Category: Photo of the Day

Oops! I was supposed to post this last week before we went on our summer road trip down to southern Ontario. Oh well, better late than never?

Wow, it seems like I took this two years ago instead of two weeks ago! I met with a fun family in the Arboretum for family pictures on a quiet Sunday morning. I’ll share more of the pictures from that session soon, but I loved the serenity of this one as they had a wee picnic with snacks for the kids, right at the end of our session.

This is Tristan in his natural habitat – exploring and climbing and being cute.

FromWhereIStand – on a sidewalk mural downtown. Ooooo, shiny and colourful!

I drive by this spot every day on my way to work. The way the morning light hits the field always catches my eye. One day early this summer, maybe even mid-spring, I was zooming past and the little canyon was filled with cows. It was such an unexpected sight, cows all over those little hillocks, and the light was divine. And I was incredibly late and for once in my life didn’t have my camera with me. Every day since, I’ve driven past and looked wistfully at the spot, but every day no cows. And then one morning last week, cows! Not a whole herd of cows, like last time, but these two at least. I had to stop, after all that regretting that I’d missed it the first time around.

Lucas on the run:

These aren’t my coneflowers, they’re my neighbour’s. The ones I planted the day after I took this are already brown and crispy. I’ll blame the drought and not my embarrassing lack of gardening juju.

I have been coveting a wide angle lens for a while, and knowing we’d be going down to southern Ontario farm and lake country for our vacation, I figured it would be an excellent time to rent one for the week to take it for a test drive. I got a 10-24mm DX lens from Vistek for a week. OMG how much do I love it??? The nature of a wide angle lens makes it distort anything that it is very close to, and pushes everything else even further away. It’s great for sweeping vistas, which I’ll show you in next week’s pictures, but how fun are these?

(snicker)

(snort)

(guffaw!!)

I love this lens a little too much!

Sorry for the radio silence this week, but I have SO MUCH to tell you about coming up in the next little while. Be prepared to be spammed, as soon as I unpack and clean out the car and get my passport. Passport? Stay tuned! 😉

Holy cow, I just realized this may be the first week in who knows how long that I don’t have a picture of either Lucas or Willie or both! Well, you can see a wee bitty Lucas in this storyboard of our quick and eventually stormy first visit to Petrie Island last week. We had just arrived and had a little picnic lunch and the boys were splashing their feet (we hadn’t brought bathing suits or towels as the beach was not our original destination) when we noticed the threatening clouds coalesce into rain way up the Ottawa River toward Kanata. We watched the rain get closer and closer, and had just decided we had better move back to the car a little faster than anticipated when this wicked wind kicked up a sandstorm, just in front of the pouring rain. We made it in the barest nick of time!

I’ve planted daisies and pink coneflowers in the front garden and sunflowers all over the place, and the damn things just refuse to grow. Who can’t grow sunflowers?! Apparently, me. But there’s a patch of daisies in the back garden that are flourishing and delightfully photogenic.

I’ve been working on honing my off-camera flash skills in anticipation of two flash workshops (well, one lecture and one workshop) that I’ll be attending later this summer. I’ve made lots of test shots, but these ones were the first ones that were interesting enough to share. I put the flash down on the ground amidst the daisies and pointed it straight up at them, then set my camera on manual with a shutter speed fast enough to kill the mid-day light, so the camera would only register what the flash was lighting. I liked it better in B&W, as it gives a more dramatic glow to the daisies, I think.

We got our first CSA share from Roots and Shoots farm this week. Fresh, photogenic and yummy too!

It was a crazy-busy last week of school! First, there was the talent show.

Then, I helped supervise the fourth grade class picnic. I was talking to Tristan’s teacher when she said, “Oh, the baby goats are here!” I thought it was a colloquialism, but no, a parent had arrived with their family pet goat’s two newborn kids. They were only two days old, fresh enough that they still had their umbilical cords attached! I tell ya, stuff like this doesn’t happen in city schools!

And then it was the last day of school. If you look closely, you can see Simon is fighting back tears here – at least I didn’t have both of them bawling this year. Does anyone else’s kids cry instead of dance the last day of school? I suppose I should be happy they love school so much, and with report cards that have B- as the lowest grade between them, it shows.

Just for fun, here’s last year’s version. Huge difference!

And this is the last year there will only be two in the traditional first/last day of school pictures – Lucas starts JK in September!!!

This week’s pictures are almost all about colour and light. I think because I’ve been feeling kind of scattered, I’ve been drawn to the basics – beautiful colour, delicious light.

