Category: Photo of the Day

This has been a week bookended by birthdays and full of brrrr. Oh my good god, is winter not over YET?

Saturday was warm and cozy inside the house as Simon celebrated his 9th birthday party with a few good friends.

These horses were from Manotick’s shiverfest a few weeks back but I didn’t get around to posting them at the time. I love the frost on their faces, poor things!

As I mentioned earlier in the week, I’ve been playing with ideas for new blog banners on and off for quite a while now. This was a failed attempt:

But then I finally stumbled in to what I really wanted. Once I had the idea down, it didn’t take me long to put these together:

Did I mention it was cold this week? This month? Seriously, has this not been a particularly cold, snowy winter? Poor Lucas fell asleep in the car with his hands shoved deep into his pockets for warmth.

I got so sick of the cold that with 15 cm of snow in the forecast I went hunting through my archives looking for signs of spring and warmth. A little over the top, maybe, but that’s how I’m feeling about warm spring sunshine right about now!

And then, Lucas turned FIVE!

The nice thing about birthday season is that once it’s done in mid-March, spring really is just around the corner. We’re getting there!

When I finished my first 365 project three years ago (almost to the day), I felt like there should be a ticker-tape parade in my honour. Heck, it was a big enough deal that CBC’s All in a Day invited me in to the studio to talk about it. (Heh, I still like to joke that my photography is perfect for radio.) When I finished the second one in 2011, it was Christmas Eve and the big finalé sort of got lost in the holiday shuffle.

And here we are again, with another year of pictures taken. I didn’t feel the need to celebrate, but it is a nice time to look back and see the fun things photography has brought into my life this year. I’ve had photos appear in magazines like Macleans, Good Housekeeping, Ottawa and Ottawa Family Living, in newspapers here and abroad and on lots of websites (some of which actually even paid for them – but most of which, sigh, just took them and used them without permission.) I worked with so many delightful families on portrait sessions that I wouldn’t even know where to start calling them out, but I loved working with each and every one of them and am grateful to them for trusting me for their portraits. For a while in the summer I was booked so solidly that I actually had to turn people away – something I never would have imagined. While in 2011 the photography business was mostly a summer venture, in 2012 it became a full-year-round venture from the Old Navy Family Day event in February (they just asked me to come back again this year!) to family portrait sessions in December.

What a year it has been! And, before this gets too long, let me just slip in a quick thank you for your business, your friendship, your encouragement and your support. Being able to share the joys here with you make them all that much sweeter.

So here’s the last week of my latest year in photos. It has been an incredibly busy week, and my Nikon has not once come out of its case – another milestone! Every photo this week is an iPhone photo taken during a moment stolen from some other task, further proof that the best camera is the one you have in your hand.

This was Saturday during the January thaw, where I spent a large part of my day chipping a 2″ deep layer of ice off the driveway. Such a Canadian way to pass an afternoon, yes?

On Sunday, the warm temperatures brought this crazy ice fog that lasted all day. It was a perfect day to huddle in a movie theatre, so the big boys and I went to see The Hobbit. Amazing movie!

Apparently this week’s theme is ice. I found this on my way to work on Monday and had first walked past it and then paused as my brain processed it and I walked back a few steps to get the photo. Caution indeed, this must have hurt when it landed!

I wish you could see the horses more clearly in this photo. They’re gorgeous Clydesdales, on a farm a little south of Manotick.

I’d gone down to the CanvasPop factory down on Hamilton Ave to pick up a canvas print (details to follow!) and saw this across the street. I love the warm honeyed wood against the deep blue, and the beer-making supplies are not exactly what you see on the sidewalk every day. This is the Beyond the Pale Brewing Company.

The final shot of my first 365 was something I planned for months. This week, when I knew I was on the last day, I tried to put a little more thought than usual into my photo (instead of my usual “hey, squirrel!”) and had a vague idea that I’d like to take a photo of me with the three boys. Unfortunately I didn’t check their social calendar and they were (gasp!) not available. So you’re stuck with a photo of me, just like in the last shot of the first 365, but with considerably less planning and duct tape. Just me, hiding in the light, which would make an excellent title to my memoirs someday, don’t you think?

And then it was another day, and I still felt like taking pictures. Conveniently, it was the first day of seasonal skating on the Rideau Canal, and I liked the idea of beginning with a beginning.

Here we go again! 🙂

So help me with this. On Flickr, I have called my photo-a-day sets “Project 365” and “Project 365: The Sequel” and this latest set “Not another 365.” I thought that was clever (I slay me!) because you can read it as a lament (“oh no, not another 365!”) or a coy denial, or a justification for my looser interpretation of the traditional rules of a 365. I’m not having any creative inspiration this time around, and have temporarily labelled it “Not another 365: 2013 edition.” Lame, eh? But I do like having the yearly sorts, and feel the need to come up with a decent title for the set.

Inspire me, bloggy peeps. What should I call this iteration of the seemingly perpetual photo-a-day project?

