion, the best view of the Parliament Buildings, especially in tulip season. I’m standing on the Quebec side, near the Museum of Civilization.

Okay, here’s another teaser, also from the Quebec side a little further down. (These are both iPhone photos.)

When you’re out enjoying the sunshine on a perfect spring day, you might just run into other families out for a walk on the riverbank as well. I am particularly partial to families of five.

Closer to home, the crab apple tree in our front yard has been putting on a spectacular show of its own this week. For some reason, it did not flower like this last year — maybe it was the rainy, wet spring we had? — but this year it has been insane with blossoms. While I was taking this photo, I could hear a low-level buzz like a beehive. I looked around and realized that it wasn’t a hive, but an entire hive worth of bees buzzing from blossom to blossom; there must have been 50 or even 100 honey bees flitting about the tree. It was really something!

I was playing with the Lensbaby and the blossoms, and stopped to sit on the porch while I checked a few of the shots. And that’s how I ended up with this shot of my feet up on the porch rail with a riot of apple blossoms behind them. Wild, eh?

But then when I added the star aperture to my Lensbaby it made this crazy shot. I’m still not entirely sure I like it, but it is definitely, um, unique. This is all done without digital manipulation; the star aperture on the Lensbaby turns the light and dark area into the star shapes.

Of course, the Lensbaby effects can be more, um, subtle, and less like, ahem, animé foot p0rn. I bought these antique medicine bottles at the Bytown Bottle Collector Club (no really!) annual show and sale a few days ago, and got the vintage crate there as well.

As you might guess, with three boys, a dog and a cat, setting up a still life is not always easy. I called this one, “This is why we can’t have nice still lifes.” (I struggled with the plural on that one. “Still lives” really does change the sense a little too much, doesn’t it?)

I really do have a flower thing going on this week, don’t I? Here’s more – Simon picking a dandelion bouquet for me. And no, that’s not our lawn — but it could be!

I had originally called this last one “naked” and I when I took it I was thinking that it conceptualized the end of things, about expended effort and seeds and renewal. I changed the title to the quote that follows for a couple of reasons. First, it perfectly encapsulates the idea that I was trying to express. Second, I love that it’s from Erma Bombeck, an author who has had a huge inspiration on me as a writer and even as a mother.

Third, it’s so true it ought to be a motto: “When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, ‘I used everything you gave me.’” ~Erma Bombeck

Amen to that.

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Spring is a photographer’s dream. Everywhere there is colour, contrast, interesting shapes – and it is SO welcome after months of winter’s monochromatic greys and dirty whites.

Even the dandelions are beautiful!

I like this one of the orange tulips in my garden because I think the orange pops against the green and I like the painterly look of the bokeh (the out of focus parts in the background.) The repeating shapes of the tulip are evocative of an echo, don’t you think?

And then in rained. For days, which seemed like weeks. (And my grass grew about two inches this week!) I love the colour in these tulips I found in a bed downtown, with that weird streak of purple against the orange.

I’d gone looking for a foggy picture early one morning, but the fog wasn’t dense enough to make the dramatic picture I was looking for. It was, however, wet enough to make these amazing, jewel-like dew-drops on a spider web. I took this with my iPhone because I wanted to get as close as possible (my 50mm lens’s minimum focus distance is something like 30 cm or more) and because I like the black and white film look from the app I was using. But, I was trying to hunker down and balance on my toes while holding the camera steady, and a breeze kept making the web dance. All that to say, it’s not nearly as sharp as I wanted it to be — but I love the refraction in the drops. It’s 80% of where it could have been, but still not bad for something I almost walked right past!

This is not what I set out to do with the sea glass. It’s part (a pretty small part, actually) of our collection from Nova Scotia. I don’t know exactly what I was intending to do, but by the time I’d finished this I’d run out of time for playing with the camera, so this ended up as the photo of the day. I heart sea glass!

Sometimes, I just can’t resist the light. Don’t you wish your breakfast tasted this good?

And finally, a bit of a cheat. I was looking for something to submit to a photo challenge on Flickr, and it had to be something I took after April 2. I started playing with the photos from the red balloon session and ended up liking this out-take a lot more than I liked the photos I posted at the time. And then, in classic fashion, I again found I’d run out of my allotment of daily photo time, so this month-old (but admittedly adorable!) picture is yesterday’s photo of the day.

And speaking of re-runs, remember I mentioned a while back that a Flickr contact had seen the use of my infamous puddle jumping picture on a flyer in a grocery store in Scotland? Look what arrived in my mail box from over the puddle, erm, I mean ocean, this week!

How funny is it to know that this picture is in grocery stores all over the UK?

I’ve got two families coming out for porch portraits this week, so it should be a fantastically photogenic week. Hope yours is filled with beauty, too!

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I seem to be feeling inspired early in the day this week. The majority of this week’s pictures were taken within the first hour or so, some before I’ve even had my first coffee. Early bird gets the photo?

It seems like ages ago now, but it was only Monday that we woke up to heavy, wet snow in Ottawa. The tulips fared better than the daffs. They’ve got strong necks!

I’d actually forgotten I had taken another picture with my camera instead of my iPhone and was pleasantly surprised to find this one a couple of days later. Pleasantly surprised because it’s a much better picture, but also because the snow had completely disappeared by the time I found it.

I kinda thought I’d have another couple of years before I started taking pictures like this of my baby. Sigh. (I loved the window light in this one. Look at the catch-lights in his eyes!)

I was taking pictures of raindrops dripping off a branch with my Lensbaby when Simon walked by on the porch and I snapped this portrait of him. I’ll take smiling boy over drippy branches any day! (You see the faint stars in the background? That’s the star shape in the Lensbaby creative aperture that does that. So hokey, but I love it!)

This isn’t an official “photo of the day” but I’m still bragging about it so I thought I’d slip it in! That’s my pictures of the skaters down there, published in an advertorial in the current issue of Macleans.

It’s been a miserable week weather-wise, but the sunrises have been pretty amazing. I actually doubled back on my way over the way over the Rideau River to take this one. I kept those branches in the foreground intentionally thinking I’d give the shot some depth, but I find they clutter up the shot now that I see it. Oh well, the colours are still pretty, no?

I like this one much better, taken a few minutes down the road at the Long Island Lock a couple of days later. Can I just say that running into a really big flock of geese and sending them honking and panicking into the water is an awesomely fun way to start the day?

And hey, I saw yesterday that they’re officially filling up the Rideau Canal now. There’s no more sure sign of impending summer in Ottawa than that!

I snapped this one with my iPhone. I really like the composition, but didn’t expect it to be so noisy. Not guitar-noisy but photographic noise: that speckly grain, caused by excessively low light. Oh well. I’ll do it in a brighter room next time.

One of the many odd theme groups to which I belong on Flickr is Fenced Fridays. I am drawn to fences, and especially the miles and miles and miles of rural fencing I see out here. I’ve thought of doing a shot like this for a while, and finally got around to it.

The funny part is that last night while I was processing it, Lucas was bouncing around with his “guitar” (not the one I snapped above) and so I asked him to sing me a cow song to go with my picture. Beloved recorded this surefire hit on his iPhone:

You’re welcome!

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