You know what would make a really great Valentine’s Day gift? A gift certificate for a family portrait!

To celebrate love and families, I’m happy to offer this time-limited deal: a custom porch-portrait mini-session at last year’s price of just $100. (Yes, prices will be going up this spring.)

So what’s a mini-session? Here’s what you can expect:

• a 30-minute session on location outside at my place in Manotick, on the porch and in the yard.
• 10 – 15 custom edited proofs to choose from in an online gallery.
• one 8 x 10 or two 5 x 7 prints.
• high-resolution digital negatives of the prints you choose.

If you’re interested in purchasing a gift certificate or booking your custom family photography session, please e-mail me at danicanada (at) gmail (dot) com or use my contact form. There’s a lot more information and more samples of my family portrait work on my portfolio site, Mothership Photography.

The porch portrait sessions were a HUGE success last year, and I’m so excited to be able to offer them again.

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It’s a little bit ironic that now that I have a more comfortable versatile carrying strap for my Nikon, I’ve fallen in love with taking pictures with my easily-pocketable and much less bulky iPhone — no carrying strap required!

My parents got me the Black Rapid camera strap I’d requested for Christmas. It took me quite a bit of waffling to get used to the idea of carrying my camera suspended upside down by the tripod screw, and a few weeks to convince myself that it was safe dangling over my hip like that, but now that I have used it for a while, I love love love it! The accessory strap that comes with the D7000 was good, but the Black Rapid strap is longer, and makes for an easy cross-body carry without pinching the, um, girls, if you know what I mean. Not to mention the fact that when you’re a busty girl, most cross-body straps are a little less than flattering. I like to carry the camera resting just to the side of the small of my back, and the Black Rapid strap is fully adjustable. The only annoying bit is that when I’m walking at a good clip, I tend to somehow trigger the video feature on the camera, so I’ve come back from photo safari walks with photos interspersed with short bouncy video clips of my feet and people walking past on the sidewalk — all upside-down.

Ahem, all that to say, while they each have a place in my heart, I have been enjoying the convenience of mobile photography this week. While it’s not unheard of for me to take the DSLR with me to the grocery store, I didn’t have it with me last Saturday. I hadn’t realized when I left the house how sparkly and gorgeous the world would be when the sun shone on the ice coating all the branches from the storm the day before. I like this photo, but I love the quote I found to go with it: “Begin doing what you want to do now. We are not living in eternity. We have only this moment, sparkling like a star in our hand-and melting like a snowflake…” ~ Sir Francis Bacon

These were surreptitiously snapped in the Bulk Barn while I was shopping for candy Lego pieces for Simon’s birthday party. I put them together with a fun app called Diptic.

This week was Simon’s birthday, and we invited the Lego Guy back for another successful Lego party. He is really amazing — I think this party was even better than the one he did for Tristan’s birthday two years ago. Ian is a natural teacher and strikes a perfect balance between instruction and play. Simon happily declared this the “best birthday party ever” while I learned that you can host a party or photograph a party — but it’s a challenge to do both!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t a perfect week. Lucas has been very sick since Wednesday — in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quite so sick. He’s had a fever that tops out around 102F and just won’t stay away, and a terrible juicy cough. I finally brought him in yesterday to see the pediatrician, and he’s got enough of a crackle in his chest that we ended up with antibiotics in case it’s pneumonia again (he had it not all that long ago.) It’s just not right seeing my energetic boy taken out like this.

And if you live in Ottawa, you know that this weekend is the official launch of Winterlude. I took a lunchtime walk on the Rideau Canal skateway (world’s largest, if not longest!) and got some fun shots with both the Nikon and the iPhone that Getty Images snapped up.

And last but not least, no piece of photographic gear is truly considered broken in until I can take it for a test drive with my favourite local attraction, Watson’s Mill in Manotick.

I’d say it passes the test, eh?

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As I mentioned earlier, I had the chance last week to help out during a portrait session for adorable nine-day-old twin baby boys with Ottawa photographer Christine Denis. I finally had the time to sort through my pictures and pick out a few more favourites.

One of the best parts of working with Christine (aside from the simple pleasure of her company!) was learning how to set up some of the classic newborn poses. I’ve worked with babies a few times now, but never as young as nine days (!) old. If you’re working with newborns, it’s really ideal to take the pictures in the first ten to fourteen days if you want to pose them like this.

(I swear, even after looking at these pictures for days, I can’t help but sigh every time I look at that one. Maybe Beloved will let me have just one — or two! — more babies?)

The boys were so calm and docile. They slept agreeably for most of the session, allowing Christine to shift and settle them with nary a complaint. In fact, they seemed quite happy to be the centre of attention.

