Category: Photo of the Day

I still haven’t figured out if I have a personal style in my photography or what it might be, but I do realize now that I have two primary goals: telling stories and celebrating beauty. Both compulsions come from within; the sheer volume of the blog speaks to my need to tell stories, the magpie in me is invariably drawn to pretty, shiny things, and the optimist in me wants to celebrate all that loveliness. When I can cram all that into a single frame, I will love the results.

Even though I’ve used collages many times before, I’ve really started to enjoy using storyboards to illustrate stories or capture highlights of events. Sometimes there’s a kind of synergy in a set of pictures that captures what a single picture lacks. For instance, this set of pictures shows the dedication of a new play structure at the boys’ school BBQ this week. None of the pictures is particularly compelling, but they do tell a story that’s meaningful to the participants better than any single picture might.

And there was this one at the community pool, just before that wicked storm broke the heat on Wednesday.

This was more fun from last weekend’s Dickinson Days, this time from Pioneer Day at Watson’s Mill. Not the best photograph ever since most of them have their backs to me, but the boys had an amazing morning trying stilts here and a pogo stick further down at My Toy Shoppe — a perfect day of activities for busy boys.

I have to admit, I was having trouble finding my muse this week with the camera. This is one of those pictures that ends up being a last-minute answer to walking around the house with my camera at the end of the day thinking, “What can I photograph for today?” Thank goodness for the garden.

There are abandoned houses like this here and there throughout Manotick, and they fascinate me. What happened? Where are the families who used to live there? What do they look like inside? (As my friend Valerie said, “Maybe they’re still there and the lawnmower is broken!”)

Like I said, my favourite pictures are where story and beauty meet. What this one is little lacking in story, he makes up for in cuteness, no?

And if you look a little deeper, you can see the story from his perspective — or at least, in his eyes.

It’s been a long week. I have to admit, I kinda ran out of steam with the picture-taking, and a lot of other stuff, this week. I still managed to take a picture each day, but there were a few days that I was doing it more out of obligation than joy. Funny, last time I did the 365 project, I wrote post after post saying “wah, this is so hard” and to be honest, I’m nearly half way through my second attempt and I think this is the first time I’ve really felt like I was slogging through.

Anyway, that was part of the inspiration behind this photo, which I called “Looking for the silver lining.” I took it at about 6:30 one morning on the way to work, and I was thinking that even when it’s stormy, the clouds will eventually part and the sun will break through.

This is one of my favourite pictures of the week, and a rare one of Papa Lou with the boys. He’s reading one of the four hand-made birthday cards he received on is birthday last Sunday. My dad inspires me, and seeing him and the boys together never fails to make me happy.

I passed these bleeding hearts peeking out between a picket fence near the Mill quite a few times and each time wished I had the time to stop and take a picture, until one day I finally made a special trip to do just that. Something about the picket fence and the bleeding hearts together speaks to warm sunny days and cold glasses of fresh lemonade, don’t you think?

Boys at play – always the ‘low hanging fruit’ of my photographic day. 🙂

Boys at play, redux. (And? Those compression-based water shooters? Are wicked fun!!)

As I may have mentioned (ahem) this was Dickinson Days here in Manotick this weekend. I knew it was the village’s annual summer festival, and I knew there were lots of fun events planned. Even so, I have to tell you I was more than a little bit surprised (and delighted!) when we left the house on Friday evening to head toward Main Street for the parade and found ourselves joining a flowing stream of neighbourhood families all doing the same thing. It felt like a small-scale version of Canada Day on the Hill — Beloved and I couldn’t help but laugh.

We chose a spot on the curb pretty much at random — and based on the quickly-disappearing available space. I have to admit, I did have the position of the setting sun in mind, but other than that, it was total fluke that we ended up right in front of the Mill Tavern, which happens to have a second-level patio that was, unbeknownst to us, serving as the viewing deck for the parade announcers Sandy Sharkey and Wendy Daniels from BOB FM and The Bear.

