Category: Photo of the Day

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!

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!

I did it! We’ve reached the end, 367 days later, of my second 365 project. Maybe when you do more than one you get extra days snuck in? I never did figure out where I dropped a couple of days, but regardless, we’re here at #365 again. Here’s the last week in photographs.

Looking back over the week, it looks like I was subconsciously trying to cram in a whole bunch of my favourite techniques: Lensbaby, textures, B&W, long exposure — and plain old cuteness, too. I had fun playing with textures with these ornaments:

And I torqued these colourful ribbons a bit with my Lensbaby lens:

This was a picture I took over a year ago, from a boat cruise on the Ottawa River, and I stumbled across it in my archives. I was thinking about how timeless the view of the Chateau Laurier on the bluff is, and how this particular view gives to clue to the era when it was taken, so I played with textures in Photoshop to make it look like a reaaaaaally old picture, instead of just a moderately old one.

This picture doesn’t do the craziness of the light show on this house justice. Even with a wide-angle zoom, I couldn’t get it all in — and apparently they run the lights all night long. Yeesh, so much for energy conservation!

I took a picture similar to this a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t thrilled with it. This is much closer to what I wanted to capture. Oh my but he’s growing up SO quickly!

This was my favourite of the Creeping Mischief Monster series. It’s the zillionth example of a set of pictures I absolutely adore that would have never happened if I didn’t have the camera out because I needed a shot of the day.

I’m not entirely why I love this one, but I really do! I took it on the last day before the holidays, when I had Lucas with me at work for the annual kids’ Christmas party. I called it “Executive VP in Charge of Cuteness.”

And finally, for the sake of completeness and also because it is still, after all, Christmas Day: the final picture in this second iteration of Project 365.

That was a hell of a lot of fun!

Now what?????

Only one week left in this iteration of the 365 project! Of course, the big question now is what comes next. I’m still not sure of the answer to that one myself – stand by and I’ll let you know when I know!

I had a great time with fakery and rule-breaking this week! The end of the project seems to find all my standards dropping like flies. Like this one – it’s true we’ve had an unseasonably mild month, but does this look like a picture that was taken in December in Ottawa?

I found it in my archives when I was looking for something else. I’d taken it back in October and for whatever reason didn’t like it enough to even post it, but when I saw it this week I loved it and wanted to share the bright, warm colours. And that ended up being such a busy day that I didn’t actually take any pictures even remotely as lovely as this one, so I just decided this would be the photo of the day.

And then there’s this bit of fakery. I wanted to revisit Watson’s Mill in Manotick one last time before the end of the project, and I knew it would be lovely all decked out for Christmas. When I was setting up my tripod last night, to my great delight it began to snow. But, to capture the lights and detail on the Mill the way I wanted to after dark, I needed a 30-second exposure, which rendered the snow completely invisible — so I added it back in with an overlay in Photoshop. I’m quite pleased with my growing facility with Photoshop and PSElements! What do you think? Would you have guessed it’s not authentic snow?

Then again, sometimes no fakery is required — you just have to point your camera in the right direction to capture the cuteness.

(The expression on Willie’s face slays me. You’d never guess that he had willingly gone to sit beside Lucas, would you?)

Speaking of Willie… sigh. He seems to be going through some sort of teenage rebellion, or maybe someone is feeding him mischief pills. He’s a complete and utter PITA lately. I was playing with the Christmas lights, trying to get one of those sentimental shots of the tree lights all blurred out in the background with a favourite ornament in the foreground (it’s rather astonishing that I’ve never attempted that particular cliché before, as it’s so clearly in my bailiwick) but this kept happening:

I’m not sure that I like this shot. Sometimes looking at Lensbaby shots makes my eyes itch.

This shot, though? Instant fave. I specifically went out at dawn (which is some time just before lunch time at this time of year!) to go shooting on that very foggy Wednesday morning this week. I turned down a road just south of Manotick I’d never been down before, and just ask I was making the corner I noticed the canted speed limit sign and the telephone poles on either side of the road that disappeared into the fog, and got out of the car to take a few shots. I was just clicking the shutter when I saw the headlights resolving in the fog in the distance and at first I was ticked, thinking I’d have to clone them out of the final shot because they’d messed up my lovely composition. Then when I got home and saw the picture on my monitor I realized that the headlights actually make the shot. This is one of my fave B&W shots of the year, and ended up popping into Flickr’s Explore, too (which is now more than a nuisance than anything – can’t believe how I used to covet having a picture in Explore!)

