Category: Photography

The big boys are at an age where they can really enjoy the Olympic Fever that’s sweeping the nation. They had a whole week-long build up at school last week, and we’ve been watching events throughout the week. In fact, one of my prouder moments as a parent was last Tuesday morning. I was just on my way out the door to work at 7:00 am when I realized they were watching the rebroadcast of Alexandre Bilodeau’s gold medal podium ceremony. I explained that they had to stand for the national anthem (Beloved teases me that I insist on this!) and choked up when they began to sing it out loud. It was a great little moment.

All that to say, this is what Olympic fever looks like at our house:

(I swear, I did *not* dress him in that outfit. That was entirely his own doing. No, really!)

Beyond the Olympics, we’ve had remarkably pleasant winter conditions around here. Sunlight and shadow on snow is a surprisingly hard combination to manage, though.

This one was a near-miss. I’m having issues with the colour levels on my laptop (it’s on my to-do list) and I thought that’s what made this one look a little less than crisp in focus. Turns out it was just out of focus! Oh well. (The point, btw, was mardi gras beads for Mardi Gras. And no, I’m not telling you how I ‘earned’ these!)

And finally this week, did you know raspberries come in yellow, too? This colour filled me with longing for spring and summer far more than an ordinary pint of red raspberries might have!

The theme for this week’s pictures was definitely colour. Maybe I’m pining for spring, but everywhere I looked this week I saw colours begging to be photographed. Like these kiddie bowls from Ikea. In 365 days of being desperate for something, anything to photograph, during which I used these bowls every single day, it never once occurred to me to photograph them. Guess that’s as good as a justification for the Thousand Picture Project as any, right?

(Amy, I posted this one just for you, so you could continue to covet my “vintage” circa 2002 and no-longer-available round Ikea bowls! *wink*)

These are Lucas’s favourite toy right now. I love how you can see which colours he prefers by how worn the tips are!

I was on a bit of a crayon and colouring kick, as you can see in this triptych.

Speaking of Lucas, you’ve seen this one already but he’s so adorable it merits reposting, no?

And further speaking of Lucas, here’s the a montage of his birthday shots from this week.

I really like this last shot. I’d bought the old-fashioned beaters at a flea market this summer, thinking they’d make an excellent prop for the dry days in the 365 project. I pulled them out a handful of times, but none of the shots seemed to work.

Last Sunday morning, I was baking a cake for Lucas’s birthday and the light from my north-facing kitchen was really delicious. I’d been using electric beaters, but suddenly this shot appeared in my head so I set it up. It turned out almost exactly as I planned, with the warm tones of the wood and the soft light, the fuzziness of the beaters contrasting the sharpness in the glass measuring cup.

The picture turned out much better than the cake, in fact. My first try at from-scratch cream cheese icing (first time I’d ever made icing not from a can, in fact!) turned out rather meh. Turns out I’m a better photographer than a baker.

I think I can live with that.

Now that I’m officially done the 365 project, I don’t carry my camera quite so obsessively as I did before. And yet, I still feel the need to take a picture most days, so the subject matter this week is largely skewed to the close at home.

That’s why you get pictures like this one of Tristan, using the brand new tablet and animation program he got for Christmas. He took to it like a fish to water, and when I commented my amazement on the Flickr picture, a friend said, “Well, of course he’s not afraid of computers and technology. It’s everywhere in his world. You’re not afraid of the refrigerator, are you?” Fave analogy of the year!

Did I mention Lucas loves Sesame Street?

Of course, since it was his birthday, this week’s pictures focus on Simon in particular:

This is my favourite picture of the week, maybe of the month. I saw the light and how it was falling on them and had to move quickly, as I knew they wouldn’t be still for long. I just missed backing up far enough to catch the book at the bottom of the frame, but that’s okay, this one is still close enough to perfect for me.

This is why taking pictures makes me happy! (Coming up with titles for these posts? Not so much!)

Welcome to the first official post of the Thousand Picture Project! Since the vast majority of you said you like these posts, and since I like doing them, and since I don’t have anything else for today (and just maybe because I’m thumbing my nose at the few of you who said you didn’t like them!), why not?

And, let’s be honest: one of the reasons I wanted to do this post today is so I could brag about this picture. Remember on Tuesday how it was crazy warm, about 15C above the normal temps for January? That was the day I had my interview on All in a Day, and on the way home the heavy clouds that had been crowding the sky all day parted and we had this beautiful sunset. A perfect end to a lovely day.