I continue to be a fan of wee feet and itsy-bitsy fingers.

I’d posted a version of this shot earlier, but I think I like this one better. The other one was a very tight crop, but I think this one works better to show how tiny the boys are, safely cradled in their parents’ arms.

Don’t you wish you looked this radiant nine days after the birth of your child(ren)?!

I think this one might be my favourite. So peaceful…

It was a genuine pleasure to take photographs of this sweet family, and I learned so much working with Christine. If you’re interested in booking a family or newborn portrait session, I’d love to hear from you. I’m now booking sessions for winter and spring 2012! You can get more information about sessions and prices on my Mothership Photography site.

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Oops, has it really been a week since I’ve put up a new blog post? That has to be a new record for me. Sorry about that, I’ve been knocked on my keister by a cold and a migraine and kindergarten registrations and the preparations for birthday season, which begins here this weekend.

I did still manage to keep taking pictures, though! The absolute highlight of my week was spending some time with the kind and talented Ottawa photographer Christine Denis, assisting while she took portraits of these nine-day-old twin boys. *melt*

Isn’t it almost enough to make you want to have more babies? They were so calm and docile and delicious, and I learned so much about newborn posing and portraiture from Christine. Wow, is it ever a lot of work, but oh my goodness, how adorable is this?

I’ve got a few more I hope to share later in the week, but I think those were my two favourites from the session. From warm and fresh to old and cold — I was delighted to find what I think is a pretty unique view of the Peace Tower when I was out on a walk downtown. This is the ruins of the former carbide mill on Victoria Island, build in 1892 by Thomas “Carbide” Wilson. I noticed the windows and shifted my perspective back and forth a bit (“zoomed with my feet” as they say) until I had the Peace Tower lined up in one of the windows.

We visited friends who foster reptiles on the weekend, and they introduced us to Edgar, the Florida King Snake. Tristan, Lucas and I thought he was pretty cool, but Beloved feels about snakes pretty much the same way Indiana Jones does. (“Snakes? Why does it have to be snakes?”)

The rest of the week was all-iPhone, all the time. You know I love my vintage typewriter, and I finally got a Hipstamatic print of it that I like.

This was one of the days I was home sick. It was literally the easiest shot I could compose, short of lying on the couch and shooting a picture of the ceiling. Lucas draws at least half a dozen or so pictures each day, lately almost always of characters from Club Penguin (which he is not, ironically, allowed to play.)

I’ve had these silk daisies as a centrepiece on the table for nearly a year and taken quite a few pictures of them, but never any I liked enough to keep and none that capture what I like about the colours and the glass vase and the bits of sea glass in the bottom of it. The late-afternoon light was hitting it just right, though, and I’m really happy with how this one came out.

And finally, a shot from the snowy, blustery drive home yesterday. I don’t know why I am so fascinated with rural mailboxes, but I am. Maybe I was a country girl in a former life? I called this one “mailbox minimalism”. I don’t ordinarily like the dark frame film on Hipstamatic but I think it works well for this one.

I promise to be a little more diligent about getting you some fresh content for next week!

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My friend Heather thinks I owe you a retraction. Remember this post, where I congratulated myself for my level-headedness and maturity in managing to pull myself out of a frenzy of consumeristic covetousness and NOT impulse-buy a new iPhone 4S? She thinks I owe you a retraction because I went out and actually did buy the new iPhone four days later. I think I deserve a medal for waiting for four whole days. And pro haggler that I am, I managed to wrangle a deal on my data plan so that I’m actually paying less per month for wireless than I was for our ancient non-data-plan Krazr, so we’ll save the price of the new iPhone in about a year and a half. Yay!

And oh my sweet lord, what a treat is the new iPhone 4S! I have only barely begun to figure out the voice-activated Siri stuff, but the camera? Wow! Well here, don’t let me tell you — let me show you!

“Hey, look Willie! Mom got a new iPhone!”

I went out for a drive on Sunday to take some pictures and started playing with Hipstamatic, an app I’ve had on my iPhone for more than a year but never warmed to. I’m kinda digging it now! (Do you like the digital sticky tape holding the collage together? I added that in Photoshop.)

This was the view from my office window when the sun hit an icy tree on Sussex Drive, also via Hipstamatic.

And this one is straight-up out of the iPhone, no app required. (I have been coveting a wide-angle lens for my Nikon so I can do this kind of big-nose distortion, but the iPhone’s angle of view is just wide enough to satisfy my creative urge for now!)

And speaking of the Nikon, I didn’t abandon it entirely this week. I’m glad I had it with me on Monday when this spectacular sunrise lit up the sky over the Byward Market. No colour enhancement on this one, I just pointed my camera and clicked.

