Category: Photography

I think I’ve managed to clamber over the brick wall of uninspiration that’s been sitting on my Muse for the last week or so. After about 10 days of feeling completely uninspired and worse, feeling like a talentless hack who happened to luck into a few good shots, I am feeling rejuvenated and excited about taking pictures again. I can’t figure out if my mood improved because my photos did, or vice versa. Regardless, it’s good to be enjoying the 365 project again. I’ve still got more than two months to get through!

I just can’t seem to stay away from leaf pictures. I can’t say in 40 years I’ve ever found them quite so compelling before, especially the ones lying in discarded heaps and blown up against fences. Like these ones!

This was from the same day, the tail end of my rather bleak mood last week. I wanted something stark and November-y. I think this qualifies.

This picture was a failed experiment. I’d been trying to shoot through a glass with water droplets on it (the water droplets magnify and distort the image underneath) but I just couldn’t get it to work. Since I had the Scrabble board out anyway, I thought I could figure out something to do with it. It was actually Beloved who came up with the idea of putting the blog title out on it. Might work well as a banner some day, with some tweaking!

When it gets to be the end of the day and I still don’t have a picture, I’ve gotten in the habit of practicing my portraits with the kids. This one was a near-miss — something about it bugs me, it just doesn’t do him justice — but good enough for the picture of the day.

I took this one a couple of days later, and *finally* got the picture I was trying to capture over the last couple of weeks.

(Hey, Project 365 is all about learning, right? And I’ve learned that you have to take a LOT of shots to get just a few good ones.)

And the very same day, I took this one, which is one of my favourite pictures ever. I didn’t even notice the bubble on his lips until I was sorting through the pictures later that day.

This next image was inspired by a really amazing TtV shot of one of my contact’s toy camera collection. It’s nowhere near as wicked-cool as his shot, but it’s mine and I like it fine. My small but growing vintage camera collection:

Saw this on my way to work, driving along the Canal early one morning and it caught my eye. They’ve got the little huts in place for Winterlude skating, making for an interesting reflection in the still Canal water.

I see these as my transitional pictures. They’re half-way between fall and winter — frost on leaves! The first version is the macro, through a close-up filter.

And this is the non-macro version:

Please admire that tiny sparkle of sunlight in the very centre of the frame, because it pretty much perfectly captures how I feel right now!

Ugh. November. If there were a contest for the least-photographic month on the calendar, November would win it hands-down. Grey, barren, sleety. Ugh.

Usually, I love writing up this weekly summary of my 365 pictures, but I’m so abysmally lacking in inspiration right now neither the photographic opportunities nor writing about them is appealing. I’m really hoping this ennui is as transient as the autumn leaves.

Speaking of leaves, could I possibly wrest one last dead-leaf image out of the season? How about the ghostly imprint of the leaves of autumn departed?

Heck, even the geese know it’s time to get out of town.

Of course, when it’s too rainy or wet or dark to venture outside, there are things inside that are worth taking a closer look at.

And Halloween is good for a few gratuitous shots!

If you get outside while the sun is shining, you can almost forget that winter is on it’s way…

(I couldn’t decide if I liked the one featuring Lucas the best, or the four of these in a set together.)

I was feeling in such a photographic rut that I thought maybe I should try something new, so I tried to emulate some high-key portraits I’ve seen recently. It didn’t quite work, but if nothing else, I’ve figured out over the course of 289 days worth of pcitures that I learn as much from my failures and attempts as I learn from my successes.

(He’s is mighty cute regardless, though, isn’t he? Beloved said the problem with portraits in high-key — that strong, flat lighting — is that it blows out the mid-tones, which are very important in a portrait. See, lesson learned — and shared!)

And hey, at least we can look forward to seven weeks’ worth of Christmas-themed images!! (The title of this photo, taken two days after Halloween, is “Oh no!” you groan, “Not already!” They were out the first Monday in November, stringing up 300,000 lights for the Christmas Lights Across Canada festival.)

Even if November begins with photographic whinging and ennui, I can still look back on the photos I took in October and think to myself, “Damn, I’ve taken some really good pictures!” See?

Okay, seriously? I am so sick of taking pictures. Really, really sick of taking pictures. So unbelievably sick of looking for pictures, finding pictures, taking pictures, processing pictures, posting pictures, talking about pictures, thinking about pictures, and the endless 24-hour loop of it all.