Such a contrast to the warm, colourful shots above, eh? 🙂

And, I got a nice early Christmas present from Getty Images last night. They send out their sales invoices once a month, and mine popped up yesterday. I sold five images in four countries! My signature “puddle jumper” shot sold twice, including one to a local artist who bought the rights to turn it into a watercolour painting. How fun is that? Here’s the images that sold last month:

One more week to go!

Edited to add: how fun is this? I just found the source for the buyer that used the Willie and Lucas picture. And you know what it was used for? To illustrate the question “what’s the cutest pet picture/slideshow ever.” Bwhahahaha! It’s on an NBC Universal pet site (!) called Petside.

There may not be much snow on the ground, but it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas in the 365 project!

We had such a busy day on Saturday that a single photo just wasn’t enough to cover it. First we went to Hillcrest Tree Farm to choose and cut down a Christmas tree. Then Simon and Beloved rode the Beaver Scout float in the Manotick Santa Claus parade while the other boys and I watched. Then we headed home to decorate our full, fat, lovely tree, and finally, not represented in this collage, we celebrated Beloved’s 40th birthday. Phew, that’s a lot of activity for one Saturday!!

(Funny, in one of their odder choices, Getty Images invited the collage for license, and while I’m tickled, I can’t imagine what purpose anyone except me could possibly have for it!)

This one was also invited by Getty the same day I posted it. Okay, I admit, I can see this one as a Christmas card. 😉 (And it’s a damn good thing he’s so cute, too, because I took this the day after Willie jumped up on the kitchen counter and knocked my camera off the counter and on to the tile floor. Lucky for him, the only damage seems to be that the protective cover over the LCD screen snapped. Yikes!)

And more Christmas cheer! Did you know that the real Santa hangs out at the Home Hardware store in Manotick? Who would have guessed it! Seriously, he’ll be there again next Sunday December 18 and it’s worth the trip out there to see the kindest, sweetest, most twinkly-eyed Santa ever — and the free hot chocolate bar with sprinkles was a big hit, too!

(Lucas is looking a little wan in the picture because he’s only just barely overcoming his shyness with strangers. Santa was awesome at putting him at ease!)

This is how I captioned the following shot when I posted it on Flickr: “It’s 5:45 pm, it’s dark, I have a hundred things I’m supposed to be doing, not limited to laundry, making dinner, making lunches, reviewing homework, and sweeping up dog hair, and I don’t have a picture of the day. I look at the lasagne baking in the oven. Nope, that won’t do it. I look at the two kids watching TV. Nope, that won’t do it. I wander around to find the pets, hoping they’re doing something adorable. Nope, nada. I scan my memory, wondering if I have anything sitting in Lightroom that I can pass off as today’s picture. Nope, nothing.

Then, from the other room, the dulcet tones of my oldest plucking out Jingle Bells on the guitar. That will do it!”

This one might look a little familiar — I took nearly this very shot back at the beginning of the 365 project last December. Sue me, it’s been a chore finding photogenic somethings I haven’t snapped to death, especially with only a couple of hours of flat cloudy grey daylight each day!

It was tough choosing just one picture from our sneak-peek tour of the new Ikea, but the colourful towels finally won out in the end. And funny, the morning after I posted this, the Ikea merchandiser who set up this display sent me a note on Twitter saying she liked my picture. The internet really does make a small world even smaller!

Yesterday I went out on my lunch break with my Lensbaby affixed to my camera, specifically looking to shoot a Christmassy kind of shot down in the Market but the light was grey and flat, and nothing looked particularly festive. I’d taken a couple of half-hearted shots, but nothing was too interesting, and I was just about to give up when these fat, white snowflakes started to drift down. It was *exactly* what I had in mind!

