Category: Photo of the Day

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!

My favourite group on Flickr (365 Community) has a rotating optional theme. This week, I happened to have been tagged to choose the theme. With no hidden agenda whatsover in thinking about our trip to Niagara Falls, I chose the theme “water play”. I managed a few variations on the theme this week!

Before we even left for Niagara Falls, we spent a sunny Sunday morning at the local splash pad. Lucas absolutely loved it!

You’ve seen some of these already in my Niagara Falls recap post, but what the heck. This is Tristan admiring the view when we first arrived in Niagara Falls.

And this is my ultimate Canada Day shot, from the Maid of the Mist. (From a technical perspective, Beloved pointed out that the bit of deck rail in the lower left, the bit of darkness in the upper left and the dark side of the gorge on the right form a nice compositional triangle around the central subjects in the image. Oh, the things you learn from an artist!)

The other theme of the week was road-tripping. I like how crisp Lucas is in comparison to the motion blur outside the window behind him. (Not to mention the inherent cute factor of him playing with his dollar-store drawing thingee. He loves those things!)

This one was on the trip home. I had my 50mm fixed lens on, and had to lean way forward in my seat to properly frame Tristan in this one. (He’s drawing a Pokémon card, and his hair is still wet from the water park at Great Wolf Lodge.)

Seems like I took these last pictures about a hundred years ago! This was taken on my last day before vacation. It’s the US Embassy in Ottawa, and I was trying to contrast the bright mirrored modernity of it with the beauty of the old “tax castle” beside it. I used B&W for this one to try to convey the starkness and unwelcomingness of this building and I liked how the lines on the Embassy pointed to the tax castle, too. It’s an okay image, but I’m still not sure I’m fond of it — it wouldn’t turn out like I was picturing it no matter what I did to it!

Finally, when all else fails, you can find a pretty flower to photograph. I planted this clematis three or four years ago and it promptly withered and died. To my surprise, it came up this summer absolutely covered in buds — I actually thought it was a weed at first. He’s the Little Clematis That Could!

Edited to add: I almost forgot! This week was the end of the month, so I’ve got my monthy mosaic done for June. There were some colourful shots this month!!

I think I might have taken nearly a thousand pictures this week. There have been days during my 365 project that I didn’t even feel like picking up the camera — this week did not contain any of those days! Everywhere I turned there was beautiful warm light, cute kids and interesting photo opportunities. Every week should be this easy!

For instance, last Friday we had our annual staff picnic, but instead of the traditional picnic we went on a boat cruise on the Ottawa River. I *could* post the pictures I took of my colleagues doing a mid-afternoon conga line (!) but instead, I’ll share this relatively unique perspective of the Chateau Laurier and the Rideau Canal locks (the bit that looks like giant concrete steps) where they dump into the Ottawa River. Doesn’t it look like something out of a fairy tale?

The Chateau Laurier pictures was actually my alternate shot of the day. This dock lead down to the Gatineau River, near where the cruise was docked, and I liked the contrasting purple and yellow (complimentary colours really make a photo pop) and the shapes in the shadows.

Does anything say summertime better than after-dinner popsicles on the porch swing? (Yep, we collected an extra for this picture. She matches my set nicely, don’t you think? Sadly, her folks won’t let me keep her. I think that if I could guarantee she’d turn out just like this, I could easily convince Beloved to have a fourth child!)

I spent more than half an hour on Sunday morning, watching the gorgeous warm light bathe Lucas as he played contentedly with these Bob the Builder toys. I took at least 60 shots, trying to capture the quiet peacefulness of the moment, and ended up having a hard time choosing just a couple of favourites.

I liked this one because of the way Lucas’s profile is in shadow but bright yellow Scoop is fully lit, and the way you can see Lucas’s profile so cleanly against the wall behind him.

I liked these two because the little hands could have belonged to any of my three boys. I love to see those chubby fingers at play!

In the end, I liked this one the best, I think because you can see the whole of Scoop and because I moved a bit to eliminate the distraction of the door frame that’s in the picture above.

For the next image, it’s the story as much as the photo that makes it the picture of the day for me.

It was hot and sunny, just the kind of day I like best, but I was overheated and cranky and really not feeling well as I finished a long 10 or 15 block loop on my lunch hour. I’d snapped a few pictures, but nothing was really capturing my eye and I wasn’t even enjoying the walk much. I went to turn down a street that would lead directly back to my office, one I’d trod a hundred times before, when I realized if I stayed on straight I’d walk down a block I’d never been down before.

Shortcut or new ground? I debated for a minute, thinking it unlikely I’d see anything worth photographing on such an uninteresting stretch, then decided to walk the new stretch anyway.