And I still have three months to go. Save me!

The theme this week is, not surprisingly, autumn leaves. I mean, it’s not even like taking a good picture is difficult these days. There are gorgeous colours and shapes lying on the ground just begging me to take a picture of them! Like this picture from earlier this week — I just walked out of the office, pointed my camera at the York Street steps, and snapped. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!

And this one, also courtesy of the downtown trees. (Who knew that fallen leaves could be so very colourful? Every primary and secondary colour save blue appears somewhere on the leaves in this picture!)

In fact, all these fall colours might be making me a little bit lazy. I was on the way home and realized I hadn’t so much as clicked the shutter all day (did I mention “so very sick of taking pictures”?) so I snapped this one of the bench in our front yard. Even a rusty old bench looks kind of snazzy with a background of leafy bokeh to set it off!

I know I’ve already shown you my pictures from our Lime Kiln Trail hike on the weekend, but I wanted to point out this picture in particular again. To me, this picture represents that despite the inevitable ennui and frustration of the 365 project, you can’t help but improve your photographic “chops” by taking a picture every single day.

Each time we’ve fed the chickadees over the years, I’ve tried to get a good shot of them eating the seed out of my or the kids’ hands, and have been mostly unsuccessful. The little beggars move so fast that it’s surprisingly challenging to get all your photographic elements in line — in focus, good composition, decent exposure, etc. But this weekend, even though I had my manual focus 50 mm lens on the camera, when this chickadee hopped up on my cousin Mike’s hand, my reflexes kicked in and I got a pretty good shot right off the bat. If you look at it large, you can even see the details of the individual feathers around its face, even though its eye is just a tiny bit too dark to resolve. And the chickadee is set off by a bright area of the background, nicely lit from behind. Instinct + reflexes + luck = good photograph!

This picture of the sunrise over the Byward Market — not even the best of the week, IMHO, let alone comparable to some of the really great shots I’ve taken lately — has nonetheless made it into Flickr’s Explore. I suppose this mollifies me somewhat on the fact that I have to continue to commute downtown each day…

And no, I haven’t lost my fascination for through-the-viewfinder photography, I just find carrying my TtV contraption around with me a little bit tedious in the merciless drizzle of late. Did somebody mention autumn colours?

And there’s no doubt in my mind that this week, I’ve definitely saved the best for last. Speaking of inevitable improvements — I think I’m finally making some progress on my portraiture skills! This may be my favourite picture of Lucas ever. Don’t you just love the expression on his face? Of the hundreds upon hundreds of times I’ve pointed my camera at him over the last 20 months, this is the first time he’s ever gazed directly into the lens!

Okay, so the 365 project may be a little tedious right now, but when it works, the rewards are worth it!

I’ve reached a funny place in my 365 photo project. I really think a lot of the pictures I’ve taken in the last ten days or so have been some of the best I’ve ever taken. The pictures I’m discarding as not-quite-good enough are better by far than the ones I would have said were my best work just a couple of months into the project.

Of course, rather than just enjoy my (relatively) new ability to make the kind of pictures I’ve wanted to be able to create all along, now I’ve raised my own bar higher. If I can make a fantastic picture on Tuesday, then I won’t settle for anything less on Wednesday. Really, I am my own worst enemy.

It was a good week to be taking good pictures, too, because for the first time I’ve entered my pictures in a couple of contests on Flickr. I’ve made it through four rounds of voting (each round requires a new picture taken within the past five days) to make it to the finals in one — last time I checked, with voting ending this afternoon, we were tied! — and I’ve made it to the second of five rounds in another. I don’t actually get anything except the fleeting satisfaction of being declared the winner — until the next competition begins in a couple of days — but it’s at least good for my ego!

I’m pretty sure this is one of my favourite pix of all time. Definitely in the top ten! I was trying to play with depth of field and shape by taking pictures of this row of pears but somebody kept trying to filch the pears. So I rolled with it! It won one round of the competition.

(Beloved suggested I name this picture “The Creation of Adam” because it looks like Lucas and the pear are reaching for each other in a manner not dissimilar to Michelangelo’s famous painting.)

And where there’s fingers, there has to be toes, elsewise the whole universe would be out of kilter.