The parade was also a lot bigger than I’d expected, and reminded me of the Christmas parades of my childhood — floats and marching bands and double-handfuls of candy thrown at the excited kids. I keep coming back to the word “delightful,” the best possible description of the evening. I’ve been playing with Lightroom’s print capabilities, and I thought the contact sheet print made for a good storyboard of some of the parade highlights.

You might have seen this picture earlier in the week, but it’s one of my favourites so worth repeating. My Beloved, man enough to win the big prize at Skeeball but not so manly that he doesn’t mind carrying all the stuffies while the boys go on rides together.

From the day we met, he’s been the man of my dreams.

Usually, I do most of my processing in Lightroom (love Lightroom madly and deeply!) but this week I’ve spent a good deal of time in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. I’ve learned a lot of fun and simple new tricks, and learned how to improve a couple of old ones.

One of the things I worked on was developing a new watermark for my pictures. I went through a watermarking phase a couple of years ago, but found them more trouble than they were worth. Nobody seemed terribly interested in stealing my pictures, and it seemed a pain to keep both watermarked and non-watermarked digital prints on file as well as keeping the original digital negative. Plus, I’m always concerned that a watermark might interfere with the image somehow, make a distraction of itself. But, in the end, I decided that I’d give watermarks another go.

That left me with the problem of designing a watermark. I’ve also been toying with the idea of hiring someone to design a logo for me, or at least coercing my graphic-design-trained husband into doing it for me. But I got to playing one afternoon during nap time on the long weekend, and came up with this:

I’m particularly fond of the little shooting star! So I’ve been using it this week as a watermark on my images, and eventually I’ll turn it into a banner for my portfolio site. One of these days.

Here’s something else fun I learned how to do this week! I found these frames on the Coffee Shop Blog, and thought they’d give a little pizazz to this picture of apple blossoms.

I was in the mood for something silly when I started playing with these vintage Fisher-Price toys we picked up at a flea market a couple of weeks ago. It was only when I started thinking about making a picture that I realized the mini-bus contains a family of five that could be ours if one of the boys would only grow his hair a little bit longer. 😉 I call it “Road trip!”

I told you the long and convoluted story of cutting the grass on the long weekend, but I never did get around to telling you about my epic battle with the lilies of the valley. I spent Monday pulling more than 500 of the invasive suckers out of the front garden. The first foot and a half, I dug down and pulled out the root system, too, but I lost enthusiasm with another 20+ feet to go and started just yanking and tossing. This bouquet was really only an afterthought, created from fishing through the bin of discarded plants. Hey, good enough for Kate Middleton is good enough for me — they do smell pretty good, and I’ve still got another (sigh) 600 or so still left in the garden!

This picture was one of those moments when I came around a corner, saw how the light was illuminating his ridiculous hair, and instinctively reached for the camera. One shot, real quick before he moved, and this was it for the day!

This is another found photo. Ya gotta catch ’em being cute! I love the body language, and the fact that the two of them together are occupying one butt’s worth of space. The ISO was set really high because they were fidgeting and I was getting a lot of motion blur, and I was kind of surprised how much noise there was — but the pose is plenty cute enough to overcome that, I think!

This one was all about the light. We desperately needed a new dining room table — we can barely fit the family around the ancient Ikea table we’ve had for 10+ years – and I’ve been coveting one since we moved. We found a place that makes harvest tables out of reclaimed wood, and I’ve been biding my time until we could afford one. It’s a little darker than I was expecting, but I love the character of it. Lucas thinks we got the bigger table just so he would have more room to colour.

Lovely, no? And I have one more picture from this week, but it’s got enough of a story to it that I’m going to save it for it’s own blog post! Stay tuned!!

In the meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts on watermarking in general and how I’ve applied the watermark to these pictures.

I am on a picture-taking tear these days, so much so that I keep filling up the hard drive on our laptop and have to regularly pull the pictures off the computer and store them in a separate hard drive. And life has been so busy, while I’m finding the time to take the pictures, finding time to sort through them and edit them is proving a bit of a challenge. I can haz six more hours each day, please?