Speaking of delicious and colours, did you beets come in different colours? When I stopped to admire the orange beets at this stall in the Byward Market, the vendor did a great sales pitch on all the varieties of beets and how you can cook them. I’ve only ever tried pickled beets, and I have to say I’m not much of a fan, but slicing up some of those orange beets and grilling them sounded pretty darn good to me! Maybe I’ll try that one of these days.

Also delicious? Ontario strawberries. I bought some local ones and some trucked-in California strawberries one day, and could not believe the difference in colour, in size and in the heavenly smell from the local ones. The trucked-in ones were barely a shadow of the local ones, even if they were four times the size.

I like the blue of this summer sky juxtaposed against the red of the strawberries. It’s all about the colour!

And then when I’m feeling arty-farty, it’s about no colour at all. Tristan and I rode our bikes down to the Long Island Locks on Sunday morning to admire the fog before it lifted.

Still stubbornly chasing a self-portrait that doesn’t make me cringe. Not there yet…

I love this picture. It makes me snicker. I was driving home near sunset and the way the setting sun was lighting up this herd of cows near Fallowfield caught my eye. I stopped, and as I crouched near the fence, this cow ambled over to take a closer look at what I was doing. It was actually a bit of a tough shot to get because if I exposed for the cow, the beautiful sky would be blown out, but if I exposed for the sky, the cow and foreground were too dark. And if I used the 50mm lens stuck on my Nikon, I couldn’t get enough of the scene in my frame. My iPhone did a pretty good job, eh? I used a terrific app called Camera+ that lets you choose where in the frame you want to expose for, so I moved it around until I had things more or less balanced. (If you want a serious camera app for your iPhone, this is the one I’d recommend.)

I really saved the best for last this week. I did a portrait session with a fabulous family on Saturday, and I’ll save the rest of the story for the blog post I promise I’ll write soon with more photos from this amazingly fun session. Suffice to say, I was a little nervous going in because I was intimidated by the idea of working with teenagers. I needn’t have worried, they were awesome!

I had such a hard time choosing between that last picture and this next one as my photo-of-the-day as I loved them both (and a good number of other shots from that session, too!) How cute is this couple?

And you see that sparkle in them? They’re just like that in person. Lovely, sweet people and I can’t wait to share the other fun pictures from that session!

And now today, back to my kid comfort zone: I’m doing a session on the porch this morning with yet another family of five (is five the new four or what?) ranging in age from 6.5 months to four years old. Yay for babies!

Some weeks have time for planning a shot, bringing together elements intentionally and trying things from a few different angles and perspectives. And some weeks I just point my camera at the things around me as I find them and keep running on to the next thing on the list.

This week? Definitely one of the latter. (Is it summer vacation yet? I really REALLY need a vacation!!) Shots this week were grabbed in the middle of a bike ride, on the way back to the office after French lessons and even in the waiting room of the optometrist. This, I think, illustrates two important points. The first is that there is beauty and interesting things worth photographing just about everywhere. The other is that I may be a little bit obsessive about taking pictures. Is this news to anyone?

I can’t believe I’ve never taken this particular tourist shot of the Rideau Canal and the Parliament Buildings before. I have the winter version, but the summer shot is so much nicer — I was particularly pleased to catch the white tour boat chugging through the scene. People find the blog all the time looking for “postcards of Ottawa” — here ya go!

Speaking of the Rideau Canal, I this shot from other end of my daily commute, at the Long Island Locks near Manotick. I like to ride my bike out here in the early morning, and was curious to find this boat docked there this week. Did you know there’s a four-day cruise you can take from Kingston to the Hartwell Locks? I had no idea! The boat actually overnights here at the Long Island Lock.

This is the one taken in the optometrist’s waiting room. I liked the light, and the orange carrying from the owl to the bricks to Lucas’s shirt.

More fun with the star aperture on my Lensbaby, this time with the dew on the morning grass. I love how it seems like the stars are floating away. Such a silly shot.

And speaking of silly shots, another one from the “from where I stand” collection.

I think I was in the middle of building my shelves on the weekend when I looked over and saw the boys heaped together, peering at the iPod. The combination of the light and their postures made me drop the screwdriver and pick up my camera to catch this moment. I think it’s my favourite of the week!

And finally, my little blogger in training! I like this photo because of the light, and the subject matter. I snapped it with my iPhone to go with the blog post he was writing, and only realized when I got it onto my computer how grainy/noisy it was – a function of the iPhone trying to compensate for the low light conditions.