Whoops, more fingers — better take another toe picture this weekend!

It just wouldn’t be October without a pumpkin-patch picture. (The boys are getting better at posing, but I messed up the lighting on this one. One area I definitely still need to work on! Also, looking at this week’s pictures, I’m thinking I need to adjust the brightness on my laptop… a lot of these are darker than I intended.)

I didn’t do a lot of through-the-viewfinder photography this week, although my typewriter picture from last week got me through the first round of the competition I mentioned. The only TtV I did this week was of this old steam tractor I found near Prince of Wales. I love the textures and colours of the rusted out wheels.

Just for the sake of variety, I took one the “normal” way, too!

There’s still just enough colour left in the leaves (and leaves left on the trees!) to take advantage of a few last autumn images. This one got me through another round of the competition!

This was supposed to be an autumn shot, but the pine needles and the green-and-red combination have me thinking early thoughts about Christmas time!

Remember back in May, I was so pleased and surprised to stumble across a tall ship moored near the Hartwell Locks one still spring morning? On the day I found out about my job disappearing this week, I went on a long wander around the back of Parliament Hill on an unexpectedly warm and sunny lunch hour and found the very same tall ship, the Fair Jeanne, this time in drydock in the Canal locks beside the Chateau Laurier.

… and now for something completely different! Some may say this is over the top, perhaps a little bit hackneyed and contrived, but I like looking at it and it makes me smile, so that’s good enough for me! (It’s also the image I submitted to the final round of competition, a bit of a risk but what the heck.)

Deep in the Orion Nebula, baby stars grow in translucent eggs until they are ready to hatch and float away…

There’s no doubt that the dominant theme in this week’s project 365 pictures is autumn: rich reds, yummy yellows, outrageous oranges. Is it just me or is this one of the most spectacularly colourful autumns we’ve had in years? Thank you Mother Nature!

But, in the way the exception proves the rule, my favourite image in a week filled with saturated colours is this first image in simple black and white. I like the picture, but I am head over heels in love with the subject. On Sunday, we took the boys on a treasure-hunting road trip down Highway 31 (Bank Street way south) to Merrickville, where we poked around McHaffie’s Flea Market for the better part of the morning. We found a couple of fun things, including Pokemon cards for the boys (sigh) and another vintage camera (a Duaflex II this time) for a very affordable $12.

It was on the way home, though, that we stopped in at Aubrey’s Antiques and I fell in love. When I saw it, I literally gasped in surprise and delight. I’ve *always* wanted a manual typewriter, but I never imagined I’d find one with this much character. And my darling Beloved bought it for me, wrangling the price down to an affordable $30 splurge. Isn’t it beautiful?

I figure it’s circa 1920s, maybe as late as early 1930s. It’s a Portable Underwood, made in Canada by the United Typewriter Company of Canada, serial number 533186. It’s in fantastic condition, works like a charm. I figure it was so affordable because of how the keys are backwards like that. (Just kidding, it’s flipped like that because the viewfinder on the Duaflex uses a mirror, so through-the-viewfinder pictures are reversed.) I can see this beauty showing up in many of my remaining 365 pictures!

And speaking of road trips down Highway 31, have you ever been through Williamsburg? Each time we drove down to Upper Canada Village, I wondered about this abandoned theatre as we passed by. My menfolk are becoming increasingly benevolent toward the 365 project, and were happy to stop and let me take some pictures of it on our way home.

The Picadilly Theatre opened in July of 1935 (not too long after my Underwood was built!) but closed its doors forever in December of 1959. According to this article, the owner keeps paying the property taxes on the empty building her grandfather built and won’t sell it or tear it down because her father, who died in 2003, wouldn’t hear of it. Another vintage beauty, no?

This was one of those “oh no, it’s almost dinner time and I haven’t managed to take a single picture all day” kind of shots. Quick, what’s photographable? Okay, crazy-coloured shrubbery in the backyard, good idea!

From there, the autumn leaves only got more spectacular as the week went on. Another one of life’s little curiousities I noticed this week was that raindrops only seem to bead on the back side of leaves. Why is that, do you think?

