Category: Photography

The good thing is: I’m really not stressing over the 365 project this time around. The bad things is: I’m “settling” for a picture of the day a lot more.

Like this shot of the boys. It was 6:25 am when I shot it, and I was just on my way out the door to go to work when I noticed they were cuddled up together on the love seat watching TV. Lucas and Simon are like oil and water more often than not, so I grabbed my camera and clicked off one shot. It was adorable when I looked in the LED, and I didn’t take another picture all day, safe in the knowledge that I had a worthy picture of the day.

Then at the very end of the day I pulled the memory card out of my camera and got a good look at the picture in Lightroom and realized it’s horribly noisy because I was shooting at 1600 ISO to compensate for the fact that the sun hadn’t come up yet, and Lucas is just in front of the plane of focus, and the highlights on his hair are completely blown out. Oh well. It still makes me happy when I look at it.

From a technical standpoint, this is a much better picture. It also makes me happy! This is Family Day, in the driveway.

More Family Day fun – Lucas thinks he’s a zamboni on his tricycle!

And Simon the future NHL star:

I kept hearing people rave about the iPhone camera app Hipstamatic, so I ponied up $1.99 to try it out. The lenses and effects are alright, similar to what I have in my other apps, but for this one you have to set your lens and film before you take the shot rather than in post-processing. And the viewfinder makes me a little crazy because it’s not like an SLR where you get an accurate picture, it’s like a point and shoot and they really exaggerate the effect. Meh, I’m not sure about this one. I tested it out on my old favourite, the Underwood typewriter.

Speaking of vintage and cameras, Lara and Angela have inspired me to take a few more self-portraits. Here’s vintage me with my Duaflex:

This was a TtV self-portrait, but I almost deleted it. I really didn’t like the original composition, but with TtV you’re very much bound by what’s inside the viewfinder frame (unless you’re much better with photoshop than I am!) I cropped out the viewfinder and the right half of the frame and ended up loving how this one came out with a bit of a vintage vibe and those crazy roses that are now two weeks old and holding! (Note to self: time to clean the dust off the viewfinder. I know some people like their TtV gritty, but I prefer it clean.)

And more vintage: this is one of the beauties from my camera collection. It’s a Kodak Brownie Starflex, and was manufactured some time between 1957 and 1964. I’d bought it for $20, hoping to use it for TtV, but I’m more partial to the Duaflex viewfinder. It’s still a lovely little camera, though! I ended up using this shot in the banner for my new photography site on a whim, and I think it works well with the typewriter font.

See, even my photography is fixated on photography this week. I am truly an obsessive creature.

This has been a really challenging week for my 365 project, mostly because I was embroiled with two sick kids, a sick caregiver, and a secret project that sucked up ALL my spare time (and more than a bit of my not-so-spare time as well!). More about the secret project later.

So here’s what caught my fancy this week!

Here’s your weekly dose of cuteness. He’s reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, one of our new favourite books.

We’ve spent a lot of time haunting the Manotick branch of the public library lately. Conveniently, we moved into a house just around the corner from the library just about the same time as my mother, otherwise known as my main paperback supplier, bought herself a Kindle — and my stream of free paperbacks dried up overnight. This is the centre of the kids’ section of the Manotick library, where Lucas is “reading” a book about potty training to Tristan. The funky frame is courtesy of the Camera+ app on my iPhone. (I don’t know what I love more, the giant colourful sunburst, Lucas reading to Tristan, or the fact that the page he is reading is covered in underwear!)

From warm and fuzzy to cold and wet — I took this one from the narrow bridge on Jockvale near Stonebridge, but no matter how much I played with it, I couldn’t quite make it what I wanted of it. It’s one of those “good enough, and I’ve got nothing else for today” shots, I suppose.

Speaking of good enough, this one is really a bit of a mulligan. I spent hours glued to my computer on Sunday working on that secret project I mentioned, and by the end of the day had nothing really to show for it — and no picture for the day, either. So I took this with my iPhone and called it “Time Sink” because that’s what the computer can be sometimes. Um, often.

On Valentine’s Day, although Beloved and I had agreed not to get each other any gifts, I came home from work to a dozen of the most beautiful fresh red roses I’ve ever seen. (Good thing I’d picked some chocolates up for him, too!) And I’ve been loving those roses all week!

