Category: Photography

Now that all the excitement of passing the half-way point has settled, the reality becomes obvious: oh my sweet lord, I have more than 180 pictures left to take? (And, since I take about a dozen pictures for every one I post, we’re actually looking at another thousand or two pictures until the end of the year!)

Last Friday was one of those days. I was disappointed in some of the pictures I’d taken for BOLO the night before, and frustrated with the camera. I didn’t put it to my face all day, and by dinner time I had no idea what to photograph. I rooted through Lucas’s toy box until I found something mildly colourful and thought I might be able to catch the beads of this rattle moving. Meh. I took about 20 pictures, trying to get one I half-way liked, and this was as good as it got. Thank goodness for digital! I’d’ve been sick about spending for a roll of film and processing and ending up with this, back in the day!

The next day, still lacking inspiration I defaulted back to my comfort zone: the coneflowers in my garden. The first one is the official photo of the day, but I liked the other two enough to post as well. (And deleted about 30 more!)

(I’m partial to how that last one turned out. I turned the frame off, because I think it looks cooler just floating in the background. I was down underneath the flowers, shooting toward a lightly overcast sky, and metered for the flower in the background. The highlights in the sky were blown out, but it turned into a nice flat white — that was done in camera, I have no idea how to achieve the effect in photoshop! The first two, I played with in photoshop a lot more. The top one was desaturated a bit, and on the middle one I torqued the noise for that grainy effect. Photoshop is FUN!)

I had my camera with me when we went for our weekly two-family Sunday breakfast and snapped this picture of a shad fly (also known as a may fly, I’m told) on my friend UberGeek’s finger. (UberGeek’s been around since the beginning of blog, but been largely silent lately, until this week!) Flickr’s magic donkey must like shad flies, because this one made it into Explore.

(Funny that that one made it into explore, because I almost made this second picture from Sunday the pic of the day. I’m either biased against bugs (ick!) or a little bit too into my coneflowers these days!)

Monday, we went to the Central Experimental Farm for the first time this year with a couple of friends, and I enjoyed watching Lucas’s reactions to the animals. He was partial to the chickens (he even said “chicken” quite clearly) and the cows, and by the end of the day every four-legged creature was a “moo”.

After seven years of Farm visits, it’s hard to find an original shot to take! I liked this one, though – I’m partial to the expression on the centred cow’s face! I zoomed in during the exposure to get the dizzying effect. I may just enter this one into the Farm’s annual photo contest, if I don’t get something better later this season.

And this one is item number 271 of things I thought would be much easier to photograph. I’ve seen some stunning pictures of spiderwebs with morning dew on them, and have been hunting all summer for a good one. I finally found this one right in our driveway, and though it wasn’t a misty morning, I made my own moisture with a water bottle. Didn’t help though. Who knew spiderwebs would be so darn hard to photograph?!? (And don’t be expecting to see a whole lot of bugs in my photostream now, either. Two in one week? Unheard of! And ick!)

I’d stopped by my parents’ house to take a picture of their used sofa and recliner to post for sale on Used Ottawa and Kijiji, and my mom showed me this cute garden ornament she’d just put out. I loved the colours and textures and snapped a picture, but certainly didn’t intend it to be the picture of the day. Then the day got away from me, and at the end of the day I simply had nothing else in the camera. Good thing it caught my eye, or you’d’ve been treated to a nice soft-light portrait of my parents’ used sofa here! (And it sold in literally about 15 minutes, entirely because of my mad photographic sofa-portrait skillz, of course!)

We were at the waterpark, and the pattern in the bricks caught my eye. This would likely have been a better shot if the footprints were more distinct and led directly to the feet, but oh well.

What can I say, I just love those little feetsies.

Well, I hope not every week is this exciting. I don’t think I could stand it! Could you stand another post about Project 365 this week? (It’s been so crazy, I almost forgot to post my weekly round-up, and that’s often my favourite post of the week.)

The week started off on a good note when this picture was the eighth of my collection to make it into Flickr’s Explore. I call it “Mama and Baby Coneflower” and it’s even prettier printed out on paper.