I already showed you Tristan’s soggy victory at the 5K race this week, but he earned a second mention with his stoic endurance! In case you missed it, he ran his first-ever race last Saturday in the cold and pouring rain. This is about four feet before the finish line, with an impressive time of just over 30 minutes.

Lucas didn’t run any races, but he did enjoy exploring the worms that have been loving this wet weather. Every time we leave the house now, we go through the same litany:

“Mom, robins eat worms.”
“That’s right, Lucas.”
“And worms eat dirt!”
“That’s right, Lucas.”
“So it’s like the robins are eating dirt!” (maniacal laughter)
“Well, kind of.”
“But boys don’t eat dirt.”
“That’s right, Lucas.”
“And boys don’t eat worms.”
“That’s right, Lucas.”

I give it even odds that before the end of the spring, he’s tasted both…

I haven’t taken too many TtV shots lately because — gasp!! — my contraption doesn’t fit properly with my new camera. I was out in the garden taking pictures with both this weekend, and while I didn’t like any of the flower TtV shots I took, I did like this one. I call it “the tools of her trade.” It’s everything I need to make me happy on a Sunday afternoon — coffee, camera, and outside!

I continue to take a lot of pictures in the garden. Whomever planted it had a wonderful sense of colour and design, and we’re reaping the benefits. These tulips are standing on guard to catch the fading light of a lovely day on Friday.

Speaking of lovely days and fading light, remember how all of a sudden Mother Nature seemed to flip a switch around 4:30 last Thursday afternoon and we went from early spring to full-on summer? I took this picture that day, as something about the light and the composition evokes everything I love about summer… light, flowers, sunshine, porch. Ahhhhhhhh.

Through all the trouble we had with the house last fall and winter, I kept my sanity by anticipating how great it would be in the summer. (And, luckily, I was right!) I think the thing I was looking forward to most of all was the smell of these lilacs, completely surrounding my private bedroom porch and drifting in through the bedroom window. I added a bit of texture to the picture, just to give it a bit of character.

And finally, my favourite picture of the week. The dandelions have completely taken over our yard despite hours of diligent plucking. And yet, despite the fact that he’s really only propagating the problem, I can’t help but love this picture of Tristan making a wish.

If you could make a wish, what would you wish for?

This was, even by my usual standards, an insanely busy week. It was the kind of week where a saner person might actually put down the camera and say, “Heck, let’s pass on the photos for this week, there’s just too much else going on.” Instead, I continued to snap madly, and just let them pile up on my hard drive, but still managed to pick out a favourite for each day.

The week started out with a bit of an “oops”. I forgot to dial down the ISO when I was shooting this one of Lucas and Beloved, but I worked it until I had recovered it a bit and noticed it had a bit of a vintage vibe, so I played that up.

More cuteness for the sake of cuteness. Forgive me.

Lucky for me, the only thing in more abundance than cuteness was nature’s glory, finally blooming after a long, drippy spring. I took these ones with one of those screw-on macro filters. They’re only about $20 for a set of four on eBay, great fun if you want to dabble in macro photography and get a little closer to your subject. These have very little post-processing, aside from creating the diptych in Photoshop.

And the same tulips straight on the next day. (You can tell they were taken on different days, because an overcast day makes the colours more even and more saturated like the first shot, whereas the second one is very constrasty with the back-lighting.)

Who knew spring had so much fiery orange? It’s ordinarily a colour I associate with autumn, but there’s a lot of it going on in my yard right now. These are the baby leaves on our red maple, just waking up for the season. (Apparently I’ve also got a backlighting theme going on this week!)

This is Kym. I’ll tell you more about her in an upcoming post!

I was really pleased with most – heck, ALL of my pictures this week, but the sentimental favourite gets the last-but-not-least spot. We won a family pass to one of those parking-lot mini-fairs in Barrhaven, thanks to the fine folks at OttawaStart.com, and we enjoyed ourselves quite a bit!

This one turned out EXACTLY like I’d hoped it would. To replicate this, you’ll need to set your shutter speed to something slow like 1/30 of a second or slower (or if you’re shooting in aperture priority, make your aperture very small. The macro setting on your point-and-shoot might work, too.) I waited until the sun was indirectly falling on him and the most colourful section of the background was behind him, and since we were moving at the same speed relative to each other, the background came out blurred. It’s called panning.