Then a couple of days later, I got an e-mail from — wait for it! — Ian Black of the CBC, saying “sorry I missed you at the studio the other day, next time say hi.” *blush* And then he went on to say he’d noticed this picture and could he have my permission to use it on the evening weathercast on the CBC news!!!! He used it on last night’s broadcast, and when Simon heard him introduce the photo and give me credit, he yelled at the TV “Hey, that’s my MOM’s name!!!” Talk about positive reinforcement!

It’s funny, but even though I’m still taking a picture every day, I’m feeling a whole lot more relaxed about the whole thing. For instance, I’ve taken three days’ worth of pictures to follow this hyacinth as it blooms. I don’t think I would have dedicated three days in the same week to a single subject before.

And man, does my house ever smell terrific right now!

On the other end of nature’s spectrum, this was the view from my office window yesterday afternoon during one of those snow squalls. I used the bricks to frame the picture, but also to give a little perspective as to exactly how blustery it was.

And finally, a picture that is more or less responsible for me deciding to continue on with a daily picture project. I’d had the idea of taking a picture of jacks in my head way back in the beginning of the project, but the boys didn’t actually have any. We got some in a loot bag from a birthday party early in January, but they disappeared before I could include them in my 365. The box reappeared in the days between the end of the 365 and the decision to continue with the daily pictures, and I was happy to finally get the picture I’d (more or less) had in my head all along.

I really enjoyed taking these pictures. I’m glad I decided to continue!

So are you getting tired of the 365 posts yet? I’m pretty sure this will be the last one. Well, kind of.

First, I wanted to share with you the very exciting (for me!) news that I’ll be on All in a Day on CBC Radio One tomorrow afternoon, talking to Alan Neal about the end of the 365 project. You might remember I was on the show back in July with former host Adrian Harewood, when I hit the half way point. On Wednesday, the last day of the project, I was driving around town listening to CBC (as always!) and thinking, “Hmmm, I wonder if it would seem needy of me if I pinged my friends at CBC and said, “So, just by the way, I’m done that 365 project…” but promptly forgot all about it. Until, that is, I opened my e-mail the next morning and there they were, wondering if I wanted to come back and chat about the big finale. So of course I said yes!

I’ll be on tomorrow afternoon, right after the 3:30 news. That also happens to be, I know from my CBC Radio addiction, just after Alan checks in with Ian Black on the weather. Dare I hope to meet both Alan, to whom I’ve been listening since back in the Ottawa Noon days, AND Ian Black? Squeeee!

Ahem, anyway, beyond my schoolgirl crushes on a good number of CBC Radio and TV personalities, I have more news. Well, sort of news.

It took about three days for me to really start missing the daily picture routine. It wasn’t so bad the first day, although Beloved did raise his eyebrows at me when I grabbed the camera on the way out the door on Thursday morning. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “It’s habit, I’d feel naked if I didn’t have it with me.” But in the evenings, between the end of dinner and the beginning of the bedtime routine, I’ve truly felt lost. That was my picture time, where I sorted and processed and posted the picture of the day most days, and that’s when I most keenly missed the project. Go figure.

Not only that, but everything I look at lately seems to be begging to be photographed. The light is coming back, and it’s making the most mundane things seem enticing. I can’t help myself.

So I’m not exactly embarking upon another 365. I figure I’ll call it (because a project needs a name, if for no other reason than I need a place to keep it on the blog!) The Thousand Picture Project. There’s 365 days in a year, so there’s 1095 days in three years. It should take me about three years of daily pix to get to the thousand mark, give or take — and I’m already a third of the way there! If I don’t take a picture every day, that’s okay, and if I take 17 pictures in one day, that gives me more than two weeks of fodder. I think it will work out. I need the project part for inspiration and a reason to haul around my camera, but I’m free of the need to stress over finding a picture — a good picture — on days when there simply is not one to be found.

Best of both worlds, I think. Now, what about you? The 365 blog posts get very few comments, but so many of you have said you’re interested in the process behind the pictures and my commentary on them. Shall I continue with the weekly picture blog posts?

Thanks, always, for your input! (I remember back when I started blogging, the prevalent idealistic advice was to blog as if nobody was listening, and that blogging in a manner which was cognizant of what the readers wanted was seen to be pandering. I think those days are long gone! The Thousand Picture Project, like it’s big brother the 365 Project, are entirely for my own satisfaction — but it’s a pleasure and a delight to be able to share them with you!)