You might have seen this one in my post yesterday. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but only recently had enough skill to be able to make it come out like I planned in my head. The text is actually added after the fact in Photoshop, which means I can put up just about any message I want. I’m thinking it might make a fun new blog header one of these days.

As I said on Flickr, stand by for the “I am so much more than just a mom with a camera” version. Speaking of which, I’ve made a few allusions recently to Internet drama. I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. I got tangled up in a war of words on a Flickr forum recently with Ottawa photographer Paul Couvrette, who called me a “mamarazzi” and criticized me for (among other things) undercharging for prints and making my pictures available online. While the criticism stung at the time, especially since it was more or less unprovoked and definitely overly vicious and personal, the apology he later posted was laugh-out-loud funny. I had no idea at the time, but apparently he had “personified [Dani] as an icon of the ill direction towards which I believe photography may well be headed.” Nice, eh? I’ve never been called an icon of anything, let alone the downfall of an entire industry. And I thought I was just taking pictures because it made me happy. So if I hike my prices next year, you can blame Paul Couvrette.

Mostly, though? I still just love taking pictures.

And hey, this made me feel a lot better. I got my Getty Images sales statement at the end of the week, and this picture from October apparently ran in the Wall Street Journal during December.

And this picture of Willie was bought by a company that makes greeting cards and calendars with titles like “Napping Cats of 2012.”

Hmmm, can you guess which one I’ll be adding to my “as seen in” portfolio? I mean, the WSJ is great, but the Napping Cats of 2012 calendar? Does it get more prestigious than that?!

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Mommyblogger, a photo by Dani_Girl on Flickr.

Cuz yanno, sometimes a picture does say it so much better than a thousand words could.

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After a notable absence, winter has arrived with a vengeance in Ottawa recently. I can’t wait to get out and start taking pictures of the great snow dump we got yesterday — but I might wait until the temperatures warm up a bit beyond the current minus 30 with the wind chill. Brrrr!

But heck, winter lasts a long time here in the world’s snowiest capital city, so you kind of have to suck it up and get outside and enjoy it. Like this!

And then you have to stand by patiently and look cute while your mom takes your picture. Again.

Or maybe you ham it up a bit and hope she’ll go away and let you get back to playing in the snow.

And then you can go back to this.

Speaking of getting out in the winter, can you believe I’ve never walked the full loop from the Interprovincial Bridge to the Portage Bridge and back? It’s a gorgeous five kilometre loop and takes just a little bit less than an hour to walk, even if you stop every now and then to take a picture or five. I’ve vowed to try to do it once a week, weather be damned, until my jeans are feeling a little less snug.

(I’ve also discovered the Pano app for my iPhone. How have I missed this before now? This one was taken on the Portage Bridge, facing Parliament Hill.)

More Peace Tower shots. I can’t help myself!

From icy and blue to warm and soft — you might remember this shot from earlier in the week. Tristan spontaneously asked if he could read Lucas a bedtime story, and then proceeded to read to him for half an hour. This one is a keeper.

Heh. The boys pointed out that not only do my multicoloured toes match my jammies, but they both match my coffee cup.

Photo tip: to catch the cat staring directly into your lens, compose your photo and then scritch your fingernail against the side of your lens. Snap! (There’s nothing I can suggest to erase the vague look of disdain, though!)

(If you read an earlier version of this post, there was some misinformation from a hacked account in here. Carry on, folks, nothing to see here.)

I’ll let ee cummings have the last word on this one.

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I‘m still on the fence as to whether this is another 365 project, but I did take a picture (or five) each day this week. How can I stop taking pictures when there’s cuteness like this is my life?

Isn’t he so lovely? Oh my, but that boy will break hearts some day.

This last week was mostly about family, even though I did have to eventually drag my sorry self in to work at the very end of the week. I love the expressions on their faces in this one, ranging from indulgence to barely repressed impatience to impish mischieviousness. They’re so patient with me, my menfolk are.

I pulled over on the way home from work when I saw this murder of crows infesting a big tree off Limebank Road. I converted it to B&W, but it was such a flat grey day that it was almost there already.

The idea for this one arrived fully formed in my head one night and I’m pleased that it’s almost exactly as I’d envisioned it. (I can never seem to remember to wear makeup, and I don’t bother to shave half the time in winter, but I do have a soft spot for a multi-coloured pedicure.)(But, I should focus on either the polish or the camera, because while the picture is fun the pedicure is a mess with polish all over the place!)

This one started out as a completely different picture, which failed miserably in the execution, but did inspire me to put this together. I like it very much! The camera is a Polariod EE100, built in the late 1970s and rescued for $5 from a junk shop by me. The the scratchy look comes from a texture I found on Flickr. Apparently it (the camera, not the texture) will take Fuji pack instant film — I may have to try it out one day!

