Project 365

My friend Heather thinks I owe you a retraction. Remember this post, where I congratulated myself for my level-headedness and maturity in managing to pull myself out of a frenzy of consumeristic covetousness and NOT impulse-buy a new iPhone 4S? She thinks I owe you a retraction because I went out and actually did buy the new iPhone four days later. I think I deserve a medal for waiting for four whole days. And pro haggler that I am, I managed to wrangle a deal on my data plan so that I’m actually paying less per month for wireless than I was for our ancient non-data-plan Krazr, so we’ll save the price of the new iPhone in about a year and a half. Yay!

And oh my sweet lord, what a treat is the new iPhone 4S! I have only barely begun to figure out the voice-activated Siri stuff, but the camera? Wow! Well here, don’t let me tell you — let me show you!

“Hey, look Willie! Mom got a new iPhone!”

I went out for a drive on Sunday to take some pictures and started playing with Hipstamatic, an app I’ve had on my iPhone for more than a year but never warmed to. I’m kinda digging it now! (Do you like the digital sticky tape holding the collage together? I added that in Photoshop.)

This was the view from my office window when the sun hit an icy tree on Sussex Drive, also via Hipstamatic.

And this one is straight-up out of the iPhone, no app required. (I have been coveting a wide-angle lens for my Nikon so I can do this kind of big-nose distortion, but the iPhone’s angle of view is just wide enough to satisfy my creative urge for now!)

And speaking of the Nikon, I didn’t abandon it entirely this week. I’m glad I had it with me on Monday when this spectacular sunrise lit up the sky over the Byward Market. No colour enhancement on this one, I just pointed my camera and clicked.

You might have seen this one in my post yesterday. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but only recently had enough skill to be able to make it come out like I planned in my head. The text is actually added after the fact in Photoshop, which means I can put up just about any message I want. I’m thinking it might make a fun new blog header one of these days.

As I said on Flickr, stand by for the “I am so much more than just a mom with a camera” version. Speaking of which, I’ve made a few allusions recently to Internet drama. I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. I got tangled up in a war of words on a Flickr forum recently with Ottawa photographer Paul Couvrette, who called me a “mamarazzi” and criticized me for (among other things) undercharging for prints and making my pictures available online. While the criticism stung at the time, especially since it was more or less unprovoked and definitely overly vicious and personal, the apology he later posted was laugh-out-loud funny. I had no idea at the time, but apparently he had “personified [Dani] as an icon of the ill direction towards which I believe photography may well be headed.” Nice, eh? I’ve never been called an icon of anything, let alone the downfall of an entire industry. And I thought I was just taking pictures because it made me happy. So if I hike my prices next year, you can blame Paul Couvrette.

Mostly, though? I still just love taking pictures.

And hey, this made me feel a lot better. I got my Getty Images sales statement at the end of the week, and this picture from October apparently ran in the Wall Street Journal during December.

And this picture of Willie was bought by a company that makes greeting cards and calendars with titles like “Napping Cats of 2012.”

Hmmm, can you guess which one I’ll be adding to my “as seen in” portfolio? I mean, the WSJ is great, but the Napping Cats of 2012 calendar? Does it get more prestigious than that?!

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After a notable absence, winter has arrived with a vengeance in Ottawa recently. I can’t wait to get out and start taking pictures of the great snow dump we got yesterday — but I might wait until the temperatures warm up a bit beyond the current minus 30 with the wind chill. Brrrr!

But heck, winter lasts a long time here in the world’s snowiest capital city, so you kind of have to suck it up and get outside and enjoy it. Like this!

And then you have to stand by patiently and look cute while your mom takes your picture. Again.

Or maybe you ham it up a bit and hope she’ll go away and let you get back to playing in the snow.

And then you can go back to this.

Speaking of getting out in the winter, can you believe I’ve never walked the full loop from the Interprovincial Bridge to the Portage Bridge and back? It’s a gorgeous five kilometre loop and takes just a little bit less than an hour to walk, even if you stop every now and then to take a picture or five. I’ve vowed to try to do it once a week, weather be damned, until my jeans are feeling a little less snug.

(I’ve also discovered the Pano app for my iPhone. How have I missed this before now? This one was taken on the Portage Bridge, facing Parliament Hill.)

More Peace Tower shots. I can’t help myself!

From icy and blue to warm and soft — you might remember this shot from earlier in the week. Tristan spontaneously asked if he could read Lucas a bedtime story, and then proceeded to read to him for half an hour. This one is a keeper.

Heh. The boys pointed out that not only do my multicoloured toes match my jammies, but they both match my coffee cup.

Photo tip: to catch the cat staring directly into your lens, compose your photo and then scritch your fingernail against the side of your lens. Snap! (There’s nothing I can suggest to erase the vague look of disdain, though!)

(If you read an earlier version of this post, there was some misinformation from a hacked account in here. Carry on, folks, nothing to see here.)

I’ll let ee cummings have the last word on this one.

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I‘m still on the fence as to whether this is another 365 project, but I did take a picture (or five) each day this week. How can I stop taking pictures when there’s cuteness like this is my life?

Isn’t he so lovely? Oh my, but that boy will break hearts some day.

This last week was mostly about family, even though I did have to eventually drag my sorry self in to work at the very end of the week. I love the expressions on their faces in this one, ranging from indulgence to barely repressed impatience to impish mischieviousness. They’re so patient with me, my menfolk are.

I pulled over on the way home from work when I saw this murder of crows infesting a big tree off Limebank Road. I converted it to B&W, but it was such a flat grey day that it was almost there already.