First, Valentine TtV roses:

Then, roses with a hint of cross-processing:

Roses desaturated in black and white:

And finally (for this week, at least, as they’re still going strong!!) roses with a hint of sunshine:

I think they got better as the week progressed — that last one is definitely my favourite. 🙂

Oh, and did I mention my secret project? Yeah, it’s really not so secret since I outed myself last night on Twitter, and I’ve actually been screwing up my courage to tell you about it here all week.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the schoolyard fence waiting for the boys and got to talking with some of the moms and dads, and one mentioned going to Sears to get portraits done and how she wasn’t really thrilled with the results. I mentioned that I really like to take family pictures, and we got to chatting. She asked me for my website, and I gave her this URL. A couple of days later, she came back and asked me where the information about my photography business was, and I hemmed and hawed a bit and said, “Well, that’s pretty much it.”

It got me thinking, though. I’ve been toying with the idea of putting up a separate photography blog ever since I started my first 365 back in January of 2009, and even toyed with a few themes and galleries, but nothing ever worked for me. I tried building a gallery with Lightroom, but the results were underwhelming.

Last week, with the help of a few friends on Twitter, I finally found a workable (and free!) WordPress theme and installed it. I spent WAY too much time sorting through some of my favourite pictures, and came up with a result that is not quite perfect, but at least worth sharing at this point.

With butterflies in my tummy, and wondering what the hell I am thinking, I am thrilled and terrified to pull back the curtain and show you my latest cockamamie scheme, Mothership Photography.

Eek!

Gah, I am so. sick. of. winter. So sick of snow, cold, wind — and the forecast is calling for three dumps of snow in the next three days.

That’s what I had in mind when I took this picture — STOP winter NOW! (I like this because it’s selective colouring but without the post-processing. I didn’t do much to this image except to tweak the exposure a bit.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here’s some soft and fuzzy and fresh from a warm bath to warm you up!

One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing the post that’s rattling around in my head about how we’ve started going to church now. Not every week, but every couple of weeks at least. I like our new church and Father Dan, and I really like these gorgeous sacred candles. I hope it wasn’t disrespectful of me to snap this, but I couldn’t resist the colours.

I took this one with my iPhone one night as the sun was setting (thus the bit of orangey-pink in the bottom right corner). I tweaked the colour of the sky to that turquoise colour with an app called FX Photo Studio. I wish I had a better telephoto to bring that crescent moon a little closer!

Yesterday was the 100th day of school, and the kids were doing special projects. Simon had the number 42 and was gluing 42 mini-marshmallows to it while I made Douglas Adams jokes that sailed clear over their heads. (Tell me somebody gets that reference?) Anyway, I loved the almost straight-on side light and the shadows, so I caught this picture.

Rather unfortunately, while I was busy uploading this to the computer, the toddler tyrant precocious preschooler got into it and ate his gluey way from 42 down to 37 marshmallows before anybody noticed!

And speaking of the precocious preschooler, here’s a couple of shots from his birthday last Tuesday.

Damn cute, isn’t he?

I‘ve heard that the last week of January and the first week of February are the dark heart of winter — the coldest weeks of the year. You can tell based on my pictures this week, featuring lots of cold and snow.

You saw this one of Lucas from Shiverfest already, but I liked it so much it was worth repeating!

I was driving past a little copse of woods at the south end of Merivale the morning after a night of lightly falling snow, and I had to stop and take a picture. I really liked the almost abstract quality and the monochrome feel to this.

And yes, more with the freshly fallen snow. This is the same old barn off Bankfield that I’ve photographed before, and I am completely enamoured of it. I swear I will keep taking snow pictures until I get one right!!

What’s really nice is when you can take a nice winter picture through the open patio door from the warmth of the kitchen!!

And speaking of the warmth of the kitchen… 😉 I have to tell you, I’m fighting very hard against my impulse to make him STOP mixing all the colours together like that.

(Here’s a sanity-saving parenting tip for you: I carry three of those little mini-containers of playdoh, the size that you can hand out for Halloween, in my purse. Any time we have to wait somewhere — doctor’s office, restaurant, etc — I pull out the playdoh and all three boys are engaged and distracted for up to 20 minutes. LOVE playdoh!)

A little mosaic of pictures from Simon’s party which you’ve also already seen, but what the heck:

This one was too cute not too share. Tristan lost an incisor and put it on the counter in a napkin — but forgot to mention it to me. While I was making dinner, I obliviously scooped up the napkin and its icky contents (give me snot or blood but I cannot handle wiggly teeth) and dumped them into the garbage. I told Tristan that the tooth fairy would likely accept a letter of explanation in lieu of an actual tooth, and this is what he wrote:

So do you remember how I agonized about getting the boys their first hand-held video game? How we only capitulated last summer before the big road trip to Nova Scotia, when they were six and eight, and even then I thought we were on the border of too early?