Don’t forget to tune in to CBC Radio tomorrow after the 3:30 news — cuz hey, nothing strokes your ego more than knowing your photography is ideal for radio!! 😉

Hmmm, seems a little anti-climactic to be posting about Project 365 again after my big finish on Wednesday, but there’s a couple of last little afterthoughts, as well as the pictures I took since my last update and before the big finale that never got their day in the sun.

But first, you know what the most challenging part of the whole damn 365 was? It wasn’t coming up with things to photograph, or actually processing and posting the pictures. It wasn’t the hassle of carrying my camera *everywhere* or the inconvenience to my family. The hardest part of the whole damn project?

Counting to 365.

I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back and renumber my pictures because I had miscounted somewhere. And ever since I started counting ahead to figure out exactly which calendar day would mark day 365, I’ve been vaguely puzzling over the date in my mind. If there’s 365 days in the year, and I started my project on January 20, 2009, then logic dictates that I’d finish on January 19, 2010? Right? So when I counted ahead in late December and realized the final day would fall on January 20 instead of January 19, I flipped back through a couple of weeks’ worth of pictures and checked the dates, and when everything seemed in order I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and said “Oh well.” But it bugged me, and bugged me, and bugged me, until finally last night I went back through the whole damn project and there it was.

I counted day 204 twice, once on August 11 and again on August 12. Dammit, now I’m going to have to go back and re-label the whole damn thing Project 366!!! Or maybe Project 365+1? Just doesn’t have the same snap, does it?

Sigh.

Anyway, here’s the last couple of pix from last week, including the penultimate pic that was apparently actually the big finale.

On Friday, we spent most of the day and well into the night putting up content on our site at work to show the relief efforts in Haiti. After a long and wrenching week of heartbreaking stories, this was the only way I could think of to explain my feelings. “Light a candle for Haiti.”

Katie for one is thrilled to no longer have to deal with me and my camera any longer.

One last shot of busy hands at work. (I called the Magna-Doodle a classic toy in the caption for this one on Flickr, and people said the Magna-Doodle is far from a classic toy. To me, if it doesn’t have batteries, downloadable parts or a corresponding online life, it’s classic. Whaddya think?)

Now trains? Definitely a classic toy. And although I’ve done the “baby playing with trains” shot before, you can really never have enough baby bokeh in your life.

And finally, the penultimate shot, which was apparently the ultimate shot, could I only count to 365. This is all the gear I didn’t have 365 — erm, 366 — days ago when I started this project: a Duaflex II, a Baby Brownie Special, a Brownie Reflex, an SB-600 flash, an off-camera cable extension for the SB-600, a gorillapod (excellent for securing your Nikon to the chandelier, should the need arise!), an Aurora mini-softbox, a set of four close-up filters, not one but TWO 50 mm f1.8 lenses, a polarizing filter, a remote trigger (also very useful when your camera is suspended from the chandelier) and several bits of lens and camera cleaning stuff — all taken through the viewfinder of my darling vintage Duaflex IV.

So there you have it. Project 365 (plus one!).

The end. 🙂

Holy crap, I did it!

I’m not sure that I was convinced, back when I launched this project a year ago, that I really expected to actually finish it. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’ve learned.

A year ago, I was using my Nikon dSLR mostly in the program modes. I didn’t know what bokeh was, and I’d never heard of TtV photography. I had a passing understanding of the basics of photography — shutter speed vs aperture vs ISO, depth of field, rule of thirds, exposure compensation, etc etc etc — but I rarely consciously employed them and even more rarely pushed their boundaries or deliberately ignored them in wondering what the result would be. I never mucked about with my camera settings. I thought using Photoshop made images less “true” and never post-processed any of my images save to correct egregious errors. I was shy about pointing my camera at anything but the most obvious photographic subjects in public, and would never dreamed of approaching a stranger and asking them if I could photograph them. I’d never shot in RAW and posted all my images in straight-out-of-the-camera colour. I didn’t know what EXIF data, rear-curtain shutter, tilt-shifting, hot shoes, photoshop actions or vignetting were. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d posted a photo to a group on Flicrk, or made a comment, or received a comment.