Half way down, I came across this young lady sitting at a table selling lemonade and busking with her ukulele, raising funds for a trip to Scotland. I was completely and utterly charmed by the combination lemonade stand-ukulele show. The picture is not terrific — the money jar blocks the head of the uke — but I was a little distracted by chatting with her as I composed the shot. She was so sweet and the idea so charming that I couldn’t *not* have this as my picture of the day! (I passed on the lemonade, but I did give her a few bucks toward her trip.) It’s also #3 in my 100strangers.com project.

On Tuesday, I had a lunch date with the inimitable Andrea, and rather than sit on a patio to enjoy the sunshine and a cold beverage, we ate a quick Budawich on a park bench and wandered the Market with our cameras on a little photo safari. It was so nice to have some company on one of my lunch-time wanders! I didn’t get many pictures in, but great conversation with a good friend is a balm for the soul, isn’t it? I did find these fuscia blooms dangling out of a basket to be particularly photographable, though.

I’ve learned that flowers are an excellent choice for an easy photo. They stand still, they’re bright and colourful, and I just can’t resist them! I particularly liked these daisies. I have a soft spot for daisies – I wore them in my hair when Beloved and I got married, and they featured predominately in the wildflower bouquet that I carried and the centrepieces on the picnic tables at our reception.

The problem with never relinquishing the camera is that you end up with photographs of everybody and everything *except* you. When I started my 365 project, one of my self-imposed rules was a self-portrait every month. I don’t think I’ve managed more than a few so far, but yesterday I caught sight of myself in this reflective window in the Market and thought the bright busyness behind me would make a neat selfie.

These are my favourite photos of the week. We had an old fashioned ice cream truck rumbling around the neighbourhood this week, complete with tinkling music and soft-serve ice cream cones. I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid in the 1970s. (I remember the one that used to come through our neighbourhood would moo like a cow, and our dog would tremble and hide under the furniture every time it went by!)

I love this picture because of Beloved’s smile (and the way that Lucas looks like he’s going to eat the cone in one giant bite!) but I’m not overly fond of the highlights on Lucas’s face. The contrast is too strong, I think.

I love this one the best. I coloured it with a light sepia because I think it’s such a classic photo. (My favourite bit is how Lucas is holding onto Beloved’s fingers!)

I do love them so – and I think this photo captures that. I think of the many ways that Project 365 has inspired me and improved my mad photographic skillz, this is the one I most appreciate: that I can capture not just an image, but the mood or moment in its entirety that caused me to pick up the camera in the first place. Well, at least some of the time!

Holy crap, I’ve been doing this picture-a-day thing every. single. day for 150 days and I haven’t missed one yet. Who’d’ve guessed it?

The nice thing about Project 365 in the summer time is that just about anywhere you point your camera there are lovely colours and light just begging to be photographed. Like these pansies:

Even on a rainy day, peonies are pretty:

I’m particularly pleased with the peony because it was the big fat raindrops that caught my attention in the first place, but they didn’t come through in the image straight out of the camera. But I’ve learned enough about Photoshop in the past few months to know that if I sharpened the heck out of it, those raindrops would pop out, just like they did to the naked eye.

This is how the next one came to be:

Tristan: "Hey Mom! Wanna see me jump off the top of the monkey bars?"

Me, remembering that there is a June is for Jumping group on Flickr and that I still don’t have a picture for today, "Actually, you know what? Just let me go get my camera…."

(Speaking of mad photoshopping skillz, I accidentally left the ISO way too high and overexposed the shot, but I loved the expression on Tristan’s face so much that I wanted to find a way to make the image work so I processed the heck out of it. I used one of the Pioneer Woman’s actions – I think it was ‘vintage’ – but it was too harsh, so I dialed the opacity down to 50%, and I really like how it came out.)

And this one? Well, what can I say, I just love those toes!

This is from the same afternoon. It’s not an official 365 shot, but it’s a moment worth admiring, no? I love it when I sneak up and find them being adorable.

Speaking of adorable… I like this picture for the look of intense concentration on Simon’s face, and because of the story behind what he’s doing. Simon is one of only two boys invited to a Princess party this weekend, and he’s been asked to dress as Prince Charming. (I know. Couldn’t you just die of the sweetness?) The closest we could come was a tiara and a Darth Vader cape (don’t ask me why in a house with three boys we had a tiara) and Beloved put his foot down and said no son of his was going to a party wearing a tiara. (Sheesh!) So yesterday, Beloved came home with a crown-making-kit. Simon enjoyed making his own so much that he decided to make and decorate a crown for the birthday girl as well. So sweet! Five is a lovely age.