He may be growing up way too quickly, but he’s not so big he can’t still enjoy the carousel. 🙂

we are at the end of the first week of May, and the leaves are still not quite unfurled from the trees. It’s the first week of the Tulip Festival here in Ottawa, but there are hardly any tulips in bloom. It’s definitely been a wet, cold spring here.

A lot of the week looked kind of like this. This is the red maple in our yard during one of the seemingly endless showers last week, just thinking about sending out some leaves.

And this guy is either a really red crocus (based on his size) or a really tiny and early tulip. He’s another gift from the garden.

Okay, so it didn’t rain the *whole* week. I shot these daffs near Watson’s Mill, and was delighted to catch that crazy triangle of flare. Erm, I mean, I totally planned that effect, right from the start. (!)

You know what I don’t think I’ve ever shot in the thousands of pictures I’ve taken over the last few years? A shadow portrait. This is me and the boys, out for a post-dinner walk.

Speaking of boys, you didn’t think I could go a whole week without pointing my big black monocle at them, did you? I love this one because I caught a *genuine* smile instead of a “humouring mom so she’ll leave me be” kind of smile. 🙂 I shifted myself up and down as I was composing this to make that shadow area end more or less at his shoulders, so the dark area would frame his head and accentuate the rim lighting that’s highlighting his hair. (I don’t know why crazy hair seems to run in our family!)

This wasn’t even supposed to be a 365 picture. I’m helping a friend by creating a website for her cooperative child care centre, and we needed an image for a banner. In the end, I didn’t even use this, but I loved the fact that when I went to the crayon bin I found all these nekkid ones — Lucas has been busy at work peeling the wrappers off them.

I was inspired to take this picture by one of my favourite photography blogs, MCP Actions. Jodie has great tips, tutorials and actions for photoshop and photoshop elements, and has been encouraging her readers to join her with a photo-a-week “Project 52” with a weekly theme. Last week’s theme was “first thing in the morning” and I thought this picture was perfect for the theme.

I looked out the window early Sunday morning and saw the lawn twinkling with a heavy dew, so I grabbed my camera and ran out in my bare feet and jammies to capture this. I opened up my aperture as wide as it would go and held my camera right above the grass. Those round circles you see are the out-of-focus points of sunlight in the dew drops, called bokeh. It only took two or three shots, and I knew as soon as I saw the viewfinder that this was a keeper.

Turns out a few other people liked it, too! Not only did MCP actions feature it as one of their photos of the week, but it’s been bouncing around in Flickr’s Explore all week, and is my most “favourited” picture ever. (It kinda makes me laugh, because I still think the photo of Lucas jumping in the puddle is a WAY better picture, and although it had even more comments and faves to start, it never made it to Explore.)

If you want to take a shot like this, all you need is a dewy patch of lawn and an early-morning sun. Set your camera to macro (the little flower) if it’s a point-and-shoot, or to your widest aperture (smallest f-stop) if it’s a dSLR. Make sure you are facing right into the sun so you get the maximum twinkle, and focus on a spot about 1/3 of the way into the frame.

And this week also happened to contain the end of April, so here’s my monthly mosaic of all the pictures I shot in April. (A few of you have asked how I make these. There’s a mosaic-maker at www.bighugelabs.com, and a handful of other fun things you can do with pictures, too!)

Despite being a long, slow and decidedly wet month, it’s kinda pretty in retrospect, isn’t it? Here’s to a warmer, dryer and equally lovely May!

Oh my goodness, was Easter really only last weekend? Surely we’ve lived three lifetimes since then. Some weeks are just like that, aren’t they?

I can hardly believe that our Good Friday wander around Manotick was a scant seven days ago. It was cool but bright, and we enjoyed wandering around the Mill and inspecting the dam in the midmorning sun.