Saturday, which seems like about a million years ago now, was the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk. This was my favourite picture of the day, and one of the two I submitted to the official competition.

(This is the other one I submitted to the official competition. Like the Café picture, it makes me smile when I look at it.)

Despite the endless rain and abject lack of sunshine so far in this so-called summer, this little raspberry in my mother’s yard fought its way to ripeness.

One of these days, I’m going to capture a good bubble picture. In the interim, here’s a bubble wand picture. (I suppose it would help if he had the bubble end up, right?)(This makes me smile because for my first child, I would have prevented him from making the mess on his shirt.)

I’d been counting down to the half-way point of the project for some time, but I put no real thought into a fun way to represent “half”. I was going to do an entire half-breakfast (half a waffle, half an orange, maybe even on half a plate and half a glass of juice) but the day was so busy I didn’t get a chance. At the end of the day, I played with half an egg, half an apple, and half a glass of milk. In the end, I finally settled on this one (with a much more than half-full belly!):

You’ve seen this one before, of course. This is Adrian Harewood and the folks at CBC, snapped less than surreptitiously during my appearance on All in a Day. As I titled the photograph, it’s much more exciting than half a cookie!

Appropriately, I ended the week on another high note. I’d had a version of this picture in my head for most of this week, but I had to snap it first thing in the morning because there was rain forecast for most of the day. (I’d meant to be wearing my shades, but it was so overcast I’d forgotten them.) And sometimes, ten seconds is simply not enough time — if you look closely, I think you can still see my hair settling as I dropped on to the windshield just as the timer went off!

All I can say is thank goodness I was on vacation this week. I hope the rest of my vacation is a little less exciting…

My brain has been a little bit too full this week, stuffed with insurance claims and residual values for the van, and with css and hex colours for the blog redesign, and with a million other silly little things. Thank goodness I’m on vacation as of this afternoon — I could really put those pesky eight to ten hours a day that work demands to better use! All that to say, the picture-taking hasn’t been my primary (wait for it!) focus this week. Har har har.

Ahem, anyway… I’ve been reading a steady stream of photography books, sucking up ideas, concepts and tips and filing them away in unoccupied nooks and crannies in my brain. I just finished the highly rated and highly recommended Learning to See Creatively by Bryan F. Peterson. He gives ideas like “Envision the world from the perspective of a leaf that’s just fallen off a tree.” I loved it! A really great book if you’re feeling a little stuck in the creativity department, with some stunning photography. Not your standard “to achieve minimum depth of field, use a focal length of…” tutorial. This picture was loosely inspired by that, imagining the perspective of a busy toddler at the park. Plus, I liked the purple of his shorts and hat with the lime green of his shirt!

I love my daisies. I love bokeh. What could be better than bokeh daisies? (Bokeh – rhymes with mocha – is the character of the out-of-focus parts of your image. I’m going to put up a whole Family Photographer post on bokeh soon!) Anyway, I was really happy with how this turned out — watch for it to play a part in the fancy-schmancy new blog design to be revealed in the next week or so!

A few years back, they shut down the Stittsville Flea Market, and Sunday afternoons just haven’t been the same since. On our way out to retrieve our personal belongings from the van (sniff) we stopped at a little echo of the Stittsville flea market and poked around for a bit. Take a look at the bottom-right image — that is by far the largest pile of scissors I have ever seen. And the top-right image got a little bit cut off in the mosaic, but the base says “#1 Mom!” Isn’t she frightful horrid adorable?

On these busy days, I’m honing a new specialty: the 365-dinner combo!

We were on our way home from swimming lessons and I was done like dinner, but I still didn’t have a decent picture. I don’t think I’d even put the viewfinder to my face that day… a new record for sure. On our way out of the sportsplex, I said to Tristan, “Go sniff those flowers.” Bless his little heart, he neither questioned me nor even cast a glance askew, he just patiently sniffed the flowers (don’ tell him they’re weeds!) while I took the picture. I do love my boys so…

Although it has been a questionable summer at best, we lucked out on Wednesday morning with a glorious day of sunshine, perfect for a couple of hours at the park. I brought my telephoto lens and took almost 100 pictures, a few of which turned out rather well. I chose this one as the shot of the day because I liked the colours and the composition.