Project 365 is about memorializing a year in pictures in addition to improving my photographic eye (and mad photoshopping skillz!) and this picture simply captures the official first day of summer: the first day it was nice enough to swim in our friends’ pool. (Friends with pool = favourite friends!) It’s called Lukey’s Boat!

Darn, I was doing so well with the segues, but I got nothing for this one. They’ve started this cool new service in Ottawa where you can rent a bike from one of four downtown locations and return your rental to any of the other stations. How awesome is that? I haven’t tried it out yet, simply because it’s either been pouring rain or I’ve forgotten to bring my helmet, but there’s a station right by my office. From a technical perspective, I like this photo because of the repeating pattern, because of the way the top and side borders have almost exactly the same amount of space, because of the way it fills the frame, and because the bit of repeating red really seems to pop against the otherwise neutral colours.

Last but not least, and also without a workable segue, this is my favourite picture of the week. I like the textures, the chipped paint and the worn wood, and how they contrast against the softness of the fingers. I think the strong diagonal lines draw your eyes right through the frame, but the little fingers stop you dead. (Edited to add: oh, and I just realized that this picture made it into Flickr’s fickle “Explore”, too. Yay!)

It’s actually the bar of an emergency exit door in a restaurant, where Lukey was wandering out his twitchies while Beloved and the big boys waited for the bill. Lesson? Always, always have your camera handy!

I’ve been swallowing photography books whole lately. Conveniently, Beloved will be teaching digital photography and already teaches Photoshop at a local college, so we have a steady stream of current textbook samples coming into the house. One of the first really great books I read was by Photoshop guru Scott Kelby. His Digital Book of Photography and Digital Book of Photography 2 are great books filled with simple instructions on how to get your camera to do what you want it to do, and gives explicit directions on how to get the shot you want in a range of photographic situations: portraits, landscape photography, sports shots, weddings, etc. Full of explicit “set your camera like this, ensure you do A, B and C, and click” type of advice.

Once I’d read every other book on digital photography techniques I could get from Beloved or the library, I moved on to some of Bryan F. Peterson’s books. I was a little surprised at how, um, outdated they were — OMG, soooo 1998 — but you know what? The techniques of photography that I’m now most concerned about are rather timeless, and it doesn’t matter if you’re shooting film or pixels. In particular, his People in Focus was great for thinking about the psychology of taking portraits, both of people you know and people you don’t. I’m still waiting for my turn in the library queue for his highly recommended Learning to See Creatively: Design, Color & Composition in Photography. I’ve also discovered and highly recommend the books of John Hedgecoe. His photography is a little, um, odd sometimes, but I’ve learned a lot about shape and texture and space from his books.

By chance, I stumbled upon a recommendation for Freeman Patterson’s books, and now I have a new photographic idol. And he’s Canadian! I’m about half way through his Photography and the Art of Seeing — an ancient mid-1970s edition from the library. It’s the first photography book I’ve read that doesn’t contain a single reference to the aperture and shutter speed used to achieve each image — instead, it’s like a workshop on how see led by your philosophical and tragically verbose favourite uncle. In googling it just now, I stumbled across his website, and am *so* ordering my own updated copy personalized and signed by the author.

As I’m reading Patterson’s book, I find myself wandering around and seeing the shapes of things — it’s very distracting! Did you know there are primary shapes just like there are primary colours? Circles, squares and triangles. And — finally, to the point — you can see the influence of my new infatuation with the shapes of things in this week’s pictures.

These eggs, for instance. See how the oval shape of the egg is repeated in each egg and in the bowl? I really liked the tones in this picture too. (Another lesson this week: if you’re shooting something with a lot of white, your camera’s light meter will be tricked into trying to underexpose the image. You have to use your exposure compensation to overexpose a bit over what the camera is trying to record.)

And these canisters, found inside Watson’s Mill in Manotick, where Lucas and I took refuge from the pouring rain when I was looking for something, anything to shoot one day while coming back from an extended nap drive. See how the circle pattern is repeated in each canister, in the way they’re grouped and in the cutting board they’re standing on?

The repetition of the shoes, and of the colours in them, and in the deck rails underneath is a little more subtle in this shot. I loved how the early-morning light fell on the shoes, left up to dry after a day of messy fun with the new sand and water table. This picture makes me very happy for some reason — it captures something about the bliss of my family life in this tiny point in time.

Speaking of the sand and water table, here’s the shot from the day before. (I know you’ve seen it already, but isn’t it precious enough to show off twice?) They played together for hours with that thing. Who knew?