Oops, I’m late posting this! What a week it’s been!! (A post for another day…)

Ahem, anyway…. I haven’t been carrying my Nikon around with me this week. I’ve mostly been using my iPhone for pictures. After the Instagram debacle, I considered deleting my account, but decided instead to keep it and simply delete any photos that are important to me after sharing them. I’ve also been using the Flickr mobile app a lot more – it’s vastly improved over the previous version, although I find the editing and filters still a little clunky compared to most iPhone editing apps I use.

One of my friends on Flickr called this a vignette and I thought that was a perfect description for most of the photos I took this week: vignettes of winter.

I was actually taking a different picture when I noticed how the shadow of the barbed wire fence played on the snow. Lucky find!

Yanno, I may have taken dozens of photos of Watson’s Mill – but I don’t think I’ve taken one with my iPhone yet. Done!

Looking for something a little more urban? I like how you can see the Peace Tower and Parliament Buildings reflected in Ottawa’s giant mirror ball (the downtown Convention Centre):

When you run out of snowy vignettes, there’s always the old low-hanging-fruit for a photo of the day: cat photo!

And finally, the only photo I took with my Nikon this week. Usually it’s Willie tolerating Lucas’s affection, but in this case Lucas was at the end of his patience and begged me to take the cat out of the bathroom so he could have his bath in peace.

And hey, how cool is this? You know I’ve long been a fan of the Ninjamatics Canadian Weblog Awards because they’re one of the few contests out there that are 100% juried. That means that making it through the first round of screening to be on the short list is based on merit (however subjective that merit might be) instead of popularity or figuring out a way to game the system. That’s why I’m especially proud that this blog has been named a finalist in the Art and Photography category.

Thank you for the nomination, and thank you for letting me talk endlessly here about the things I love so much! There’s some bloggy gold over on the Canadian Weblog Awards list of finalists – you should check them out!

We’ve received so much snow in the past couple of weeks that it’s hard to believe we had none on the ground in mid-December. We’ve had a lot of fun getting out and playing in it this week!

A few of you have been by to see how well the front yard works as a photo studio in the summer, but did you know during the winter months it moonlights as a toboggan hill? (I love my semi-rural life only a wee bit more than I love my w-i-d-e angle lens that stretches and distorts things, making close seem closer and far seem further.)

I drive by these snowy trees almost every day and I finally stopped one day to try to capture the interesting contrast of white snow on dark branches that kept catching my eye. Apparently I did not learn my lesson last week, but was at least smart lucky enough to not get stuck this time.

We also had a lot of fun outside building snowmen during our winter break. I picked up a snowman “kit” on sale at the grocery store and I gotta tell you, it’s paid for itself in fun already. I shared one photo in my how to add snow in Photoshop post, but here’s the full series:

(I love how the snowman has a smile that seems to turn into a frown in the one where Lucas is staring him down! And you’ll see the perils of adding snow to your photos in post production – you kind of have to be willing to commit for the full series!)

And, while we were on our snowman kick, we made a mini-one too! He has peppercorns for eyes, mouth and buttons, in case you were wondering. 🙂

After all that snowman building, this is kind of how I felt: “Ever have one of those days when you’re just riding on fumes?”

Last but certainly not least, this week of course included new year’s day. I took a shot last year that we decided to carry on as an annual tradition. Here’s the 2012 shot:

And here’s the 2013 shot.

Lots of changes in just one year, eh?

Happy new year to all of you, and may 2013 be a joyful year full of beauty and fun for everyone!

This was an amazing year for me from a photographic perspective. Getty Images continued to be a lot of fun, not to mention a lucrative little endeavour, and I have approximately 450 images for license now. (!) The portrait business was hopping from early spring until early winter with photo shoots every weekend all summer long. It was absolutely delightful to meet so many lovely families and have the chance to take their portraits. And in fact, I still have so many to share! Before I get to that, though, here’s my favourite photos from this week, over Christmas and the last full week of 2012.

Even though it’s not a Christmas shot, this may be one of my favourites of the week, and I had to move fast with my iPhone to catch it. Rememer when you used to read comic books in your secret blanket fort? Times sure have changed!

A lot of the week looked like this:

And this:

And this:

I love the expression on Lucas’s face but OMG don’t they all look terribly grown up all of a sudden? Heh, not to grown up to get a gift from Santa at my work Christmas party, tho!!

I barely took any pictures on Christmas Eve, when we traditionally open most of our gifts. It was a huge relief! I never like how they come out, and with a full house I had lots of other things to do. I did get these shots from Christmas Eve into Christmas Day, though, and we had a lovely time with my face NOT plastered to the viewfinder *coughforachangecough*

And this is the happy aftermath of Christmas. These are the moments I want to remember – mussy-haired laughing boys first thing in the morning, jumbled together on the bed assembling new Lego sets received for Christmas.

These two weren’t official photos of the day, but they were significant enough parts of the week that they bear inclusion here. First, a re-cap of my rescue by Santa Claus on Christmas Day (did you see the new PS with the improved photo of my hero? Apparently I’m the only person in Manotick who had never met Andy!!)