And here’s a fun bit of news related not to this 365 project but the one I shot in 2009. I sold my first photo to a magazine this week!! Ottawa Magazine was looking for pictures of the old change huts for skaters on the Rideau Canal (I’m guessing to contrast them to the new fancy ones that the NCC installed this year) and they bought this picture to run on the back interior page of their winter issue!! How fun is that?

My first paid print credit. Woot! And one of my pictures may (or may not) be used in a Mazda commercial in the new year. I’ll keep you posted!

Zoom zoom zoom!!

There’s no cohesive theme to the 365 project this week. In fact, I’ve been bending the rules near to breaking — only 20 days left!

Speaking of days left, remember last time I did this, and ended up with 366 pictures in my 365 project cuz I couldn’t count to 365? So I know I started this project on December 23 this year, and I know I haven’t missed any days, and yet somehow I am due to end on December 24 — that’s 367 days. Gah! Clearly, the hardest part of a 365 project is counting to 365.

So speaking of broken rules, this is a picture that I actually took back in October on our very photogenic trip out to Pakenham. It got lost in the shuffle, and when I stumbled on it recently, I really liked it. I also really like the Flypaper Textures I downloaded recently, and am madly in love with the intersection of the two:

Don’t you love the painterly effect? (You probably either love it or hate it. I love it!) The building is St Peter Celestine Church, consecrated in 1893. Click through the link if you like reading historical accounts of early Ottawa — something else I love madly! I’m going to have to go back out to Pakenham for more exploring soon.

The texture didn’t work out quite so well on this one. I like the subject, and loved the way the terraces lead down the hill from the Parliament Buildings to the Canal, but the day was so flat and grey that everything looks quite washed out. I tried to add a little something to the sky with a texture, and it’s better — but still not as great as the church picture.

A little closer to home, this is the photographic equivalent of low-hanging fruit. I could take this picture every single day at our house — a boy, a pencil and a blank piece of paper.

I liked the repetition of all the chestnuts and the bit of burlap for contrast and context, but I should have slowed down and stopped down the aperture a little more to get more of the nuts in focus — but the guy in Farm Boy was giving me the stink eye for photographing his nuts, and I felt I should move along.

These ornaments are on my Mom and Dad’s Christmas tree. They make me happy. 🙂 (Other things that make me happy include Instagram and lazy iPhone photos-of-the-day!)

I picked up this baby at the end of the fall flea market season, but haven’t found the right shot to show it off quite yet. Not quite sure this is the one either, but it was the best I managed so far. This is a Brownie Super 27, an early point-and-shoot from the 1960s. I got it in its box for $5 — hard to resist a steal like that! It has two apertures, “SUNNY” (f/13.5) and “CL’DY BR’T” (f/8), and two focus zones (3 1/2 to 6 ft and beyond 6 ft), and the flash hides behind a little pop-out door. Fun, eh?

And last but definitely not least, probably my favourite picture this week. He was “helping” me hang this giant Costco wreath when it attacked him.

Oh the cuteness!

I can’t believe I’ve got more than 90 per cent of my second 365 project in the can. Did this year just fly by or what?

This week’s pictures are all over the map. Actually, that’s not quite true — they were all taken within or around Manotick. But I couldn’t really come up with any sort of cohesive theme outside of “I really don’t have time for Project 365 this week!”

I like it best when cuteness asserts itself for the photographic taking, like when Willie hopped up onto the table to try to entice Tristan away from his homework. I thought him settling in on the Petit Robert was pretty cute, but the yawn was an unexpected bonus that I just happened to be ready to catch.

I tried to play with a longer exposure and pan the camera with the movement of these geese, but I’m not thrilled with the result. It was an idea better in concept than execution, I think, but it was the best of the lot and I didn’t have any other pictures for the day. It was fun spooking a giant flock of geese into flight just by stopping by the side of the road, though!

When I saw this stump with its little ecosystem, it looked like a faerie playground to me. 🙂

And then we had snow! I was pretty excited to see how much snow fell when we woke up on Wednesday — and by the time we got everyone into their boots and ski pants and scarves and hats, I was pretty much done with winter. Lucas seemed plenty perplexed by the white stuff!