This fellow was busking in the Market when I was out wandering on my lunch hour one day this week. I was fascinated by the intricate design on his accordion and by his jaunty little hat, and even the pattern on his shirt. I dropped a loonie into his case to say thanks for letting me snap a few portrait shots of him, but wasn’t brave enough to actually say anything. He did favour me with a nice smile, though!

These pretty flowers aren’t flowers at all, they’re weeds growing against a fence in a parking lot! See how the flowers are circular, and the four of them together make a semi-circle, and the bits of swirly stems in the blurred background echo that curve? That’s what I was going for, anyway!

Some things just cry out to be photographed. I was driving down Gladstone near Booth when I did a double-take while passing this house. Is this not the yellowest house you have ever seen? Luckily, I had enough time to double back and stop to take a couple of snaps of this outrageously yellow house. I have no idea why someone would do this, but I kind of like it! (We once painted our tiny Glebe attic apartment’s living room with this exact shade of yellow. We called it “homicidal yellow.”) The sign on the wall says the building is slated to be torn down, and an application has been received to build seven (!) townhouses in its place. Sigh.

From homicidal yellow to righteous red — I’m on a primary colour streak! (apparently, I’m going to have to find something in deepest blue to photograph today!) This is what fresh, local strawberries are supposed to look like, not those anemic things they truck in from California.

And, as I said above, some things just beg to be photographed. I had a chest x-ray done yesterday for the double-pneumonia that will not quit. How often do you get to take a photograph (of the photograph) of your own lungs?

And finally, an out-take from earlier in the week. I was trying to take the egg picture above, and was trying the eggs in various combinations of bowls, when Lucas crawled up onto the table to see what was so interesting. Lookit those fat crocodile tears running down his cheeks, just after I’d scolded him with a firm, “No!” I call this one “The egg thief.”

And that’s why doing a 365 project is especially challenging for a busy mother of three: you try to take a picture of eggs, and end up with a picture of eggs being taken!

We tend to leave our laptop open on top of our TV console in the evenings, and half the time I’m as drawn to the slide show of the “pictures” file as I am to whatever drivel is on TV. (Tangent: June TV? Painful suckage.)

The one really nice thing I can say about the Windows Vista operating system is that it makes a really lovely set of random slide shows. It doesn’t just display the pictures, but wraps them up in fancy transitions, adds backgrounds and frames, varies how the images are displayed, and even displays them occasionally in black and white. Looking at some of my favourite images in black and white, together with a couple of books I’ve read on getting more out of black and white digital photography, encouraged me to try some monochromatic images this week. It was supposed to be a week-long theme, in fact, but my attention span is simply not that long.

Last Friday was rainy and dreary (again) and I went out into the drizzle at lunch time trying to see how the rain changed the “look” of things I look at every day. I ended up wandering down to the Notre Dame Cathedral and took a couple of pictures inside that I didn’t end up liking very much. But when I came out of the cathedral and noticed how the Parliament Buildings lined up under Maman’s legs, I knew it would make a neat composition. Unfortunately, despite my best stink-eye I couldn’t get the gaggle of school-group tourists to move out of my frame, so I had to cut Maman off at the knees. (Maman is one of my favourite Ottawa attractions, a 30 foot tall bronze spider who lives in the courtyard of the National Gallery.)

I liked this picture of Tristan blowing bubbles (I never would have guessed that my ‘big boys’ at five and seven would still love bubbles as much as they do!) but I didn’t like the big planter in the corner of the image. When I ran one of the Pioneer Woman actions that turned the photo into sepia tones, though, it really seemed to minimize the mostly brown planter into the brown fence behind it, while giving the image a nice classic and timeless look that I thought complimented the subject.

I blogged about this image the other day, but I love it so much I thought I’d include it again. This is the fourth of my images that have made it into Flickr’s Explore.

On the days I drive downtown, I drive right past this dairy farm. I’ve actually taken dozens of pictures of it — I’m fascinated by it. I love the fact that we get to drive past cows and horses whenever we go from the city to our house! I’d love to live on a farm some day, if it weren’t so much work!

There are lots of ways to play with an ordinary photo to make it more interesting. I’m learning to embrace them! False tilt-shifting is a way of processing the image so it looks like a miniature or toy-model version. It didn’t quite work out on this image of the Alexandria Bridge and the Museum of Civilization as well as I’d seen on some other images, but it still perks up a rather ordinary photo. To get the effect, I just ran the photo through on this website. To get the full effect, click through and view it large and up-close!

And when one picture of pretty flowers is just okay, a mosaic of them is somehow more than the sum of the parts. These are all from my garden, and some of them may be weeds, but at least they’re pretty weeds. The one in the top left corner is a bleeding heart, and the white ones are on a shrubbery near my front door. The others are just purty.

