Category: Photo of the Day

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?

Sheesh, as if two birthdays in one week weren’t enough excitement, there’s more! First of all, today is my first day back at work after my year of maternity leave. More on that some other time, because there’s still more!

Can you believe that four years ago today, I wrote my very first blog post? Yowza! And here we are, more than 1,300 posts and 18,000 (!!!!) comments later, still going on about not much in particular and everything in general.

As if all that weren’t enough, I’m taking the occasion of my blogiversary to tell you about a secret project I’ve been working on for the last little while. Back in November, I was listening to archived podcasts of the CBC radio program Spark. In one particular podcast, they were talking about a guy who took a Polariod a day every day for years; from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. Listening to it tweaked memories of having seen something similar on the web, and when I went looking I found a couple of sites talking about Project 365, the idea of taking one photo per day for an entire year and posting it to the web.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to try it. I mean, you know, I don’t have anything else on my plate right now, right? *grin* And hey, I’ve made it all the way through 11 of 365 days already; how much harder could it get?

My own rules of the project are fairly simple. A photo must be taken every day, but I can slip a little bit on the posting of them. I really want to expand my subject repertoire beyond the boys, and to learn to look at things and ‘see’ them in a new way. And I want to include at least one self-portrait every month or so.

I’ve been toying with ways to show you my pictures. I was thinking of a separate gallery on the blog, or even a separate photo blog. Rather than make extra work for myself, though, I think I’ll just keep uploading them to Flickr. You can see the most recent pix under “Project 365” over there in the sidebar, and I’ll make a post of my favourites each week. And you can see the full set on Flickr, including the captions, explanations and other random thoughts that accompany each photo.

Here are my favourites so far:

(Click on any of the thumbnails to see them full size on Flickr.)

And this is one of my new all-time fave photos. I love the reflection of both Lucas and I in the collander!

Funny, but I am already seeing how this project is getting into my brain. Just like I used to often see the world around me in terms of blog fodder, now everywhere I look I feel like I’m looking through the lens and scanning for photo opportunities!