I’ve come a long way, baby! I’ve had more than a dozen photos “Explored” by Flickr, I’ve had a photo featured as the “Photo of the Day” by a large group, and I’ve been asked for permission to use my images on a few websites. My 365 project was featured on CBC Radio at the half-way point last July, and I’ve even sold some of my images. Who woulda guessed it?! Mostly, though? I learned to love taking pictures. And, damn, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it!

When I started the 365 project, I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted from it. I imagined I’d take a snapshot every day of the boys, or things around the house, or the places I went during the day, and every couple of days I’d throw them up on Flickr and that would be it. I had no idea that within a month or two, I’d have raised my own personal bar so high that I would drive myself crazy for the rest of the year trying to live up to it. A snapshot would simply not suffice. Not content to take just any picture, suddenly I had to take a good picture — and the definition of “good” was a sliding scale. I blame and thank the members of the 365 Community almost exclusively for this. More than just a place to dump pictures, the 365 Community is an amazing collection of really first-rate photographers and super-nice people, and had I not been welcomed into the group early in the project, I imagine things would have turned out much differently. Not only did they support and encourage me with comments and feedback, but they inspired me to do better each time I perused their photostreams.

And then, of course, there’s you, my bloggy peeps. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to know that a few of you started your own version of a 365 project because of me, and the comments and e-mails I received from people who said they were inspired to pick up a camera because of my pictures — dozens of them, over the year — is truly an honour.

If you’re considering starting your own 365 project, here’s my advice for you: go for it! You’ve got nothing to lose (except maybe a few hundred hours) and everything to gain. I had no idea how hard it would be, but I also had no idea how rewarding it would be. I knew I would get a few pictures I loved and would capture in pictures the minutiae that I love to capture in words on the blog, but I had no idea I’d learn so much, meet such amazing people, and have such an amazing body of work to look back upon.

The best and worst part about a 365 project is that no matter how awful your picture of the day might be, in your own estimation, there’s always tomorrow. And no matter how worth of a National Geographic cover you may think your latest image, you’ve got to start over again the next day.

Out of more than 16,000 shutter clicks (!!) since January 20, 2009, here are my top ten favourites:

I think this is my fave of the year. I love everything about this picture — the hand, the way the pear seems to be reaching for Lucas, the reflection in the table, the depth of field, the back lighting.

Fun and silly, but eye-catching. I like the story I was telling as much as the image: “Deep in the Orion Nebula, baby stars grow in translucent eggs until they are ready to hatch and float away…”

The beginning of my obsession with fingers and toes.

Multi-Mom, my cloning experiment. Turns out photoshop is a lot of fun!

Not even an official 365 picture, but representative of all the images of the boys I’ve learned to take this year. This picture makes me smile every time I look at it, and isn’t that the whole point?

Because I developed a love of vintage cameras — and typewriters! — during my 365 project. Besides, you had to know a TtV shot would make the top 10.

A perfect example of the things I might never have noticed, let alone photographed, before my 365 project.

What on earth would make me take my camera into the stairwell at the office to take a picture of the people walking in the rain seven stories below? Only Project 365, I assure you.

And I never would have thought to pull off the road and creep around a park in the pre-dawn gloaming (at minus 2C, no less) poking around for worthwhile images if I weren’t looking for something worthy of the photo challenge I was in — and eventually won!

Okay, so maybe I had some photographic knowledge and instincts before I started the 365 project. This one of Lucas and I reflected in the collandar was taken on Day 5 of the project, and remains one of my favourites.

There’s a lot (really? a lot!) of mediocre shots in the project, too, and a very few that I outright dislike. On the whole, though, I love how they capture the world as I saw it this past year, and how evocative each of them is of the time and place I took them.

So, you might ask, what’s next? I agonized over toyed with a few ideas over the last couple of months, including a TtV 365, a 52×7 (seven pictures a week but not one each day), and a couple of other variants on the theme. Much as I like the challenge of finding new ways to see the world each day, I have to admit it’s become a little tedious recently. You know how much I love my new job, but the industrial park where it’s located is far from the rich milieu of photographic opportunities I had when I was working smack dab in the middle of the Market, the Canal and Parliament Hill, which you’ve seen was a massive source of fodder and inspiration this year. I might yet set my sights on something like a thousand picture project, but one with no time constraints. We’ll see!

