Category: Photography

I got a new toy this week! A 50mm f1.8 lens, so well loved in the photography community that they call it the “nifty fifty.” I totally love it!

As with far too many things in my life, however, the circuitous route by which it came to me makes for both a cautionary tale and excellent blog fodder.

I’d been eyeballing it for weeks, and knew I could buy it on Amazon.com for about $135US. I also happened to have $40 in Amazon.com gift certificates, for my last couple of blog tours. When I got a $100 paypal payment in $US, I figured it was meant to be. I have $140US to spend, the lens I covet costs $135. Hook me up!

Problem: Amazon.com doesn’t ship lenses to Canada. (And Amazon.ca doesn’t accept Amazon.com gift certificates.)
Solution: Find benevolent American friend willing to re-ship lens to me.

Problem: Amazon.com doesn’t accept paypal. If I cash it out, I lose both ways on the exchange.
Solution: Use $$ in paypal account to bid on $100 Amazon gift card on eBay. Brilliant! (Beloved thought of this one. He’s so clever!)

Problem: I’m 80c (yes, eighty CENTS) short when I go to check out of the Amazon store. Friggin’ taxes!
Solution: use dregs of paypal account to buy a $5 gift card.

Problem: Lens finally arrives with $56.90 payment outstanding to UPS. Nanny doesn’t have the cash on hand to cover it. (I thought the $56.90 was the delivery charge, but my American friend had already paid nearly $20 for that. It was GST and duty. *choke*)
Solution: Must wait overnight and leave cheque for UPS.

Total cost to buy new lens from Amazon: $258.42 Cnd.
What it would have cost me to buy it from the Henry’s around the corner: $182.45. Sigh.

Oh well, my out-of-pocket is still only about $70. Not bad for a lens that I am completely and utterly in love with!

It took me a while to get used to the manual focus again (the 50mm f1.8 doesn’t autofocus with the D40) and of using my feet to do the zooming, but this lens is so sharp and takes the most lovely pictures. The f1.8 means that it has a particularly wide aperture, much wider than the f3.5 or so I can get with my kit lens. I’ve always liked playing with depth of field, and this lens is just amazing for that. (Depth of field refers to the amount of the photo that is in focus. In a wide depth of field, using say f20, all the details would be in focus. In a short depth of field, you can highlight what you want to be in focus and throw the foreground and background out of focus. /photography lesson)

You can see how much fun I’ve had with DoF in this week’s photos:

(In this case, the out-of-focus areas are from motion. This is a technique called ‘panning’ where you move your camera to follow a moving subject (theoretically) keeping your subject in focus while the background is blurred. I just love the expression on Tristan’s face!)

(I’m playing fast and loose with the definition of “this week’s photos”. You’ve already seen the peanut butter jar picture and the picture of Tristan and Lucas, so I slipped in a few extras of the pretty flowers. I found them growing wild by the side of the road near the Experimental Farm and didn’t figure you’d mind! Sometimes it’s hard to choose just one picture for the day, and sometimes it’s hell coming up with something, ANYTHING that will do for the day! Also, those flowers represent what I truly love about my 365 project: I never would have stopped and got out of my car to photograph or admire those flowers before — and I spent a lovely and restorative 20 or 30 minutes creeping around and even lying sprawled on my belly taking pictures of them. That in and of itself was a gift!)

And here’s one last thought for this week, a photo that I didn’t take that speaks for itself:

(With props – and apologies? – to Michael David Murphy of Unphotographable, and to Kate , who first exposed me to his work.)

The photographer’s equivalent of the one that got away, I guess!

Well, after the excitement of getting my first picture featured by Flickr in Explore, I finally relaxed and got back to the business of taking photos for myself instead of for everybody else this week.

I think that sentiment is best encapsulated in this picture I took on Sunday. I adore this wooden cradle. It has cradled all three of my boys as newborns, and Lucas grew too large for it at least a couple of months ago. Before I put it away for good, though, I wanted to take this one last image. I wanted it to be a moody, dark shot, though, because I also wanted to pay a tribute to those years of doubt and sadness back before Tristan was born, when we weren’t sure if we’d ever be able to have the kids we wanted so badly. The darkness of those years of infertility will always be a part of us, I think. And then, of course, there were the three babies lost: the first one at 13 weeks, in 2000; the second one, Tristan’s twin, lost at 9 1/2 weeks in 2001; and the baby we lost in 2006 at 16 weeks. So this picture is a tribute to them, and to Frostie, too. An acknowledgment of what never was, and of the joy with which we have been blessed.