And then it snowed – and snowed – and snowed! It took double the usual commute, but I did make it in to work on Thursday. This is what it looked like when I went out in search of coffee midmorning:

You might have noticed I’m test-driving a new watermark. I love the Mothership Photography logo with the shooting star, but it is occasionally hard to read and a few have commented that the busyness of it takes away from the photographs themselves. I also wanted a watermark that I could more easily replicate on my mobile pictures and one that asserts my copyright a little more strongly. Finally, the bit of free advertising for the web site doesn’t hurt! My only concern is that Flickr is not fond of you advertising your own website in your descriptions, although I have done it occasionally without repercussions. And I’m not entirely sure you can attribute copyright to a URL instead of a person.

Anyway, I do like the cleaner look. What do you think?

It’s been a while since I posted the weekly picture round-up. I’ve been taking a photo most days, but especially through November there were a handful of days I skipped. I missed it, though, and though I should have finished my third 365 project tomorrow, I’m running about a week and a half behind. Call it 365 in 375.

I’d had the idea for this photo in my head for literally a year. I was inspired by a version I saw last Christmas, and for the whole year I noodled the idea of tying up the boys in Christmas lights and taping their mouths with a bit of duct tape and printing the text “Silent Night, indeed!” in a festive red font. I even bought old-school white lights during a Boxing Day sale and put them away especially for it. Except, it turns out every other photographer in the western hemisphere had the same idea. And on the only day I had the right combination of good light in the house and the time required to put together the set-up, Tristan was sick with a bad cold. He gamely played along, but not in the best humour and it was not at all the fun shoot I had envisioned. And we had run out of duct tape.

This is not even close to the shot I had been imagining all year. Really, I only took about three snaps before I realized it wasn’t going to work out and called the whole thing off. But then I went back and looked at these and decided I loved them anyway, for all the wrong reasons. I love the evil delight of Lucas, who was SO into the idea of tying up his brothers and taping their mouths. I love Simon’s perfect expression. And I love Tristan’s expression, too: annoyance, with a hint of “seriously?” and a goodly amount of “I’m only doing this so you’ll let me play video games when we’re done.” I tell you, it’s not easy being the kid of a photographer who’s creativity is always just a wee bit outside her ability to execute.

This photo was a remnant from that amazing ice fog we had a little while back. This is a little patch of holly I found in a concrete planter on Elgin Street. I love how festive the frost makes it look. Would you guess it was on a sidewalk beside a busy urban street?

There is something about the overwrought cliché of a holiday photo that I just can’t resist. Crank up the romanticism and bring on the glitter. See?

And this one, a Santa my mom gave me years ago and still one of my favourite decorations. I took this on my kitchen table, and just threw a string of white lights in the background, then used the shallowest depth of field (lowest aperture number, in this case f1.4) to throw the lights out of focus.

I kinda liked the set-up, so I milked it for all it was worth! And then I added MOAR GLITTER!

More ice fog pictures from downtown. You can see I’m still not too picky on actually *taking* a photo so much as *posting* a new photo each day.

And then it snowed!!

My Getty statement came in this week, and I found this one of Willie I thought I’d share. You might remember this photo appeared in the December issue of Good Housekeeping magazine, and it’s also being used this month on NBC Universal’s Petside website.

Willie the misbehaving cat. Yep.

So tell me, bloggy friends: should I keep these weekly photo posts up in the new year? I toyed with simply posting my photo of the day every day as its own post, pretty much duplicating what I put on Flickr, and I toyed with not blogging them at all. I figure I’ll keep taking photos in the new year, cuz I can’t seem to stop. What do you think? Do you like these posts?

It was Thanksgiving this week, and I could fill pages and hard drives of all the things I have to be thankful for. First and foremost, I am thankful to my brother and his family for making the drive up for an unexpected visit for the weekend:

I’m thankful to live in a gorgeous city ringed by amazing wild spaces where kids can interact with nature. Lucas was so frustrated at how easily the chickadees landed on the big kids’ fingers and it was only at the end of our hike that he finally got one to land on his hand. I am also thankful for the wonder and delight of a child:

Here’s one more, not an official photo of the day but the intersection of family and childlike wonder with nature:

I’m thankful for cool, brilliant fall days and their breathtaking colour — even if I know they’re just a precursor to months of frosty monochrome. This is the Long Island Locks on the Rideau River near Manotick.

Did I mention I’m thankful for fall colour? I kinda have to double up, because it just won’t be here in a couple of weeks…

I’m thankful to live in a community that cares about its residents and offers fantastic free activities for families. This is the free pumpkin painting at the Manotick Harvest Festival this weekend:

I am extremely thankful for all of the wonderful people who have trusted me with their family portraits over the last couple of year, and I’m grateful for sweet kids who put up with my antics and reward me with beautiful smiles like this:

I’m grateful for my wide-angle lens that makes interesting shots like this, my French class that sees me walking down Elgin Street on a sunny morning to capture a shot like this, and my homeland that makes me proud to share a photo like this.

I’m pretty much thankful for everything right about now. It’s not a bad place to be, on Thanksgiving weekend and always. 🙂

It’s a week late (or a month early for my American friends) to ask the question, but what are you thankful for?