Someone must have liked the picture, though, because I got a note from Getty Images on Monday saying someone had requested to license this picture through Flickr. Since I hadn’t added it to any groups, it’s likely that the person found the photo either through my blog or one of my other social networks. The wonders of the Internet never cease to amaze me. 🙂

After getting rained out last weekend, I’ve got a fun photo shoot with a family of five this afternoon. I can hardly wait!! Of course, I’ll share the pictures here soon…

I‘m getting lazy with the idea of the photo of a day thing. I’m still posting a new photograph every day, but I’ve taken to posting a few from the same day or session over the course of a couple of days. Some photos just deserve a day of their own! Also, taking a new picture every day? Is a lot of work. And, posting a bad picture for the sake of sticking to some arcane project rules that nobody is paying attention to but me anyway doesn’t seem to be of any benefit to anyone. So all of this week’s shots were actually taken on just four days — but those days were very photogenic indeed!

For example, we made our annual trip to the Gloucester Fair on Saturday with my mom, which is always fun for the boys and a photo bonanza for me.

Even after all those photos, I had forgotten entirely that I took this one with my iPhone, and I found it on Monday morning. I love the old-timey poster look of the processing — I’m thinking of getting one of those CanvasPop Instagram canvases made of this to hang on the wall.

Speaking of favourite summer family traditions, this week marked the return of Uno on the porch after dinner at our house. Colour me happy.

Hey, did you know there is a Mill in Manotick? 😉 This pretty little patch is right beside it. I am in love with this sign, pointing the way to the fisherman’s path.

Lucas indulged me in some posed shots. I got the wagon from a flea market recently (don’t you love it?) and I had the vague idea in my head for these shots ever since.

I still can’t decide which composition I like better.

On the same (very photogenic) day, Lucas and I walked up to the school to pick up “the brothers” as he still calls them, and we had fun taking pictures on the way home. Well, they walked and I just kind of followed along, snapping photos as I went.

(Oh my but they’re growing up quickly, aren’t they? Sometimes I can’t stand it!)

You know I like to marry up some of the photos with quotations. For this one, I chose “All things good are wild, and free.” ~ Henry David Thoreau.

I’m facing a unique new challenge with my camera this weekend — I’m doing portraits for a family with teenagers! Eek! You think my extensive repertoire knock-knock jokes will impress them? Stand by to find out! 😉

I like to sit down on the weekend and write these posts, looking for the common thread in the week’s picture and coming up with themes and descriptions. Some weeks, though, the photos defy easy homogenization — they’re just all over the place. This is one of those weeks. Flowers, portraits, strangers and skateboards. Interestingly, and perhaps not coincidentally, my own brain has been kind of all over the place this week, too.

If I had the time to blog properly, I’d have blogged the resolution to my skateboard question a few weeks back. After getting some great advice from a friend who was a skateboarder back in the day, we took Tristan out to fulfill his 10-year-old heart’s desire:

“You realize,” I told him, “that I’m only doing this so I can take pictures of you?”

“Sure Mom!”

This sweet family of five came out for porch portraits on the holiday Monday. I’ll have more pictures from their session to share soon!

Dandelions continue to fascinate me. People hate them, I know, but I kinda like them. They are lovely when they’re yellow, and interesting when they’ve gone to seed. I’m going to start a new movement – embrace the dandelion! I mean, sure, I could tend my lawn, but then I wouldn’t be able to take photographs like these!

I keep looking at this photo and wondering when Lucas got to be so grown up. I take 30 pictures of the child each week, but this one makes me nostalgic for a time that hasn’t even passed yet.

Speaking of old (I know, I stretched on that segue), I love the fact that 180 years after the Rideau Canal was built, they still use these mechanisms to open and close the locks by hand. (I’ve been thinking of writing a few blog posts about the history of Manotick and the Rideau Canal. Would that be of interest to you?)

We’re in our second summer in Manotick, and I still haven’t gotten used to the (wildly overgrown) garden. Every morning this week I’ve woken up to find something new blooming, including these lovely irises. I still can’t look at an iris without thinking of Georgia O’Keefe. Aside from turning irises into erotica, she said, “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”

And last but not least, this is Charlie. Charlie was fishing off the weir at Watson’s Mill while I was taking photographs of a great blue heron in the water below and we struck up a conversation. I was charmed by the hat and the pipe, and managed to work up the courage to not only ask him if I could take his picture but to ask him if he would sign a model release for me so I might license the picture. I was so surprised and pleased when he said yes that I was almost too nervous to take the picture.

When I asked him if he would like me to e-mail him a copy of the photograph, he laughed and said, “Oy, no. My wife would kill me if she saw the pipe.” Ha! If you’re reading, Charlie’s wife, please don’t give him hell. He was a treat to chat with.