Category: Photography

I still haven’t figured out if I have a personal style in my photography or what it might be, but I do realize now that I have two primary goals: telling stories and celebrating beauty. Both compulsions come from within; the sheer volume of the blog speaks to my need to tell stories, the magpie in me is invariably drawn to pretty, shiny things, and the optimist in me wants to celebrate all that loveliness. When I can cram all that into a single frame, I will love the results.

Even though I’ve used collages many times before, I’ve really started to enjoy using storyboards to illustrate stories or capture highlights of events. Sometimes there’s a kind of synergy in a set of pictures that captures what a single picture lacks. For instance, this set of pictures shows the dedication of a new play structure at the boys’ school BBQ this week. None of the pictures is particularly compelling, but they do tell a story that’s meaningful to the participants better than any single picture might.

And there was this one at the community pool, just before that wicked storm broke the heat on Wednesday.

This was more fun from last weekend’s Dickinson Days, this time from Pioneer Day at Watson’s Mill. Not the best photograph ever since most of them have their backs to me, but the boys had an amazing morning trying stilts here and a pogo stick further down at My Toy Shoppe — a perfect day of activities for busy boys.

I have to admit, I was having trouble finding my muse this week with the camera. This is one of those pictures that ends up being a last-minute answer to walking around the house with my camera at the end of the day thinking, “What can I photograph for today?” Thank goodness for the garden.

There are abandoned houses like this here and there throughout Manotick, and they fascinate me. What happened? Where are the families who used to live there? What do they look like inside? (As my friend Valerie said, “Maybe they’re still there and the lawnmower is broken!”)

Like I said, my favourite pictures are where story and beauty meet. What this one is little lacking in story, he makes up for in cuteness, no?

And if you look a little deeper, you can see the story from his perspective — or at least, in his eyes.

It’s been a long week. I have to admit, I kinda ran out of steam with the picture-taking, and a lot of other stuff, this week. I still managed to take a picture each day, but there were a few days that I was doing it more out of obligation than joy. Funny, last time I did the 365 project, I wrote post after post saying “wah, this is so hard” and to be honest, I’m nearly half way through my second attempt and I think this is the first time I’ve really felt like I was slogging through.

Anyway, that was part of the inspiration behind this photo, which I called “Looking for the silver lining.” I took it at about 6:30 one morning on the way to work, and I was thinking that even when it’s stormy, the clouds will eventually part and the sun will break through.

This is one of my favourite pictures of the week, and a rare one of Papa Lou with the boys. He’s reading one of the four hand-made birthday cards he received on is birthday last Sunday. My dad inspires me, and seeing him and the boys together never fails to make me happy.

I passed these bleeding hearts peeking out between a picket fence near the Mill quite a few times and each time wished I had the time to stop and take a picture, until one day I finally made a special trip to do just that. Something about the picket fence and the bleeding hearts together speaks to warm sunny days and cold glasses of fresh lemonade, don’t you think?

Boys at play – always the ‘low hanging fruit’ of my photographic day. 🙂

Boys at play, redux. (And? Those compression-based water shooters? Are wicked fun!!)

As I may have mentioned (ahem) this was Dickinson Days here in Manotick this weekend. I knew it was the village’s annual summer festival, and I knew there were lots of fun events planned. Even so, I have to tell you I was more than a little bit surprised (and delighted!) when we left the house on Friday evening to head toward Main Street for the parade and found ourselves joining a flowing stream of neighbourhood families all doing the same thing. It felt like a small-scale version of Canada Day on the Hill — Beloved and I couldn’t help but laugh.

We chose a spot on the curb pretty much at random — and based on the quickly-disappearing available space. I have to admit, I did have the position of the setting sun in mind, but other than that, it was total fluke that we ended up right in front of the Mill Tavern, which happens to have a second-level patio that was, unbeknownst to us, serving as the viewing deck for the parade announcers Sandy Sharkey and Wendy Daniels from BOB FM and The Bear.

The parade was also a lot bigger than I’d expected, and reminded me of the Christmas parades of my childhood — floats and marching bands and double-handfuls of candy thrown at the excited kids. I keep coming back to the word “delightful,” the best possible description of the evening. I’ve been playing with Lightroom’s print capabilities, and I thought the contact sheet print made for a good storyboard of some of the parade highlights.

You might have seen this picture earlier in the week, but it’s one of my favourites so worth repeating. My Beloved, man enough to win the big prize at Skeeball but not so manly that he doesn’t mind carrying all the stuffies while the boys go on rides together.

From the day we met, he’s been the man of my dreams.

Usually, I do most of my processing in Lightroom (love Lightroom madly and deeply!) but this week I’ve spent a good deal of time in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. I’ve learned a lot of fun and simple new tricks, and learned how to improve a couple of old ones.

One of the things I worked on was developing a new watermark for my pictures. I went through a watermarking phase a couple of years ago, but found them more trouble than they were worth. Nobody seemed terribly interested in stealing my pictures, and it seemed a pain to keep both watermarked and non-watermarked digital prints on file as well as keeping the original digital negative. Plus, I’m always concerned that a watermark might interfere with the image somehow, make a distraction of itself. But, in the end, I decided that I’d give watermarks another go.