And it really seems like a lifetime ago we were colouring these eggs (although it did seem that the egg salad sandwiches for lunch might never end!) It was only after I was playing with this one in Lightroom that I realized that I had handed Lucas the little tablets of egg dye in random order and he had dropped them into the cups in an equally random order — and yet he managed to put them in the perfect ROYGBIV order of the spectrum. He’s an artiste savant! 😉 I was actually aiming to have the boys a little less in focus than this, but oh well.

Not the shot of the day, but I rather liked this one of the tools of their trade, so I’ll slip it in here, too.

Am I taking advantage of your polite attention if I slip in just one more? Easter is so photogenic, and so much more transient than Christmas!

This is Bubba, my recently adopted fur-brother, trying to eat Papa Lou’s face for Easter dinner.

As if that weren’t already an incredibly photo-rich long weekend, it was Monday when lovely Baby H allowed me to point my camera in his direction. (There’s more from that shoot here.)

There are some subjects I seem to be drawn to over and over again. Kids with books is one of them. Lucas is another one. 😉

(You know, the whole reason I launched my own photography business is because my kids were getting so sick of me pointing my camera at them. I simply need more kids to photograph!!)

And then, on a much more sombre note, we have the results of that incredible wind storm last week. Turns out it will cost us close to $1000 to have our lovely old poplar cut up, a few hundred less if we dispose of the wood ourselves. Anyone want some free firewood? Pull up a trailer and haul away what you can! (No seriously, if you want some, I’ll hold it for you — just let me know before Tuesday.)

There’s more pictures from the wind storm on this post, if you haven’t seen it yet. Worth a click to see where the crown of the tree ended up. The good news is, I now know the species of the rest of the trees on the property. We have a handful of Manitoba maples and two silver maples and a sugar maple and a red maple. (It’s a very Canadian yard!) We have two towering Eastern white pines and an equally-towering ash. And an ex-Poplar. Sigh.

I mentioned the untimely demise of my favourite Manotick landmark in my earlier post, too, and included a picture I’d taken with my iPhone to replicate more or less the original picture I’d taken of it. I wanted to take one with my camera, too, as a proper sort of commemoration. I don’t know why I am so drawn to this silo, but I am. Erm, I was.

I’ll be the first to admit, I really like my pictures. I think most of them are pretty good, at least the ones worth posting here. But every now and then, I really nail one. This is one of those times, and possibly one of my favourite photographs ever.

Isn’t that fun? The rubber boots, the rain coat, his relentless hair, and the reflection. It makes me smile every single time I look at it. No doubt, it was a very long week — but a lovely one, too.

You might have noticed I’ve been ignoring the blog lately. Sorry about that. It’s not that I haven’t had my face stuck to the monitor any more than usual, I’ve just been trying various solutions for my photography website. I downloaded a couple of different galleries, but couldn’t find anything I liked. Finally, after many hours of tweaking, I think I’ve got it to a place where I like it. (Take a peek and tell me what you think!) But, it hasn’t left me much time online to do any blogging or socializing. Darn this 24 hour day, there just isn’t enough time to get everything done!!

I did manage to take pictures every day this week, though, and I’m pretty happy with them! I know you saw this one already (several times if you happen to follow my RSS feed!) but for the sake of record-keeping, I’m including it here.

And even though it was a busy week, there was still time for some peekaboo!

A lot of my pictures this week were on a theme of waiting for a spring that seems like it might never arrive…

And this one, too … evergreens are more winter than spring, but I loved the way the long needles gave this one a sense of motion.

I was just playing with the camera when I discovered this weird phenomenon. I call it “reverse bokeh.” Bokeh is the out-of-focus part of the shot — for example, the brown background on the thistle/bur shot above. In this case, the bokeh is in focus and the bottle I was shooting is out of focus.

What really perplexes me about this image is the fully-formed reflection of Lucas in the bottom right corner. I cannot for the life of me puzzle out how that’s happening! For reference, here’s what the bottle itself looks like.

Weird, eh? Half a week later, and I’m still wondering how that’s happening!

And last but not least, my handsome middlest son Simon. He’s going through the fake-smile phase all seven-year-old boys seem to pass through, but this one was close enough to legitimate for me — I love this one! I think the browns work so well with his skin tones, and the blue of his jeans gives a lovely contrast.