These two are from yesterday morning. I was driving to work about 20 minutes before the sun came up, and I noticed that because it was so cold (two below freezing, brrrr!) there was a lovely mist coming off the Rideau River. I pulled off Prince of Wales to take a few pictures at the Black Rapids lock station, and got totally sucked in by the beauty of the sunrise and the fall colours.

This was taken from the bridge you can just see in the photo above. The tree in the foreground was literally raining leaves — I wish I’d had video mode on my camera to capture it, I’ve never seen anything like it!

If you don’t mind losing the feeling in your fingers, poking around in the leaves by the river at dawn is not a bad way to start the day!

I just realized that including the typewriter and the Picadilly and all the autumn leaves falling off the trees, my 365 pictures this week are almost exclusively about things past their prime. Except, of course, for these handsome young things.

As I said when I posted this one to Flickr, they make my heart sing every single day. This one is pretty cute, too, when he’s not into mischief.

So I need your help now. By 3 pm today, I’ve got to post one of the leafy-type shots above in a Flickr contest I’ve entered. I won the first round with the typewriter shot, so now I’ve got to post something I’ve taken in the last five days. I’m caught between the raindrops on the leaf one and the one with the path leading to the bridge. What do you think? Help me pick!

You know how some days you take 50 (erm, who am I kidding, two HUNDRED and fifty) shots, and you get about three keepers? Yesterday wasn’t one of those days. I knew it would be sunny and a good day to enjoy the fall colours, so I brought my little TtV contraption with me to work and went on a little walkabout. It took me three HOURS to sort, edit and process them, but in the end I still had more than 30 pictures I liked. Even in squishing some of them into collages, I still posted five pictures of the day yesterday. Photo overload!

(You just know that I’m going to be scrambling for even one decent image today. I think that’s why next year, I might do a 7*52 instead of a 365. Seven new pictures each week, instead of a new picture each day. We’ll see!)

This is the week I discovered the TtV collage, because if one through-the-viewfinder shot is good, two dozen of them is exquisitely good! Here’s my first one, taken last Friday in Ottawa’s Byward Market.

Then on the weekend, I went back to taking pictures with just one camera. We went for a little wander on the hiking trail at the Chapman Mills Conservation Area along the Rideau River on Saturday, and Lucas stopped to inspect every rock, leaf and flower along the way.

I had a hard time deciding between the traditional version, above, and this one. Sometimes, I find selective colouring actually detracts from a photo, but I liked the subtleness of the purple here. What do you think?

This may be one of the three best portrait pictures I have ever taken — and it’s not even my kid! This is Aiden, son of my dear friends and friend of my sons. Isn’t he going to break about a million hearts some day with those clear blue eyes?

I can feel the winter coming, with its monochromatic tones and faltering sunlight, so I think I’m on some kind of subconscious mission to squeeze every last bit of colour out of what Mother Nature offers right now. Like this crazy crab apple tree growing in our backyard.

I tried to make this one work as a TtV shot, too, but I liked the straight shot better. I spent the better part of one lunch hour poking around in the wet leaves under a pair of giant oaks in the park across from my office one day, looking for acorns… something I never would have done before the 365 project. As I said on Flickr, I think the 365 is making me a better person. It’s definitely giving me dirty pockets.

See that grainy quality? It’s called “noise”. That’s what happens when you leave your ISO on 1600 by mistake. And you can see it in this pinwheel shot taken the next day, too. It can add character to a shot, but I’m copping to this one as a lucky mistake!

All of the following pictures were taken yesterday. And if you think I should have worked harder to cull the flock, you haven’t seen the heap I almost posted but didn’t! I cancelled my bus pass thinking I’d be changing jobs sooner than this, and so was driving to work along Colonel By when I realized that I absolutely *had* to stop and take some pictures of the fall colours reflecting in the Rideau Canal. Another thing I never would have done before the 365! See?

And this one! (And, by the way? There are not nearly enough parking spots on Colonel By!)

I took about 30 pictures, both TtV and straight on with the Nikon. You’d think that would last me for the day, but on my coffee break I wandered past the Chateau Laurier and snapped a couple of TtV shots, because I think the dreamy retro fisheye effect makes the Chateau look even more like a fairy tale castle. (I like the one in the top left the best.)

And then, because it was still sunny and clear and blue, and the forecast is calling for rain followed by six months of winter, I went for a walk along the Canal at lunch time, too. (If nothing else, I’m at least getting my exercise with this damn photography habit!)