And, because I was out of the way and less obviously in their faces with my camera, I managed to get some nice portraits of each of the the boys at play.

(Tristan is wearing a fleece vest in the summer sun because it makes him “look like a Pokémon trainer.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.)

This last one is something a little different. It’s an abstract. Can you guess what it is? It caught my eye because of the contrasting blue and orange colours, and because of the really interesting texture. I shot this one with my telephoto lens, zoomed all the way out to 200mm for a close-up.

It’s the safety railing between levels in the parkade where I’ve parked at least two dozen times since I started the 365 project, possibly one of the nastiest places I go on a regular basis. I don’t know why I never noticed it before, but as soon as I pulled up and the headlight illuminated the corrosion on the railing I thought it would make an interesting picture. I wasn’t expecting the background to fade out to black because it was reasonably well-lit in there. In fact, I set up the shot so the red car down 1/2 level would be the out-of-focus background for the railing, giving even more colour constrast — or so I thought. I kind of like how it turned out, though.

And any day when you get your 365 picture in the can before 7 am is a good day!

It may have been a traumatic week otherwise, but it was a good week for photography. I got some gorgeous shots this week, and I’m really happy with most of the pictures I took. Funny how everything creative, from writing to blogging to photography, runs hot and cold, isn’t it?

Although it seems like a million years ago now, this was the photo I took to commemorate our 10-year anniversary last Friday. These guys were the centrepiece on our wedding cake!

This is one of the two pictures that made it into Flickr’s “Explore” feature this week. I wait all year for my daisies to come out, and they grow in a large and unruly but happy-looking patch in my front yard. One of the first pictures I took with my D40 was of Simon in the daisies in 2007! I shot this one from down low, pointing up and into the light on one of the rare days of sun this week, so the petals have a neat translucent quality to them. (I didn’t do much post-processing on this, just a little bit of sharpening to bring out the edges and a tiny bit of a warmer cast. The blurry bits around the edges are the leaves from the tree above the daisies.)

This is the other picture that made it into Explore. When I saw the rhubarb stacked up in one of the Market stalls, I liked the almost-repeating shapes of the cut edges, and the almost-repeating patterns in the stalks, and the nice complimentary transition from red to green. I thought it was a throwaway snap, actually, until I was reviewing my shots that evening and something about it appealed to me. Even so, I am quite perplexed by how much people seem to like it — random strangers keep adding it as a favourite and it’s been bouncing in and out of Explore all week.

This one, on the other hand, is not only one of my favourites this week but one of my all-time faves. I called it “Precarious” – something about those about-to-tumble blocks gives it a nice dynamicism. (Is that a word?) I sat and watched Lucas stack the same blocks over and over and over again, snapping pictures of the different constructions, for the better part of an hour — and a hundred images!! This one was the best, IMHO.

I was making dinner the other day, and hadn’t snapped a single picture all day. It’s either a testament to my newly acquired comfort with the camera or a testament to my mad mothering skillz, but half a year ago I wouldn’t be able to conceptualize, compose and capture a photo like this while in the midst of making dinner!

(Conveniently, I’ve recently realized that the spot between the two burners on my stove makes for an excellent seamless white back drop. I’d been using the bathtub, but the light is better in the kitchen! I used it for the frog pictures above, too.)

In my favourite Flickr group, there are weekly challenges posted. This week, the challenge was to take a self-portrait. I made this one on my lunch hour, but I wasn’t overly fond of it. I’d planned to take another image of some sort in the evening, but that plan got derailed by the whole van-on-fire thing, so this is it for the day.

This is my favourite picture of the week. I took it when we first arrived on Victoria Island for our Aboriginal Experiences adventure. I noticed the reflection right away, but it was a bit of a trick to get the image composed fast enough to still take the picture and get to Lucas in time to prevent him from soaking himself. I did it! And I love the image. I desaturated it just a bit in Photoshop to give it that timeless feeling.

Funny, the rhubarb and the daisy pictures made it into Explore, but I far prefer the photos of the puddle and the blocks. But then, I’m a little biased about the subject matter. I really don’t even like rhubarb!