Early in the week we had a visit from the boys’ grandparents, Mimi and Pipi. I was taking out the garbage when I noticed Beloved’s dad out there in the snow without gloves, building a snowman to entertain the kids. Have I mentioned how much I love my family?

Grandparents cause the most delightful sorts of disruptions, don’t they?

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I have been posting my pictures on the Internet forever, going back to the first website I built back in 2000 or so, and I’ve always known there were inherent risks. I’d always figured, though, that the biggest risk would be that someone takes one of my pictures and misappropriates it.

However, as I’ve become more serious about photography, I’ve realized that there are a lot of ways you can unwittingly give someone (or more nefariously, a big corporation) the right to use your pictures in any way they choose, commercial or not. Did you know, for example, that each time you use Instagram or Hipstamatic or TwitPic, you have granted “a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content”? (Taken verbatim from the Instagram terrms of service you agreed to when you signed up for the service, but the others are pretty similar.) They need a certain amount of rights to display and back up your pictures, but these terms seem to go above and beyond what would be requried for that.

So what does this mean? Well, most importantly it means that they can use your picture or any part of it in pretty much any way they like — advertising, derivative works, etc. It also means that if you happen to go pro and start licensing your images through a stock agency like Getty Images, you’ve limited the kind of licensing model that can be assigned to that photo. The photo loses some of its attractiveness to certain buyers who might want (and pay big bucks for) an exclusive license. And this isn’t just limited to fine art photography — you might be at the right place at the right time and capture an editorial photograph that a newspaper, magazine or television station might pay to use, but once you sign away your rights, you instantly lose control of a significant part of your negotiating power.

For more information on social sharing of pictures, copyright and licensing models, see Jon Boyes great blog post on the subject. There’s also been a huge amount of discussion on Facebook and photo rights, and more recently on Google +. It’s a minefield for sure!

And if you’re an amateur shutterbug looking for more, ahem, exposure for your pictures, you might want to think twice before submitting your pictures to any photo contests. Read the fine print and you’ll find that a lot of contests are simply what photographers call “rights grabs” – watch out for wording in the rules and regulations that says you grant the contest organizers any kind of royalty-free license if you have even the faintest aspiration of licensing that photo at any point in the future. For example, the rules and regulations of National Geographic’s 2011 photo contest has this clause at the bottom of a long page of jargon:

By entering the Contest, all entrants grant an irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide non-exclusive license to Authorized Parties, to reproduce, distribute, display and create derivative works of the entries (along with a name credit) in connection with the Contest and promotion of the Contest, in any media now or hereafter known, including, but not limited to: Display at a potential exhibition of winners; publication of a book featuring select entries in the Contest; publication in National Geographic magazine or online highlighting entries or winners of the Contest. Entrants consent to the Sponsor doing or omitting to do any act that would otherwise infringe the entrant’s “moral rights” in their entries.

Even something as simple as uploading your sunset pictures to the Weather Network will require you to sign away your rights:

You hereby grant to PMI a world-wide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, distribute and sub-licence any and all material or information submitted by you to this Web site or by e-mail to PMI and/or to incorporate it in other works regardless of form, medium or technology. In addition, you hereby waive any moral rights you have in any and all material or information submitted by you to this Web site or by e-mail.

So what does all of this mean? Just be aware of what you’re agreeing to before you allow someone to use your pictures. You may not care where they end up or how they’re ultimately used, but I really had no idea about most of this stuff until recently. You may find that entering that contest will be more valuable to you than keeping the rights of a photo you cherish, or that you’re comfortable sharing your iPhone snaps via TwitPic, and that’s entirely up to you. It’s making an informed decision that counts!

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I‘m still on the fence as to whether I will be doing an official 365 (erm, 366) project in 2012, but I still seem to be taking a picture each day, and I do enjoy writing these posts, so let’s keep on keeping on for now. I posted a boatload of pictures over the last week, partly because I have had time to go through my archives and find some new favourites and partly because I have not really put down my camera at all this week. And really, how could I resist this ridiculously photogenic time of year?

This is what our Christmas looked like:

One of my favourite gifts this Christmas was a creative aperture kit for my Lensbaby. I’ve done shaped bokeh before, but this makes it very easy by providing a bunch of different cutouts you just pop into the Lensbaby, so any out-of-focus areas (known as bokeh) take on the shape of the aperture. Here’s the effect the heart-shaped one had on the tree lights:

And here’s the star-shaped one with the neighbour’s Christmas lights. (There is a part of me that worries about being known as “That weird woman with the camera” in my neighbourhood.)