That left me with the problem of designing a watermark. I’ve also been toying with the idea of hiring someone to design a logo for me, or at least coercing my graphic-design-trained husband into doing it for me. But I got to playing one afternoon during nap time on the long weekend, and came up with this:

I’m particularly fond of the little shooting star! So I’ve been using it this week as a watermark on my images, and eventually I’ll turn it into a banner for my portfolio site. One of these days.

Here’s something else fun I learned how to do this week! I found these frames on the Coffee Shop Blog, and thought they’d give a little pizazz to this picture of apple blossoms.

I was in the mood for something silly when I started playing with these vintage Fisher-Price toys we picked up at a flea market a couple of weeks ago. It was only when I started thinking about making a picture that I realized the mini-bus contains a family of five that could be ours if one of the boys would only grow his hair a little bit longer. 😉 I call it “Road trip!”

I told you the long and convoluted story of cutting the grass on the long weekend, but I never did get around to telling you about my epic battle with the lilies of the valley. I spent Monday pulling more than 500 of the invasive suckers out of the front garden. The first foot and a half, I dug down and pulled out the root system, too, but I lost enthusiasm with another 20+ feet to go and started just yanking and tossing. This bouquet was really only an afterthought, created from fishing through the bin of discarded plants. Hey, good enough for Kate Middleton is good enough for me — they do smell pretty good, and I’ve still got another (sigh) 600 or so still left in the garden!

This picture was one of those moments when I came around a corner, saw how the light was illuminating his ridiculous hair, and instinctively reached for the camera. One shot, real quick before he moved, and this was it for the day!

This is another found photo. Ya gotta catch ’em being cute! I love the body language, and the fact that the two of them together are occupying one butt’s worth of space. The ISO was set really high because they were fidgeting and I was getting a lot of motion blur, and I was kind of surprised how much noise there was — but the pose is plenty cute enough to overcome that, I think!

This one was all about the light. We desperately needed a new dining room table — we can barely fit the family around the ancient Ikea table we’ve had for 10+ years – and I’ve been coveting one since we moved. We found a place that makes harvest tables out of reclaimed wood, and I’ve been biding my time until we could afford one. It’s a little darker than I was expecting, but I love the character of it. Lucas thinks we got the bigger table just so he would have more room to colour.

Lovely, no? And I have one more picture from this week, but it’s got enough of a story to it that I’m going to save it for it’s own blog post! Stay tuned!!

In the meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts on watermarking in general and how I’ve applied the watermark to these pictures.

I am on a picture-taking tear these days, so much so that I keep filling up the hard drive on our laptop and have to regularly pull the pictures off the computer and store them in a separate hard drive. And life has been so busy, while I’m finding the time to take the pictures, finding time to sort through them and edit them is proving a bit of a challenge. I can haz six more hours each day, please?

I already showed you Tristan’s soggy victory at the 5K race this week, but he earned a second mention with his stoic endurance! In case you missed it, he ran his first-ever race last Saturday in the cold and pouring rain. This is about four feet before the finish line, with an impressive time of just over 30 minutes.

Lucas didn’t run any races, but he did enjoy exploring the worms that have been loving this wet weather. Every time we leave the house now, we go through the same litany:

“Mom, robins eat worms.”
“That’s right, Lucas.”
“And worms eat dirt!”
“That’s right, Lucas.”
“So it’s like the robins are eating dirt!” (maniacal laughter)
“Well, kind of.”
“But boys don’t eat dirt.”
“That’s right, Lucas.”
“And boys don’t eat worms.”
“That’s right, Lucas.”

I give it even odds that before the end of the spring, he’s tasted both…

I haven’t taken too many TtV shots lately because — gasp!! — my contraption doesn’t fit properly with my new camera. I was out in the garden taking pictures with both this weekend, and while I didn’t like any of the flower TtV shots I took, I did like this one. I call it “the tools of her trade.” It’s everything I need to make me happy on a Sunday afternoon — coffee, camera, and outside!

I continue to take a lot of pictures in the garden. Whomever planted it had a wonderful sense of colour and design, and we’re reaping the benefits. These tulips are standing on guard to catch the fading light of a lovely day on Friday.

Speaking of lovely days and fading light, remember how all of a sudden Mother Nature seemed to flip a switch around 4:30 last Thursday afternoon and we went from early spring to full-on summer? I took this picture that day, as something about the light and the composition evokes everything I love about summer… light, flowers, sunshine, porch. Ahhhhhhhh.

Through all the trouble we had with the house last fall and winter, I kept my sanity by anticipating how great it would be in the summer. (And, luckily, I was right!) I think the thing I was looking forward to most of all was the smell of these lilacs, completely surrounding my private bedroom porch and drifting in through the bedroom window. I added a bit of texture to the picture, just to give it a bit of character.

And finally, my favourite picture of the week. The dandelions have completely taken over our yard despite hours of diligent plucking. And yet, despite the fact that he’s really only propagating the problem, I can’t help but love this picture of Tristan making a wish.

If you could make a wish, what would you wish for?