(That’s a really long explanation for a picture I should maybe have just let speak for itself.)

None of the other pictures this week are nearly so laden with meaning or melancholy. In fact, most of them are either shots for a new scavenger hunt game I’m playing (thank goodness, because it provides me with ideas and inspirations I desperately need right now) or pictures inspired by the changing (often hourly!) seasons.

(No, that last one is not me in a blizzard. It’s me reflected in a giant 8×10 sheet of granite outside a local granite and concrete shop on a beautiful day around lunchtime. Neat effect though, eh?)

Remember way back on Friday, when I wrote that post talking about how I’d finally given my head a shake and stopped worrying about having Flickr acknowledge the merits of my photographs with it’s “Explore” feature?

Snicker.

About 22 hours after I wrote that post, I snapped this photograph:

And guess what? It got Explored! That means Flickr recognized it as one of the 500 most interesting photographs posted on April 5. Since Flickr gets about 6500 new photos every minute, I’m pretty excited. Lookit, here’s my souvenir poster!

As I noted on the photograph’s page, some times you spend hours setting up a shot and taking 150 microscopically different versions, spend more hours tweaking and fixing and adjusting in photoshop, and you still have a very ordinary photograph. And some days, you plunk the tripod on the porch and balance the baby on your hip to snap a couple of images with one hand while trying to keep all three of you (you, the baby and the camera) out of the rain, and it’s a work of art. Go figure!

I’ve been thinking this week about how much my Project 365 experience has mirrored my blogging experience, at least in the early days. In both cases, I started out on a whim with no plan except to satisfy a creative urge. And in both cases, I got totally sucked in by the comments and feedback, and the gravitational pull of that praise pulled me completely out of my own orbit. Both have been extremely satisfying, but my own insatiable need for external validation has completely hijacked any sense of doing the thing simply for its own merit.

Until I started up the 365, I was only marginally aware of Flickr’s “Interestingness” feature. The idea is that through a secretive algorithm that encompasses number of times a photo is viewed, number of comments, groups to which the photo belongs, and number of times someone selects the photo as a favourite, Flickr assigns an “interestingness” value. Thanks to a third-party hack, I’ve made up a little set of my 20 most “interesting” photos at any given time — it changes daily.

Flickr also chooses the 500 most “interesting” photos each day and puts them in its own showcase, called “Explore“. I get a lot of inspiration and ideas just from paging through some of the great pictures on Explore, but it never would have occured to me that some day one of my pictures might make it up there. My main 365 group on Flickr seems to have extraordinary success in having their photos “explored” though — more than 100 of them in March alone.

Suddenly, I began to think that maybe I could get one of my photos in Explore, too. I started looking at the factors that go into the algorithm and thinking, hey, I’m pretty close on some of these. And then, I found myself disappointed when people weren’t commenting or favouriting my photos because I wanted that spot in Explore so badly. (Because that, too, is a feature of my personality — the pattern that goes oblivion -> awareness -> desire -> obsession.)

And then this week I realized that I was actually causing myself no small amount of anxiety in my covetousness of this arcane little bit of recognition and I gave my head a shake and said, “Why are you doing this project? Are you doing this to express your creativity and improve your skills, or are you doing this for some sort of esoteric bragging rights?” I don’t know why I let myself get my knickers in a twist over something like this in the first place, but it was a huge relief to absolve myself of the need for that particular bit of praise and get back to taking pictures because they were interesting, instead of Interesting. Or just, you know, pretty.

(The big irony is that Flickr must be well aware of how deeply some of us desire that spot on Explore, because on April 1st all of my photos were deemed worthy of Explore! April Fools or not, I was happy to grab a souvenir poster that marks membership into this exclusive club.)

Ahem, anyway, here are this week’s pictures. All of them have captions on Flickr, if you’re curious as to the story behind the photo. None of them have been Explored — but I like them nonetheless!