The idea for this one arrived fully formed in my head one night and I’m pleased that it’s almost exactly as I’d envisioned it. (I can never seem to remember to wear makeup, and I don’t bother to shave half the time in winter, but I do have a soft spot for a multi-coloured pedicure.)(But, I should focus on either the polish or the camera, because while the picture is fun the pedicure is a mess with polish all over the place!)

This one started out as a completely different picture, which failed miserably in the execution, but did inspire me to put this together. I like it very much! The camera is a Polariod EE100, built in the late 1970s and rescued for $5 from a junk shop by me. The the scratchy look comes from a texture I found on Flickr. Apparently it (the camera, not the texture) will take Fuji pack instant film — I may have to try it out one day!

Early in the week we had a visit from the boys’ grandparents, Mimi and Pipi. I was taking out the garbage when I noticed Beloved’s dad out there in the snow without gloves, building a snowman to entertain the kids. Have I mentioned how much I love my family?

Grandparents cause the most delightful sorts of disruptions, don’t they?

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I‘m still on the fence as to whether I will be doing an official 365 (erm, 366) project in 2012, but I still seem to be taking a picture each day, and I do enjoy writing these posts, so let’s keep on keeping on for now. I posted a boatload of pictures over the last week, partly because I have had time to go through my archives and find some new favourites and partly because I have not really put down my camera at all this week. And really, how could I resist this ridiculously photogenic time of year?

This is what our Christmas looked like:

One of my favourite gifts this Christmas was a creative aperture kit for my Lensbaby. I’ve done shaped bokeh before, but this makes it very easy by providing a bunch of different cutouts you just pop into the Lensbaby, so any out-of-focus areas (known as bokeh) take on the shape of the aperture. Here’s the effect the heart-shaped one had on the tree lights:

And here’s the star-shaped one with the neighbour’s Christmas lights. (There is a part of me that worries about being known as “That weird woman with the camera” in my neighbourhood.)

It can be more subtle when the lights are not as bright or contrasty. You can see the faint stars in the right fence post on this one, too:

Here’s what it looks like on the camera:

Not for every day, but a lot of fun when used sparingly. And speaking of bokeh, here it is without the shaped aperture. The glass ball is part of a decoration my mom bought for me ages ago — in fact, it was in my first 365 picture back in 2009. I keep meaning to play with it more:

On a side note, if you’re killing time and looking for something cool to watch, check out this amazing time-lapse video that combines shaped bokeh, a glass globe just like this one and Los Angeles. I found it after I’d taken all these pictures and laughed at how they all came together in this video — I’ve watched it a couple of times and really love it!

Snow Globe Los Angeles from All Cut Up Films on Vimeo.

I’ve been noticing these lights on a fence in Manotick since the beginning of the season, and that gorgeous snowfall on Christmas day made for the perfect conditions to finally capture them. I love this picture!

And no week in pictures would be complete without at least one portrait, right? Here’s Lucas, hard at work. He’s spent most of the week at the table doing exactly this: cutting, colouring, gluing and drawing.

I’m not quite sure yet if this is another 365 project or not, but one thing is clear — I’ve no plans to stop taking pictures any time soon! This post is getting a little long, but I thought I’d cram in this last one while it’s still fresh:

Happy 2012 from us to you!

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Yay, I did it! Another 365 project under my belt. Because I finished on Christmas Eve, there wasn’t a lot of time to post a long-winded look back at the year in pictures, but you must have known it was coming!

Here’s all 365 of them, in the order they were posted:

(Lots of greens and golds and deeply saturated colours, eh?)

As I’ve mentioned in a few recent posts, I was playing pretty fast and loose with the rules on this version of Project 365. While I was pretty rigid about following them for the first 365 project, I think it was more important to me this time around to be stretching my limits rather than following rules. It seemed more valuable to me to be thinking about photography in some way every day, whether it be learning a new photoshop technique or studying the work of someone I admire or reading a book on photography, than actually taking a photo every 24 hours.

The first 365 project back in 2009 certainly rekindled my love for photography, but I think it’s safe to say that this has been the year when photography became not just a passion but a lucrative endeavour. Here are some of the wonderful things that have happened during the course of this 365 project:

• I acquired my darling D7000, a Lensbaby Composer and a 50mm f1.4 lens. (It’s not *all* about the gear, but good kit certainly helps!)
• I launched Mothership Photography and established my signature porch portraits. Since the first mini-session in July I did five porch mini-sessions, seven family portrait sessions and a wedding. (And it occurs to me that I haven’t blogged about half of them. Good fodder for the long cold winter, yes?) Considering I was aiming for a session a month, I more than doubled my projection for the first year and had to turn people down in October and November because I simply didn’t have any room in my calendar. (It seems like a hundred years ago I put up the website and some posters around Manotick and feared that I’d never get a single client — and that was only March of this year!)
• I had my first print credit, a collage of Manotick pictures used in an ad by our city councillor in the Manotick Messenger.
• I was invited to be a contributor to Getty Images and had my first sales.
• I sold my first photo to a print publication, pending in the January issue of Ottawa Magazine.

To look back to the launch of the first 365 project in early 2009 gives me a sense of vertigo — wow! We sure have come a long way, haven’t we? I learned so much this year I don’t even know where to start: portraiture techniques, post-processing in Lightroom and Photoshop, posing and lighting, to name a few. As a matter of fact, learning to use my flash properly is one of my big projects for the next year.

Here’s a few more favourites from the last year:

Thank you all for your ongoing support. Sharing what I’ve learned, what I’m trying and the pictures themselves with you makes this whole experience even more delightful for me. You inspire me to keep going, try harder and do better — thank you for that!

I can hardly wait to see what the next year brings!

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