It can be more subtle when the lights are not as bright or contrasty. You can see the faint stars in the right fence post on this one, too:

Here’s what it looks like on the camera:

Not for every day, but a lot of fun when used sparingly. And speaking of bokeh, here it is without the shaped aperture. The glass ball is part of a decoration my mom bought for me ages ago — in fact, it was in my first 365 picture back in 2009. I keep meaning to play with it more:

On a side note, if you’re killing time and looking for something cool to watch, check out this amazing time-lapse video that combines shaped bokeh, a glass globe just like this one and Los Angeles. I found it after I’d taken all these pictures and laughed at how they all came together in this video — I’ve watched it a couple of times and really love it!

Snow Globe Los Angeles from All Cut Up Films on Vimeo.

I’ve been noticing these lights on a fence in Manotick since the beginning of the season, and that gorgeous snowfall on Christmas day made for the perfect conditions to finally capture them. I love this picture!

And no week in pictures would be complete without at least one portrait, right? Here’s Lucas, hard at work. He’s spent most of the week at the table doing exactly this: cutting, colouring, gluing and drawing.

I’m not quite sure yet if this is another 365 project or not, but one thing is clear — I’ve no plans to stop taking pictures any time soon! This post is getting a little long, but I thought I’d cram in this last one while it’s still fresh:

Happy 2012 from us to you!

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Yay, I did it! Another 365 project under my belt. Because I finished on Christmas Eve, there wasn’t a lot of time to post a long-winded look back at the year in pictures, but you must have known it was coming!

Here’s all 365 of them, in the order they were posted:

(Lots of greens and golds and deeply saturated colours, eh?)

As I’ve mentioned in a few recent posts, I was playing pretty fast and loose with the rules on this version of Project 365. While I was pretty rigid about following them for the first 365 project, I think it was more important to me this time around to be stretching my limits rather than following rules. It seemed more valuable to me to be thinking about photography in some way every day, whether it be learning a new photoshop technique or studying the work of someone I admire or reading a book on photography, than actually taking a photo every 24 hours.

The first 365 project back in 2009 certainly rekindled my love for photography, but I think it’s safe to say that this has been the year when photography became not just a passion but a lucrative endeavour. Here are some of the wonderful things that have happened during the course of this 365 project:

• I acquired my darling D7000, a Lensbaby Composer and a 50mm f1.4 lens. (It’s not *all* about the gear, but good kit certainly helps!)
• I launched Mothership Photography and established my signature porch portraits. Since the first mini-session in July I did five porch mini-sessions, seven family portrait sessions and a wedding. (And it occurs to me that I haven’t blogged about half of them. Good fodder for the long cold winter, yes?) Considering I was aiming for a session a month, I more than doubled my projection for the first year and had to turn people down in October and November because I simply didn’t have any room in my calendar. (It seems like a hundred years ago I put up the website and some posters around Manotick and feared that I’d never get a single client — and that was only March of this year!)
• I had my first print credit, a collage of Manotick pictures used in an ad by our city councillor in the Manotick Messenger.
• I was invited to be a contributor to Getty Images and had my first sales.
• I sold my first photo to a print publication, pending in the January issue of Ottawa Magazine.

To look back to the launch of the first 365 project in early 2009 gives me a sense of vertigo — wow! We sure have come a long way, haven’t we? I learned so much this year I don’t even know where to start: portraiture techniques, post-processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, posing and lighting, to name a few. As a matter of fact, learning to use my flash properly is one of my big projects for the next year.

Here’s a few more favourites from the last year:

Thank you all for your ongoing support. Sharing what I’ve learned, what I’m trying and the pictures themselves with you makes this whole experience even more delightful for me. You inspire me to keep going, try harder and do better — thank you for that!

I can hardly wait to see what the next year brings!

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I did it! We’ve reached the end, 367 days later, of my second 365 project. Maybe when you do more than one you get extra days snuck in? I never did figure out where I dropped a couple of days, but regardless, we’re here at #365 again. Here’s the last week in photographs.

Looking back over the week, it looks like I was subconsciously trying to cram in a whole bunch of my favourite techniques: Lensbaby, textures, B&W, long exposure — and plain old cuteness, too. I had fun playing with textures with these ornaments:

And I torqued these colourful ribbons a bit with my Lensbaby lens:

This was a picture I took over a year ago, from a boat cruise on the Ottawa River, and I stumbled across it in my archives. I was thinking about how timeless the view of the Chateau Laurier on the bluff is, and how this particular view gives to clue to the era when it was taken, so I played with textures in Photoshop to make it look like a reaaaaaally old picture, instead of just a moderately old one.

This picture doesn’t do the craziness of the light show on this house justice. Even with a wide-angle zoom, I couldn’t get it all in — and apparently they run the lights all night long. Yeesh, so much for energy conservation!