Last but far from least: Lukey in black and white. If you’re looking for some really great light for baby portraits, consider shooting in the car seat! Your subject is immobilized, the light is bright but diffuse, and you have baby’s undivided attention. In this case, you can plainly see Baby is far from impressed in having my 50mm lens half a foot from his nose. Again. But the b&w really favours that creamy smoothness of his skin — don’t you just want to touch it? And I should have stopped down my aperture just a bit because my plane of focus was so small (I’d been shooting flowers up close) that while his left eye is perfectly in focus, his right eye is blurry. A smaller aperture would have given me a larger area in focus. Oh well!

And if you look closely, you can even see me reflected in his eyes!

Before I had all of your most excellent suggestions on how to carry on finding interesting pictures every(!) single(!) day(!) I was relying on some of the Flickr groups I’ve joined for inspiration. One of them is the monthly scavenger hunt, where they give you 20 clues or categories and you have the month to find suitable pictures. You can take a new picture for every category or, if you’re a little bit lazy like me, mine your archives for padding in a few choice places. I played last month, too, but only got 16 out of the 20 categories done before I ran out of month. But last night I took the final picture to round out my first complete monthly scavenger hunt!

(You’ve seen most of these already, I know, but the only ‘prize’ I get is the satisfaction of gloating that I finished, so I’m milking it for all it’s worth! If you click the mosaic, the image on Flickr has a list of the categories and a clickable link to the images everyone else used for that category, too — if you’re curious! And Roz, I had to laugh — I had the picture of the wrought-iron fence around Parliament Hill in the camera already when you made your suggestion. Great minds!)

This one from last Friday was for the scavenger hunt clue “one in a million.” Tristan won one of those “guess the number of jellybeans” contests at our local comic book store at a Webkinz Extravaganza day, winning not only the jar full of jellybeans but a Webkinz gift pack as well. I figured the image worked well on a couple of ways for the theme, both in the sheer number of jelly beans (anyone want to hazzard a guess?) and in the odds of Tristan winning. The colour balance on the picture is off, but I think that’s largely because I have to calibrate our monitor.

You saw most of my pictures from the Gloucester Fair already, but I like this one so much that I’ll include it here again!

(Funny how I took two dozen photos at the fair and had a hard time choosing just a few because I liked them all so much, and other days this week I took a hundred or more pictures in a day only to have not a single one worthy of the project. Dammit, I have to choose a less fickle hobby one of these days!)

I called this one, “Yeah mommy, as a matter of fact I AM about to eat this rock” but Beloved things I should have called it “My kung fu is better than your kung fu!” I like it because you can see the devil in his eyes. This child will be the one that snaps my will like a twig.

I’ve been reading Byran Peterson’s book People in Focus, which talks a lot about the psychology of approaching and interacting with strangers for photography. Feeling emboldened, I approached this lovely woman this morning at about 7:15 as she was readying her ByWard Market stand for the day and asked her if I could take her picture.

“Oh, just a minute,” she said as she hustled behind the stall, “and I’ll get some more water in my watering can.” Isn’t she lovely? She made my morning. The only problem is that I was so flustered by the time it came to actually taking the photo, I didn’t catch the shade/sun line running right through the middle of the picture and the background was so ugly I had to fudge the depth of field in Photoshop to blur it out a bit. Oh well, at least she was sweet about it, and I do love the result.

This is one of those times that a lovely new flower in the garden saved my project at the end of a long day. After more than 100 photos that I didn’t like, I snapped one of this new iris that had just bloomed in my front yard and called it “good enough.” You can totally see why Georgia O’Keefe eroticized flowers in this, though, can’t you?

I finally caved and bought myself an infrared remote for my D40, because I had been thinking about taking this image for so long and couldn’t think of a better way to do it. It won’t be long before these moments are gone and I wanted to capture the peaceful serenity of rocking Lucas to sleep at nap time.

I think I actually like this one better, though! The shot above is closer to what I’d originally planned for the shot, but this test shot I did to check the focus and the composition caught an unexpectedly sweet moment of its own.

The other mothers standing at the fence waiting for the bell to ring were giving me odd looks as I stood taking pictures of the umbrella being spun on my fingertips, letting the rain spatter on my bare head, but I was intrigued by the play of colour in this. Not the greatest shot in the world, but some days just cry for “good enough.”

I really wish I could find some sort of coherent narrative or even common thread in these pictures or what I’m drawn to, but I can’t. I have a magpie’s eye for bright and shiny things, and that’s about the only consistency I can see. But this week’s images to tell the story of this place in my life reasonably well, for whatever that’s worth.