67:365 Sunrise on Mooney’s Bay

68:365 Back in the day

69:365 Slinky

70:365 Fool’s Gold*

71:365 The wonders of spring

72:365 Just dropping by

73:365 Starbucks revisited

* For a theme on ‘Fool’s Gold’. My caption said “Oh, pyrite? I thought you said pirate!” I also lamented how it’s difficult to compose a good shot when the talent keeps trying to eat the props.

The best thing and the worst thing about taking a picture every single day is that your glory and your defeat are only locked in for 24 hours; after that, the slate is clean and you start all over again. That seems to be the theme of this week, where I took a couple of great pictures and a couple of “meh” pictures, and now I foist them all upon you.

I loved my four-part series of these paintbrushes and the palette. (All bought by our wonderful nanny at the dollar store of all places, to keep the boys busy during March Break. I just loved how the colours of the brushes reflect the colours in the palette, though.)

This experiment was less successful. The idea is that you put a shaped filter over your lens so that the out-of-focus areas (called bokeh) take on the shape of the filter. The points of light are just ordinary Christmas LEDs, and I made the filter with a craft punch. It didn’t turn out great, but I think I at least understand why now.

Some opportunities presented themselves to me on the way to or from work:

(This was for a theme on “secrets”. A bit of a stretch, I know.)

I really liked this old abadoned barn. I found it on Sunday morning, driving around with Lucas sleeping in the back seat of the van.

It’s within plain sight of the grocery store I’ve been shopping at for six years, and yet somehow I never noticed it before. I spent quite a while poking around here, and will likely return. That’s one thing I truly love about this photo-a-day project — the things you find when you simply open your eyes!

And this is my other favourite from the week. The other day, a friend lamented on Twitter that she was facing a Sisyphean day, and I had one of those “Aha!” moments. Not the first adjective I’d go to, but one that *perfectly* describes this low-level ennui that has been plaguing me for a week or so. Poor old Sisyphus, who pushed a boulder up a hill every single day only to have to start over again the next day. Sigh.

(Don’t you love the expression? And yes, that’s Princess Leia’s hair. It’s the only girl hair we have in our surprisingly extensive Lego mini-fig collection. As I noted in the caption to this photo, didn’t every little girl who grew up in the 70s and 80s want to be Princess Leia at some point? And no that’s not a mustache, it’s a shadow!)

When I look at these and compare them objectively to the photos I was taking and posting just a couple of months ago, I know there is an appreciable improvement. But Flickr has opened my eyes to a world of photographers who are creating some stunning images, and my confidence in my own work falters as a result. I have to keep reminding myself to compare myself to me, and not to them. It’s hard!

Once upon a time (okay, last week) I was skeptical of photos that had been manipulated in Photoshop or other post-processing software applications. I was a bit of a purist and, let’s call it, a snob. If I really liked a photo, I’d like it a little bit less if I noticed it had been manipulated. Then I had a really interesting conversation with a group of people on Flickr also doing a 365 project, and came to believe that post-processing is not only completely acceptable, but actually a lot of fun. Post-processing, I now believe, is just one of a suite of tools one uses to make the final photograph resemble the image you originally conceived before you even peered through the viewfinder – a suite of tools that includes your focus ring, your composition, your selection of colour or b&w, your decision to use flash or not, etc, etc. A 180 degree turn on my 365, you might say.

All that to say I’ve had a lot of fun this week with Photoshop. Like this photo, for example. Since I got the minivan, I’ve wanted my boring old key fob with it’s red PANIC button to say this:

And now, thanks to the wonders of post-processing, it does!

I had a lot of success this week, including this shot, which I truly believe is one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken:

Don’t you just love his hat? And for the Canadians in the crowd, you can delight in the irony that I snapped this in a Starbucks (overcoming my strong fear of being arrested for stalking a random stranger by capturing this photo while peeking out from behind a shelf stacked with Tazo tea) on my way to Tim Hortons for a coffee.

All of the photos from this week seemed worthy of showcasing in full size – it was a good week! All of these have been adjusted, most very minimally, in Photoshop as well.

Now, if only I were living with someone who was so comfortable with Photoshop that he actually taught the subject, and had access to dozens of free textbooks on the subject. Oh wait, I do!! Yay!

(Now I just need an extra five or six hours in the day to play… anybody got any of those to spare?)