I took a picture similar to this a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t thrilled with it. This is much closer to what I wanted to capture. Oh my but he’s growing up SO quickly!

This was my favourite of the Creeping Mischief Monster series. It’s the zillionth example of a set of pictures I absolutely adore that would have never happened if I didn’t have the camera out because I needed a shot of the day.

I’m not entirely why I love this one, but I really do! I took it on the last day before the holidays, when I had Lucas with me at work for the annual kids’ Christmas party. I called it “Executive VP in Charge of Cuteness.”

And finally, for the sake of completeness and also because it is still, after all, Christmas Day: the final picture in this second iteration of Project 365.

That was a hell of a lot of fun!

Now what?????

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Yay! This is it, the final shot in my 365 project this year, and also, my Christmas wish for all of you:

May all your Christmas wishes come true!

Much love from DaniGirl & Beloved, Lucas, Simon and Tristan

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There I was, minding my own business, playing with the Charlie Brown Christmas tree and taking pictures of the reflections in the shiny red ball …

… when all of a sudden — dun dun DUN — I saw him: the Creeping Mischief Monster!

And even more terrifyingly, at that exact moment, he noticed it. The shiny red ball!!

After that, you knew this was inevitable.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

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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.

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There may not be much snow on the ground, but it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the 365 project!

We had such a busy day on Saturday that a single photo just wasn’t enough to cover it. First we went to Hillcrest Tree Farm to choose and cut down a Christmas tree. Then Simon and Beloved rode the Beaver Scout float in the Manotick Santa Claus parade while the other boys and I watched. Then we headed home to decorate our full, fat, lovely tree, and finally, not represented in this collage, we celebrated Beloved’s 40th birthday. Phew, that’s a lot of activity for one Saturday!!

(Funny, in one of their odder choices, Getty Images invited the collage for license, and while I’m tickled, I can’t imagine what purpose anyone except me could possibly have for it!)

This one was also invited by Getty the same day I posted it. Okay, I admit, I can see this one as a Christmas card. (And it’s a damn good thing he’s so cute, too, because I took this the day after Willie jumped up on the kitchen counter and knocked my camera off the counter and on to the tile floor. Lucky for him, the only damage seems to be that the protective cover over the LCD screen snapped. Yikes!)

And more Christmas cheer! Did you know that the real Santa hangs out at the Home Hardware store in Manotick? Who would have guessed it! Seriously, he’ll be there again next Sunday December 18 and it’s worth the trip out there to see the kindest, sweetest, most twinkly-eyed Santa ever — and the free hot chocolate bar with sprinkles was a big hit, too!

(Lucas is looking a little wan in the picture because he’s only just barely overcoming his shyness with strangers. Santa was awesome at putting him at ease!)

This is how I captioned the following shot when I posted it on Flickr: “It’s 5:45 pm, it’s dark, I have a hundred things I’m supposed to be doing, not limited to laundry, making dinner, making lunches, reviewing homework, and sweeping up dog hair, and I don’t have a picture of the day. I look at the lasagne baking in the oven. Nope, that won’t do it. I look at the two kids watching TV. Nope, that won’t do it. I wander around to find the pets, hoping they’re doing something adorable. Nope, nada. I scan my memory, wondering if I have anything sitting in Lightroom that I can pass off as today’s picture. Nope, nothing.

Then, from the other room, the dulcet tones of my oldest plucking out Jingle Bells on the guitar. That will do it!”

This one might look a little familiar — I took nearly this very shot back at the beginning of the 365 project last December. Sue me, it’s been a chore finding photogenic somethings I haven’t snapped to death, especially with only a couple of hours of flat cloudy grey daylight each day!

It was tough choosing just one picture from our sneak-peek tour of the new Ikea, but the colourful towels finally won out in the end. And funny, the morning after I posted this, the Ikea merchandiser who set up this display sent me a note on Twitter saying she liked my picture. The internet really does make a small world even smaller!

Yesterday I went out on my lunch break with my Lensbaby affixed to my camera, specifically looking to shoot a Christmassy kind of shot down in the Market but the light was grey and flat, and nothing looked particularly festive. I’d taken a couple of half-hearted shots, but nothing was too interesting, and I was just about to give up when these fat, white snowflakes started to drift down. It was *exactly* what I had in mind!

And here’s a fun bit of news related not to this 365 project but the one I shot in 2009. I sold my first photo to a magazine this week!! Ottawa Magazine was looking for pictures of the old change huts for skaters on the Rideau Canal (I’m guessing to contrast them to the new fancy ones that the NCC installed this year) and they bought this picture to run on the back interior page of their winter issue!! How fun is that?