Yeah.

And this is the not-quite-three-year-old playing Angry Birds on the iTouch with Beloved.

And inevitably, a few moments later:

Sigh. (Nice light, though, eh? ;))

And finally, a 365 tradition that I nearly forgot about — the monthly mosaic for January. Just in case you missed some of these the first five or six times. 😉

Off to a pretty good start on the year, no?

This week on my 365 project, I took a lot of iPhone pictures. I found an app called Diptic that lets you create diptychs (two panels creating one picture) as well as triptychs and up to five-panel images.

Another easy iPhone capture, this one via Instagram:

This was an iPhone capture simply because it was the only camera I had with me at the time. Remember how cold it was last weekend? It was near -25C (-15F) on Saturday morning when I headed out to the gym, and I noticed that even though it was relatively clear, it was so cold that the ice crystals in the air formed a rainbow around the rising sun. Stellar!

One of my favourite groups on Flickr is the “Through the Viewfinder” group, and they had a thread discussing “topless TtV”: TtV shots that aren’t cropped to the viewfinder and with no contraption, so you can clearly see the entire bottom camera. I liked the idea, and this is the result. Photogenic Miss Katie, who, by the way, is still in fine health.

Every year I buy a potted hyacinth from the grocery store. The smell as they come into bloom is delicious and fills the house with the sweet scent of spring just when it seems that winter will never end. And each year I plant the leftover bulb in the garden. I’d cultivated a half a dozen or so of them at the old house, and am looking forward to peppering the new garden with them!

Lucas couldn’t even wait for this one to bloom, so intent was he on sucking in the scent last weekend! This, by the way, was not so much staged as captured. I was shooting the backlit hyacinth when Lucas popped up to “help”. The pose and the vigour with which he sniffed were entirely his own! Don’t you just love that cowlick? It’s *always* standing on end like that!

And, the hyacinth a few days later as it came into bloom, taken through the viewfinder of my Duaflex. The frame is in very soft focus because I used a close-up filter on my Nikon lens so I could get in close and fill the frame.

Here’s my brain-teaser of the day for you. In TtV, the Nikon lens focuses on the viewfinder glass, which is on the top of the Duaflex. The Nikon lens also has a minimum focusing distance, meaning you have to be at least X distance from your subject before it can autofocus. Part of the reason I use a “contraption” is to ensure that minimum distance is kept while blocking out extraneous light.

But! If I get too close to the hyacinth flower with the *Duaflex*, the Nikon won’t autofocus. It wants me to have the Duaflex that minimum distance away from the subject as well as the minimum distance from the Nikon to the viewfinder.

Weird, eh? One of the many wonderful quirks of TtV. 🙂

Maybe it’s the cold temperatures or maybe it’s the short days and low light, but I liked the idea of taking pictures a lot more than I liked actually taking pictures this past week. I wanted to take beautiful, thoughtful, meaningful pictures. I actually took, well, these.

I fear that I’m relying to heavily on the kitch factor in my iPhone pix, but I can’t resist the funky frames and effects to spice up pictures like this one of the setting sun through my living room blinds.

This was a concept picture that worked better in my head than in the camera. Possibly because I was trying to take it while also cooking dinner and moderating the bickering equivalent of World War III and also packing lunches for the next day, while not actually reading any of this book.

From toasty toes to frozen feet… it was c-c-c-c-c-o-l-d last Sunday when I took the big boys skating with friends at the rink around the corner, but even c-c-c-c-c-o-l-d-e-r when I plunked myself belly-down on the ice to try to get an interesting skate shot. I didn’t realize that I still had the aperture set at f22, so the motion blur was a kind of pleasant mistake!

Lucas and Katie were both pretty happy to help me by posing for this shot. I call it “one for you and one for me”.

So have I mentioned Lucas’s puzzle fixation? The child is not yet three, and he will sit and do one jigsaw puzzle after another. Not just the toddler puzzles either, but the 100 piece ones for 5 to 7 year olds. It’s quite endearing, until you have to clean the floors!

Homework time, through the viewfinder of my Duaflex.

I found these berries out on one of my Manotick walkabouts. They must be inedible if the birds haven’t claimed them by now, but they looked good enough to photograph!

And speaking of Manotick walkabouts, I found this sign on the dam beside Watson’s Mill, and I chuckle every time I pass it. Who knew the peeps at Parks Canada has such a fun sense of humour? Worthless dam operating equipment, indeed!

So I have a question for those of you following my blog feed. You’ll notice that the daily picture now gets broadcast as well as any new blog posts. Is it picture overkill to have both?