Mostly, though, I’ve set out what I wanted to do. I’m sure I’ll continue to take way too many pictures, and if you want me to, I’ll continue to talk about them here. In fact, I kind of hope to keep taking at least one picture every day. But on those days when it’s somehow gotten to 8 pm and I still have lunches to make and the swiffer to be run and a load of laundry to fold and no photo? It will be one less thing to worry about.

And so, here it is — the last picture. Almost from the start of the project, I thought about what this image might be. At various points in the last little while, I’d imagined it would be the old Underwood manual typewriter, with the words “365:365 THE END” typed on the piece of paper, or maybe a close-up of the boys with the numbers 3 6 5 written on each of their cheeks. This one came to me yesterday, though, and evolved from the idea of a high shot looking down at me looking through my pictures to this:

(Whatever you do, don’t tell Beloved I suspended the Nikon from the chandelier with a gorillapod and some duct tape during the baby’s nap, or this may well be the last picture you ever see me take!)

There’s good news and bad news from the land of Project 365 this week. The good news is: next week is the big finale!! Only six days to go!! The bad new is: next week is the big finale!!

Okay, not really. While I’m a little anxious about both what will happen on day 366 — I still haven’t decided — and what I’ll do for day 365, I’m still pretty excited about being finished. The bad news is actually that I think I may have killed my camera. The poor old D40 has been acting up lately, and I fear that I may have photographed it to death. I’m getting this weird hypersaturation in the last week or so, and the exposure seems off.

I got curious as to the life expectancy of a D40, and found out that you should get in the neighbourhood of 50,000 shutter clicks, but that in standard “your millage may vary” form, many report D40s that went on to live happy lives in the land far beyond 100K clicks. Then again, those D40s may not have been subject to the rigours inclement weather, being hauled around absolutely *everywhere* (and, ahem, perhaps dropped once or twice), used to placate a curious 18-month-old and the various other indignities to which I have subjected my beloved camera.

So I got curious about the whole counting shutter clicks thing. I’d realized back in October that I’d taken 10,000 pictures when my internal counter rolled over and started using image numbers I’d been using in March, but I didn’t know how to figure out the exact milage on my camera. Turns out you can find out through your EXIF data, which is displayed on Flickr, under “More properties” in the “Additional Information” menu on the bottom of the right-hand menu of any given picture. At least, that’s what it is for me. All that to say, that just before I started Project 365, I had 5,372 shutter clicks on the D40, and as of yesterday I had 21,251 clicks. That means in a year I’ve snapped off almost SIXTEEN THOUSAND images. Yeesh! No wonder I feel like I’ve got a permanent one-eyed squint going on!

So anyway, here’s this week’s pictures. This was from last Friday, a special “Breakfast for Dinner” treat for the boys. I don’t know why I like TtV pictures from my kitchen, but I do!

This week’s subliminal theme is apparently kittens. You might remember we had to put down our 17 year old cat in 2008; you might more recently remember that we had mouse issues this past autumn. The topic of reacquiring a cat seems to be a subliminal theme in our lives lately, especially ironic because I — the non-cat person — am more into the idea than Beloved, the avowed cat lover. In fact, I came *this close* to getting him a cat for Christmas, but sweet though it would have been to have a bright-eyed kitten in a box under the tree, I couldn’t in my heart give the gift of more than 15 years of litterbox scooping. Because that? Is so not my job.

Anyway, all that to say, we already had kittens on the brain when we visited our friends Jojo and Jaimie and were utterly charmed by the Christmas kitten they gave their daughter.

Oh, the cuteness! (I went with the above pic as the photo of the day, but in hindsight, I think this next one is better.)

And then, a couple days later, we were on a family trip to PetSmart to get some dog food for Katie, and Lucas tried hard to liberate this cat waiting for an adoptive family. Universe, are you trying to tell me something?

Speaking of Lucas, doesn’t he look like he was enjoying his excursion out into the cold?

This was almost a throwaway, but I kind of like it. In the 365 Community on Flickr, there was an optional theme on primary colours, and when I saw how the light was hitting the pushpins on my cubicle wall, I immediately thought of that. Don’t they look a little bit like gems? Besides: ooo, shiny!

And, more gratuitous colour: Beloved playing Rockband Lego on the Wii.

This one isn’t really out of focus, the focus is just somewhere where you might not expect it – on the basket in the foreground. See the murkiness in the colour, though? That’s part of what makes me think my camera is ailing.

That’s it for this week. Six days — SIX DAYS!!!! — to go!