I took at least eleventy-hundred pictures, most of which I looked at later on the computer and said, “Wow! I really like that one!” and realized I had to start lumping them together into collages. This one is called “Perspectives on the Rideau Canal”.

And finally (if you made it this far, you’re a trooper!) here is my favourite collection and perhaps my favourite among faves in a week of fortuitous photography.

I don’t usually get a lot of comments on the 365 posts, and I can never tell if it’s because you’re yawning waiting for me to get over the pictures already, or if it’s because the nature of the posts don’t engage commentary like some of the other things I write about. Having said that, I’d really like your (non-obsessed) opinion on the TtV collages — are they too much? Do you think I should edit harder and just choose a single fave or two to post, or do you think they have a more-than-the-sum-of-the-parts synergy to them? And do you think I’ve finally lost it, using a word like synergy? Yeah, you can skip that last question…

So I have a new obsession, a subset of my 365 obsession, which in itself is a subset of my photography obsession, which, it might be argued, is a subset of my “living my life out loud on the Internet” obsession. My new obsession is TtV (through the viewfinder) photography, in which you take a photograph by shooting through the viewfinder of another, usually vintage, camera.

This picture, my photo of the day for last Sunday, is taken through the viewfinder of a camera that I’ve had since I was a kid, my uncle’s old Kodak Brownie Hawkeye.

But this one is taken through the viewfinder of my latest toy, a Kodak Duaflex IV that I won on eBay this weekend. (It’s the first auction I’ve ever won! I bid on and won a lot of six vintage cameras including a a Baby Brownie Special, and a Brownie Reflex Synchro, THREE Brownie Hawkeyes including a flash unit — that’s in addition to the Brownie Hawkeye I already own, mind you. The other cameras are in middling to rough condition, as you might expect for a lot of vintage cameras, but the one I really wanted, the Kodak Duaflex IV, was in near-mint condition including an original leather case. (You can click through to see what it looks like, but mine is in much better condition.) I got it all for the stellar price of $10.99!

So now instead of murky, fuzzy TtV pictures like the apple above, I can shoot clear and dreamy ones like this one:

I am absolutely fascinated with TtV photography now, and have a half-written post discussing it in more detail for next week. (Edited to add: TtV how-to post is now live!)

The rest of my pictures are all over the map this week. There is nothing even remotely resembling a theme, or a coherent narrative. There’s the obligatory cute baby shot, for example:

And there’s this one. I’d stepped out of my office on the way home into a cool, rainy afternoon, and suddenly there was this massive moving sea of umbrellas crossing the street in front of me… some sort of Japanese tour group, from the look of it. I tried to get a few shots, but they moved surprisingly quickly, and by the time I hopped up on a bench for a higher vantage point (in a short skirt and heels, no less, what a sight I must have been myself!) they’d moved on. This is an *almost* shot that didn’t quite capture what I wanted, but was still good enough for the POTD.

I took this one the same day I wrote the post grumbling about how difficult the homework-dinner-prep-baby-wrangling part of the day is, and you’d never know it from their inherent cuteness how stressful it can all be! But lookit the grip Lucas has on that pencil — not bad for a 19-month-old!

I’m really pleased with how this shot of Tristan’s hockey skates turned out. I think the black and white emphasizes the shapes and the textures, which is what makes this shot look particularly interesting. (IMHO, that is!)

And this bike caught my eye when I was going for coffee one morning… I’m not sure why but something about the shape of it appealed to me, out of the dozens of chained-up bikes I walk past every day downtown. It was a drizzly grey morning anyway, so desaturating it to b&w wasn’t much of a stretch, but then I used Photoshop to remove the b&w from the bell, leaving it the original gold colour. I like how all the lines in the picture lead the eye toward the bell.

This was yesterday’s picture and yes, it is an editorial comment on how my day went. I don’t know why some days fall apart, and why some days go so spectacularly sideways, but yesterday was one of them, from start to finish. I’m glad it’s over!

And finally, this week happened to include the end of September. In case you haven’t been paying attention, here’s a September recap in the form of the monthly mosaic:

September was a good month. A long month, but a good month. Expect October to be stuffed with shots of fall colour (if the rain ever stops) and more TtV experiments!