I’ve been playing a lot with textures lately, and I really love the effects from the Spring Painterly sets from Flypaper Textures. I love how the brush strokes and deep blue hues transformed this rather mundane photo into something moody and a little mysterious. I’m really pleased with this one!

I used another texture from the Spring Painterly set to enhance this picture of some fall berries.

And last but definitely not least — yes, it’s that time of year again! We hauled out the Santa hats and turned the porch into a portrait studio again. This one is one of the outtakes, but I like the expressions on their faces and the interaction.

At the end of the day, they’re still my very favourite subjects to photograph. 🙂

It seems I’m doing most of my picture-taking at sunrise and sunset these days. Not really surprising, since they bookend the work day, and with continuing mild temperatures, dusk and dawn are pleasant times to be out hunting for interesting shots.

These spiky, weedy things, for example. I have no idea what they are, but they make an interesting silhouette in front of the rising sun, don’t you think?

And this one, too. The morning sun blazing through a couple of branches and falling on some but not all of the leaves made an interesting composition early one morning. Tip: look for triangles when you’re composing your photographs — threes and triangles always seem to have extra visual appeal. Why do you think I had three boys? 😉

This is a sunny beauty of another sort. May you find in your life the joy of being three years old and on a swing!

I am drawn to old barns, especially the really decrepit ones. I couldn’t get far enough back to get all of this one in the frame without falling in the ditch on the other side of the road (apparently there *is* a limit to how far I’ll go to chase a picture!) so I’m not entirely satisfied with this one — but it’s close enough.

I took this one last weekend when we visited my brother’s family. It always warms my heart to see the boys interacting with my parents.

With this long, lovely and mild autumn, I’ve been slow to get all the leaves raked up. I’d stuffed more than 20 bags myself over a couple of weeks when I finally bribed enlisted the boys to help me. I filled another three while they jumped and tossed and eventually filled this one. With nearly 30 bags filled, I think we’re finally ready for the inevitable snowfall.

Speaking of snow, how do you like these spectacular squall clouds? As I was driving home on Thursday, I was on the lookout for the perfect foreground for these towering snow clouds, and when I saw the baled hay in this field I knew it was perfect. (I’d stopped and taken quite a few others, but I love how the light behind me makes the field golden, and how those giant clouds dwarf the huge trees in the foreground.) Ian Black featured this photograph on his weather report on the CBC Ottawa news on Friday night. 🙂

Not long now and you’ll be seeing a lot of snow pictures, I think. How much longer can this blissfully mild autumn interlude last?

There was a stat quoted in the Ottawa paper the other day, to the effect that in the 75 years they’ve been keeping records there has never been a year that no measurable snow fell before Remembrance Day. Hasn’t it been just the most lovely, pleasant autumn?

The photo ops have been throwing themselves at me this week. I haven’t so much sought out pictures as have tableaus call out for my attention, like the setting sun silhouetting the last of our pumpkins just before I put it out in the compost bin. (The pinecone was an afterthought but I love the way it refracted the setting sun behind it!)

And with the change from daylight to standard time, it’s no longer pitch black when I drive to work in the morning, so I can be seduced into being late for work because I stopped to take pictures of the thick morning fog. Like this:

On the other end of the day, though, it’s barely dinner time when the sun sets, and when you see a gorgeous magenta-orange sky you have to run out and leave the pasta to boil over while you take a few pictures like this:

I did a portrait session with my BFFs and their extended family, and although I had to twist a few arms to get them to do a leaf toss shot for me, it ended up being one of my favourites from the day. 🙂

You could say i was board when I took this one. 😉 I just liked the tinge of colour, the iron handle and latch, and the repetitive pattern of the boards.

Sometimes the whole photography obsession can get annoying, like when you’re raking the leaves and running out of daylight and you like the way the light hits a couple of pinecones you just raked out of the pile so you drop the rake and pick up the camera and suddenly it’s 20 minutes later and you have a lot of great pictures of pinecones but half a lawn of unraked leaves.

I was trying to think of a good tribute shot for both 11-11-11 and Remembrance Day, and when I found this fallen tree and stump I knew it was exactly the thought I wanted to express.

So do you think we could be lucky enough to hold out until December for the first snow shot?