Here’s my CBC interview on project 365!

This was so fun!! Thanks a million to host Adrian Harewood and producer Rosemary Quipp for giving me the opportunity to come on to All in a Day this afternoon. I had a blast! I’m sure there is a more elegant way for me to do this, but you should be able click on the link to listen to it. It will open up in a new window (at least it did on my system) and the whole thing is about six minutes long: project-365-on-all-in-a-day * Edited to add: the link to the MP3 of the show is being finicky for me. If it doesn’t work, try right-clicking and opening it in a new window.

184:365 My CBC radio début!

That’s Adrian Harewood on the left, and down the right side the CBC newroom, the exploding cabbage, and Julie, Michel and Rosemary in the control room. (I don’t know if they actually call it a control room, but they’re the behind-the-scenes producers. I am newly enamoured with the idea of a career in media. So wicked cool!)

*It goes without saying, the clip is courtesy of and copyrighted by All in a Day and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, aka the other Mothership! Oh wait, that’s MotherCorp. Nevermind…

Welcome All in a Day listeners!

If this is your first time here, hello! Pull up a chair and grab a coffee.

Curious about project 365? It’s quite simple, really. Take a picture each day for a year. I post mine to Flickr and to this blog, but I have a friend who is doing her 365 on her own, just for the sake of doing it. You don’t need a fancy camera, you don’t need to be a good photographer… you just need to take a picture each and every day for an entire year. Sound too ambitious? What about a Project 52, a photo each week for a year?

It’s a simple concept, but deceptively difficult! There will be many days when you don’t want to take a picture, many days when you are sick to death of the very sight of your camera. But for all the occasional irritation and frustration, I have to say it’s been a wonderful adventure for me, and I’m so glad I decided to try it. 183 days down, 182 to go!

If you’re interested in knowing more about my 365 project, you can read more about it on my 365 page, or on the first post I wrote about the project. The full set of pictures so far is also on Flickr.

Each week I write a post featuring the pictures I’ve taken, with a few thoughts on what went well or poorly that week, what challenged or inspired me, or the technical aspects of some of the photographs . You can read them in the Project 365 category. I’ve also started writing a few posts to share the things I’m learning about photography, and you can read those in the Family Photographer category.

There are some great groups on Flickr if you’re interested in trying a 365 project of your own. I’m not sure I’d’ve made it this far if it weren’t for the inspiration and support from my friends in the 365 Community, and there’s a vibrant if not a little bit loopy community of local photographers in the Ottawa group on Flickr. For a primer on the 365 project, I recommend PhotoJoJo.

Thanks for dropping by, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on Project 365 — feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think!

Project 365: Half-way there!!

Wow, can you believe I’ve made it to Day 183 of my Project 365? One photo every day for half a year!

(Oh my sweet lord, you mean I’m only half way done? I have to come up with ANOTHER 182 photos in the next six months? Yikes!)

Seriously, I am quite proud of myself. I can honestly say I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this project on January 20 of this year. I think it’s pretty safe to say I’ve fulfilled my early goals of “flex[ing] my creative muscles and to learn[ing] to see the world in new ways.” I haven’t missed a single day yet, although there have been a few when I was a day or so late posting them. And I really had no idea when I started that I wouldn’t simply be taking “a” picture each day — in fact, I’m sure I average ten to a dozen for each one that gets posted. Thank goodness for large hard drives!

This project has been one of the most validating, one of the most intriguing, and one of the most irritating things I’ve ever done. There have been more than a few times that I’ve rued the day I set out on such an ill-conceived voyage, and many days when I’ve been delighted that I did. There’s no question my photographic skills have improved, and I think I’ve even learned a thing or two along the way. *grin*

170:365 The Puddle

Here’s five things I’ve learned so far about Project 365, about photography, and about myself:

1. No matter how good or how terrible the picture of the day, there’s another one due in 24 hours. You know those days when you’ve written what you know is a really good blog post, and you just sit on it and admire it a while, letting it enjoy it’s spot of honour at the top of the page for a couple of days? With the 365 project, no matter how outstanding the picture is, you’ve got to replace it the very next day. And, almost without fail, the picture you take the next day is nowhere near as worthy. Inspiration runs in fits and starts. (Corollary: no matter how uninspired you feel, no matter how lackluster your effort, no matter how embarrassingly hackneyed the image, tomorrow is another day and a fresh start. Shake it off and take another picture!)

half way one

2. Amazing pictures lurk in the most mundane places. Some of my favourite images have been of things that I would never have thought to even photograph if I weren’t trolling the universe for photo opportunities every moment of every day. (Yes, it is that bad. I have lost the ability to turn off my photo-seeking radar!) But the constant picture-seeking has led me to put the camera to my face in situations where it would have never occured to me to do, and I’ve become a better photographer for it. Corollary: take your camera EVERYWHERE. You just never know when, you know, your van might catch on fire or something.