Now that I’ve finally got the photography website back to a point I can stop tinkering with it for a while (until I can get a custom logo created, anyway) I’m hoping to play out here on the blog a little bit more. Erm, after I do a family photo session this weekend. And I have to write an election opinion piece for Canada.com. And, um, I should probably talk to the kids and maybe go for a walk or something. I’m thinking the dust bunnies are just going to have to wait another week.

Anybody got any spare time? I seem to keep losing track of mine….

My dump of photos from the Vancouver trip superseded the usual 365 post last week, but I had a few that I snapped before I left and now a week’s worth since I got home, so I figured I’d cram them all together here.

These ones were snapped the weekend before I trundled off across the country. First, the first step in his career path to the NBA, courtesy of a discarded basketball net snagged from someone’s curb! (I love the yellow in the boots, the basketball stand and the jacket.)

Who knew on the first weekend in April I’d find not only flowers in my front garden, but flowers crawling with bees?! P.S. Have I mentioned that I love my new camera?

Again with the yellows. Can you tell I’m digging our emergence from the season of monochrome?

And then, it rained. And rained and rained. Apparently April showers beget April mud.

One of my favourite new pastimes is playing “Ooo, what’s this new thing growing in my garden?” Thanks to my Facebook and Flickr friends, I now know that I have puschkillia and scilla creeping across my lawn.

This is the most photogenic puddle I’ve ever encountered, as captured in the light of a barely-risen sun.

I liked it so much I went back for seconds!

And finally, a dose of cuteness from a quiet morning at the Manotick Public Library.

Don’t you love the bronze statue of the kids? And yes, he’s reading Where the Wild Things Are. How have I made it more than nine years into my parenting career and never read that book before? It’s our new family favourite!

I‘m so happy that I decided to document another year in pictures. I’m sure that I’d’ve been carting my camera around with me everywhere anyway, but it’s giving me lots of inspiration to go out and take lots of different kinds of pictures, which I think is clear from this week’s mishmash of subject matter!

Really, it’s all about the light. I was carrying a load of folded laundry into Lucas’s room last weekend when I noticed how the sun was hitting the shelves in his room, and I literally dropped the basket so I could go get my camera before it shifted too much. (It’s true, I’m just in favour of *any* excuse not to put away folded laundry, surely one of the most onerous and despised of domestic tasks.) Doesn’t this just capture something elemental about childhood, though?

And speaking of Lucas: he may not be potty trained, but at least I’ve got him trained to smile on cue. Personally, I think the latter is a more valuable skill at this point in our family’s life!

This fanciful bit of glass has made it into the 365 project already in TtV form. In this one, I like how the screen door behind it gives the bokeh (the out of focus areas) that square mesh look.

I bought milk in this jug months ago explicitly for the purpose of taking a picture of it… and then it sat on my kitchen counter waiting, waiting, waiting. (No, I didn’t leave the milk in it that whole time.) I tried several variants of cookies near bottle and cookies in front of bottle before I finally had the brainwave of cookies on top of bottle. I think it took me about 30 minutes and as many shots before I finally got this one. Obsessive much? I do love how it turned out though!

This was Wednesday, the first really lovely day of spring, and the boys had broken out the bikes for the first time since we moved here. I love the expressions on their faces, totally candid and unaware that I was even taking their picture.

I found out this week that — horrors!! — my new camera doesn’t fit into my TtV contraption! I’ll have to adjust the neck of it a bit to accommodate some of the fiddly bits that the D7000 has that the D40 doesn’t. Oh well, I don’t mind using the D40 as a dedicated TtV camera in the interim. This is what I call an early version of the CameraPhone. 😉

I’d been walking around outside looking for something to photograph, and when I came back in the house Beloved and the big boys were piled like a heap of puppies on the couch. I pointed my camera at them and snapped, and I like this one so much that I made a gallery canvas of it with a coupon I had. I can’t wait to see how it turns out!

And, since this week was the end of March, I also made a mosaic of all my pictures for the month.

Who knew March could be so lovely? 🙂