My first paid print credit. Woot! And one of my pictures may (or may not) be used in a Mazda commercial in the new year. I’ll keep you posted!

Zoom zoom zoom!!

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There’s no cohesive theme to the 365 project this week. In fact, I’ve been bending the rules near to breaking — only 20 days left!

Speaking of days left, remember last time I did this, and ended up with 366 pictures in my 365 project cuz I couldn’t count to 365? So I know I started this project on December 23 this year, and I know I haven’t missed any days, and yet somehow I am due to end on December 24 — that’s 367 days. Gah! Clearly, the hardest part of a 365 project is counting to 365.

So speaking of broken rules, this is a picture that I actually took back in October on our very photogenic trip out to Pakenham. It got lost in the shuffle, and when I stumbled on it recently, I really liked it. I also really like the Flypaper Textures I downloaded recently, and am madly in love with the intersection of the two:

Don’t you love the painterly effect? (You probably either love it or hate it. I love it!) The building is St Peter Celestine Church, consecrated in 1893. Click through the link if you like reading historical accounts of early Ottawa — something else I love madly! I’m going to have to go back out to Pakenham for more exploring soon.

The texture didn’t work out quite so well on this one. I like the subject, and loved the way the terraces lead down the hill from the Parliament Buildings to the Canal, but the day was so flat and grey that everything looks quite washed out. I tried to add a little something to the sky with a texture, and it’s better — but still not as great as the church picture.

A little closer to home, this is the photographic equivalent of low-hanging fruit. I could take this picture every single day at our house — a boy, a pencil and a blank piece of paper.

I liked the repetition of all the chestnuts and the bit of burlap for contrast and context, but I should have slowed down and stopped down the aperture a little more to get more of the nuts in focus — but the guy in Farm Boy was giving me the stink eye for photographing his nuts, and I felt I should move along.

These ornaments are on my Mom and Dad’s Christmas tree. They make me happy. (Other things that make me happy include Instagram and lazy iPhone photos-of-the-day!)

I picked up this baby at the end of the fall flea market season, but haven’t found the right shot to show it off quite yet. Not quite sure this is the one either, but it was the best I managed so far. This is a Brownie Super 27, an early point-and-shoot from the 1960s. I got it in its box for $5 — hard to resist a steal like that! It has two apertures, “SUNNY” (f/13.5) and “CL’DY BR’T” (f/8), and two focus zones (3 1/2 to 6 ft and beyond 6 ft), and the flash hides behind a little pop-out door. Fun, eh?

And last but definitely not least, probably my favourite picture this week. He was “helping” me hang this giant Costco wreath when it attacked him.

Oh the cuteness!

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Last week, I hauled out the Santa hats for our annual Christmas card shoot. The boys recognize this tradition, and are wonderfully patient subjects. It was getting dark quickly, but the sun was perfectly screened by light cloud cover and the light on the porch was lovely when I got a few good shots. This isn’t the best of the lot, but it is my favourite of the outtakes.

Here’s the official portraits from 2009 and 2010, too!

(Ha, I just realized that they’re in exactly the same seating arrangement for all three pictures — complete coincidence!)

With a little bit of patience, you too can take great pictures of your kids (no, really!) for your own holiday cards. Here’s a few tips:

- work with them when they’re at their best. Full bellies, post-nap, playful mood and nobody in a rush. Also, a calm photographer goes a long way towards making kids calm, so don’t try to cram a session in while the spaghetti is boiling over or you’ve only got 10 minutes before you have to leave for hockey practice.

- be playful. Tell the kids a knock-knock joke, and snap pictures between the responses. Make funny noises. Make funny faces. Genuine laughs are way more beautiful than what a six year old boy *thinks* a smile is supposed to look like.

- get in close. Fill the frame with the kids, or even just their faces. Also, try avoid shooting down at them. Get yourself to face level or even shooting slightly up at them.

- look for the best light – and turn OFF the pop-up flash on your camera. This is the dimmest part of the year, so good natural light is hard to come by — but it’s worth hunting for! Think about shooting with an open door or window behind you (but watch out for your shadow) or shoot beside a big window or patio door. Soft, diffuse light is better than direct light, though. (Oh, so many rules!) If you’re outside on a bright day, look for open shade with bright light nearby.

- try to capture catchlights in their eyes. Catchlights are those bright points of light that bring sparkle to the eyes, and are either a reflection of the light source itself or a large surface of light like an open window or bright patch of floor. Catchlights are so important that Photoshop books will teach you how to fake them, but it’s better if you can just and capture them.

- avoid having the kids look at the camera and say cheese. Nothing spoils a good photo faster, IMHO! Catch them interacting with each other, with a favourite toy or book, or even interacting with you — but no canned cheese smiles, please!