It’s official, I’m obsessed with my photo-a-day Project 365 now. In addition to carrying a camera with me everywhere, and I mean *everywhere* (you get weird looks coming out of a public washroom with a camera around your neck, that’s all I’m sayin’) and looking at everything in the world around me as if I were holding a camera up to my face, I’ve started dreaming about taking pictures. Yep, obsessed.

You wouldn’t know it to look at my pictures from the last week or so, though. I’ve hit one of those creative dry patches, pretty much summed up in day 43’s entry:

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about photography, and spending a lot of time trying to deconstruct other people’s photographs to see what makes them work. In a way, it’s good because I’m getting ideas and learning how to go beyond simply capturing moments, but bad because I’m realizing that I’m not nearly as clever as I thought I was. As if that weren’t bad enough, I’ve also been endlessly frustrated this week that what I “see” and what the camera creates are not really the same — sometimes not even close. In other words, the theme this week is “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing”!

One of the 365 themes suggested this week was toys, and I actually had a little while to set up this shot and play with it a bit. I liked it the best of all the ones I took, and it seemed to have a lot going for it: nice depth of field and colours, leading lines, more or less follows the ‘rule of thirds’, and a little bit clever because I *almost* managed to get a self-portrait in the shiny bit of the magnet.

But the angle is just a little bit off, and now that’s all I can see. Plus, the self-portrait really isn’t clear enough. And although I played with a couple of different exposures on this one, it’s still not quite right — but I’m not sure why. I can’t figure out how to take my pictures from “okay” to “wow”, yanno?

This was also the week that I learned to love my discards. I was not originally happy with either of these pictures, but they’ve grown on me:

(as I captioned it on Flickr, nothing says “Happy Birthday Granny” like an armload of laughing grandsons!)

Here’s the rest of them from the past week or so:

I read somewhere that your first 10,000 pictures are your worst. Somehow, that makes me feel better! If the internal meter on my Nikon is to be believed, I’m more than half way there!

Hey, can you believe I’ve already made it ten per cent of the way through my Project 365 year? Look, 36 pictures for 36 days, and I haven’t missed one yet!

1. 1:365 Snowglobe, 2. 2:365 Peek!, 3. 3:365 The morning commute, 4. 4:365 Club soda, 5. 5:365 Lucas and me in the colander, 6. 6:365 Lego StarWars Family Portrait, 7. 7:365 Comfort food, 8. 8:365 Lucas in the morning light, 9. 9:365 Snowy night, 10. 10:365 Sunlight, snow and shadow, 11. 11:365 Coloured pencils, 12. 12:365 Snow removal crew, 13. 13:365 Happy Birthday Simon!, 14. 14:365 Icicles up high, 15. 15:365 Picture window, 16. 16:365 Icicles in the sun (3 of 4), 17. 17:365 Toes, 18. 18:365 Cornstalks in the snow, 19. 19:365 Happy Birthday, Lucas!, 20. 20:365 Friends and family at Lucas’s birthday breakfast, 21. 21:365 Winterlude on the Rideau Canal, 22. 22:365 Bored room, 23. 23:365 Melty, 24. 24:365 Vote for me!! Vote for me!!, 25. 25:365 Mooning the Peace Tower, 26. 26:365 Snack time!, 27. 27:365 Winter day at the park, 28. 28:365 Pest, 29. 29:365 Parliament in pink, 30. 30:365 Vote for our Mom!, 31. 31:365 President Obama’s afternoon motorcade, 32. 32:365 Me in the fancy elevator, 33. 33:365 Long exposure skating lessons, 34. 34:365 Poladroid Lucas, 35. 35:365 The artist at work, 36. 36:365 Mardi bokeh and the thief

There are two pictures of which I’m particularly fond this week. First, there’s this one of Tristan drawing, which he does with at least half of his free time each day. Lookit that free-hand star he just drew — I couldn’t do that with a template to follow! (He’s drawing Cosmo and Wanda from “Fairly Odd Parents.)

And I love this one, too. For a change, rather than simply finding inspiration in whatever was around me, I had taken the time to set up a light source and a background, and was playing with depth-of-field and focus to get some “bokeh” from these Mardi Gras beads… when suddenly the beads started disappearing! Sheesh, a girl can’t even take a picture without some random baby coming by to pilfer her subject. I couldn’t resist the two-fer composite shot:

36 down, 329 to go… are y’all sick of Project 365 yet?