- give the kids some control. Tell them that once you get a couple of shots you’re happy with, they can do a funny-face one, or one with everyone doing rabbit-ears, or whatever it is that they’re trying to do that you don’t want to send to all 150 people on your greeting card mailing list.

- think about what they’ll be wearing and try to coordinate the colours. They don’t have to be matchy-matchy, but think about having a bit of one colour on each person, or complimentary colours. Or go for matching props, like with my precious Santa hats, or maybe matching mitts or scarves. Unity is good, cloning is not.

This year, I’m feeling mildly guilty that I chose to print flat, single-sided hoilday cards — preprinted with a greeting and our names, no less! — rather than the folded cards that I’ve personalized by hand in prior years. And I had even had grand designs of creating my own template from scratch at one rather optimistic point back in September, but have defaulted to one of Costco’s templates. I feel like such a slacker!

But at least I had the photos taken and the cards ordered before the end of November. I think that’s a new speed record for me! Now it just remains to be seen if I’m organized enough to send them out this year…

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I can’t believe I’ve got more than 90 per cent of my second 365 project in the can. Did this year just fly by or what?

This week’s pictures are all over the map. Actually, that’s not quite true — they were all taken within or around Manotick. But I couldn’t really come up with any sort of cohesive theme outside of “I really don’t have time for Project 365 this week!”

I like it best when cuteness asserts itself for the photographic taking, like when Willie hopped up onto the table to try to entice Tristan away from his homework. I thought him settling in on the Petit Robert was pretty cute, but the yawn was an unexpected bonus that I just happened to be ready to catch.

I tried to play with a longer exposure and pan the camera with the movement of these geese, but I’m not thrilled with the result. It was an idea better in concept than execution, I think, but it was the best of the lot and I didn’t have any other pictures for the day. It was fun spooking a giant flock of geese into flight just by stopping by the side of the road, though!

When I saw this stump with its little ecosystem, it looked like a faerie playground to me.

And then we had snow! I was pretty excited to see how much snow fell when we woke up on Wednesday — and by the time we got everyone into their boots and ski pants and scarves and hats, I was pretty much done with winter. Lucas seemed plenty perplexed by the white stuff!

I’ve been playing a lot with textures lately, and I really love the effects from the Spring Painterly sets from Flypaper Textures. I love how the brush strokes and deep blue hues transformed this rather mundane photo into something moody and a little mysterious. I’m really pleased with this one!

I used another texture from the Spring Painterly set to enhance this picture of some fall berries.

And last but definitely not least — yes, it’s that time of year again! We hauled out the Santa hats and turned the porch into a portrait studio again. This one is one of the outtakes, but I like the expressions on their faces and the interaction.

At the end of the day, they’re still my very favourite subjects to photograph.

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It seems I’m doing most of my picture-taking at sunrise and sunset these days. Not really surprising, since they bookend the work day, and with continuing mild temperatures, dusk and dawn are pleasant times to be out hunting for interesting shots.

These spiky, weedy things, for example. I have no idea what they are, but they make an interesting silhouette in front of the rising sun, don’t you think?

And this one, too. The morning sun blazing through a couple of branches and falling on some but not all of the leaves made an interesting composition early one morning. Tip: look for triangles when you’re composing your photographs — threes and triangles always seem to have extra visual appeal. Why do you think I had three boys?

This is a sunny beauty of another sort. May you find in your life the joy of being three years old and on a swing!

I am drawn to old barns, especially the really decrepit ones. I couldn’t get far enough back to get all of this one in the frame without falling in the ditch on the other side of the road (apparently there *is* a limit to how far I’ll go to chase a picture!) so I’m not entirely satisfied with this one — but it’s close enough.

I took this one last weekend when we visited my brother’s family. It always warms my heart to see the boys interacting with my parents.

With this long, lovely and mild autumn, I’ve been slow to get all the leaves raked up. I’d stuffed more than 20 bags myself over a couple of weeks when I finally bribed enlisted the boys to help me. I filled another three while they jumped and tossed and eventually filled this one. With nearly 30 bags filled, I think we’re finally ready for the inevitable snowfall.

Speaking of snow, how do you like these spectacular squall clouds? As I was driving home on Thursday, I was on the lookout for the perfect foreground for these towering snow clouds, and when I saw the baled hay in this field I knew it was perfect. (I’d stopped and taken quite a few others, but I love how the light behind me makes the field golden, and how those giant clouds dwarf the huge trees in the foreground.) Ian Black featured this photograph on his weather report on the CBC Ottawa news on Friday night.

Not long now and you’ll be seeing a lot of snow pictures, I think. How much longer can this blissfully mild autumn interlude last?

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