half way two

3. Post-processing is your friend. When I started out, I was a purist and a snob. I thought “photoshopped” images were somehow less ‘true’ or worthy than straight out of the camera (SOOC) images. Ah, how foolish and naive I was. More than half of the images I post have at least a touch of post-processing, whether to bring out the colours, adjust the exposure, or erase the dust marks from a dirty lens. It’s fun to play with things like sepia tones and b&w as well. I now believe that Photoshop and other post-processing programs are just another in the arsenal of tools a photographer uses to achieve the image you set out to create. On the other hand, I’m a believer in a light touch. I think you should have the skills to do the lion’s share of the work with the camera, and I’m not fond of the idea of using post-processing to do stuff like slenderize people or remove objects entirely from the frame.

half way three


4. Admire the picture you took, not the picture you missed. This is something I learned from reading the books of Canadian photographer Freeman Patterson, and I think it’s one of the more valuable lessons I’ve learned. You know how you see a good photo opportunity and you take a few shots, but they just don’t come out like you’d planned? I’m slowly learning to evaluate and assess the image on its own merit, and not in comparison to the shot I imagined but didn’t get. When I’m looking at my pictures at the end of the day (an arduous process worth a blog post of its own some day!) I’m often surprised that the shot that I thought at the time was a throw-away turned out to be my favourite of the day — or sometimes one of my all-time faves.

half way four

5. When you’re taking a photo each day, you can’t help but see — really see — the world around you. I think this is one of the most unexpected, and best, benefits of doing the 365 project. I’m no longer oblivious to the world around me. I am amazed by how the light changes by time of day and by season. I see contrasts, shadows and tones everywhere. I see the fine details in architecture, in flowers, in smiles. I crane my neck looking for new angles, new perspectives, new ways to see things — even when I don’t have my camera around my neck.

half way five

It’s kind of ironic, really, that I set out to expand my photographic repertoire beyond simply taking pictures of my family, and yet of all things I’m most pleased about, it’s that I can take better pictures of the boys! The landscapes and the creative shots and the other stuff is fun, but in 30 years, these are the pictures that will really matter.

137:365 Sand and water table

Tune in to my radio début!

How cool is this? A couple of months ago, a producer from CBC radio sent me an e-mail and asked if I’d be interested in coming in to chat about my 365 project. At first, we talked about doing a show around my 100 day mark, but what with it coinciding with Barack Obama’s 100th day in office (sheer coincidence) we put it off to reconsider around the half-way point of the project.

Which brings me to tomorrow, at 3:10 pm, when I’ll be live (gulp!) on CBC Radio One during Ottawa’s afternoon drive show, All in a Day, talking to host Adrian Harewood (squee!!) about Project 365.

When I told my brother about it, he said, “Yeah, I always thought you had the perfect face for radio.”

Drop by here tomorrow for the 365 half-way post, and tune in to CBC Radio One (91.5FM in Ottawa) tomorrow afternoon for my radio début!

The ultimate DIY blog kit

If you’re reading the feed for the first time since Friday (you, on Facebook, I’m talking to YOU!) you’ll have to click through to formally admire my fancy new blog design. Did I mention I did it myself? Yay me!

I’ve been looking for a decent theme for WordPress on and off for the last six months at least. I’ve downloaded and tested almost a dozen different themes, but none of them were quite right. Even when I got the custom blog design in May, while it was a lovely design it just wasn’t *me*, yanno? And, more importantly, there was something in the code that caused Internet Explorer to seize up and shut down entirely, and no amount of trolling the interwebs for solutions proved fruitful.

I was about to download the free theme Neoclassical when I stumbled across a link for this theme by the same designer. It’s called Thesis, and although it wasn’t free, it is by miles and miles the most easily customizable theme I’ve ever seen. Worth every penny!

If you’re even pondering a new blog design, I highly endorse Thesis. Even if you have never mucked about in your blog’s code (over the years, I’ve learned to hack the html, the css and even the php just enough to really screw things up!) you can still give Thesis a lot of customization by making changes to the options on your WordPress dashboard. You can choose one, two or three columns, customize the font size and style (there are about two dozen font options), choose a different font for sidebars or headers or whatever, all with the settings panel in your dashboard. Don’t like it? Just choose a new option.

If you’re feeling braver, they’ve created a really unique system for more in-depth customizations, like the drop-cap at the beginning of each post, and the multi-coloured navigation menu across the top, and my favourite, the rotating pictures in the header. And they’ve got a great help forum with people who actually answer your pleas for assistance, like when I could not for the life of me figure out how to activate the code I’d installed for my archives page. Turns out it was hiding in a drop-down menu on the ‘create a page’ page. That was the only time I got really frustrated through the whole customization experience, knowing I was missing something incredibly simple and yet not being able to figure it out.

Anyway, just a little note of thanks to the Thesis community (I love that there is in fact a community of users!), especially the people in the support forum, the guy who wrote these tutorials, and this great post on adding a custom header. I learned a tonne just by reading their stuff.

Oh, and if you’re used to using the blogroll that used to be in the sidebar, it’s just moved to it’s own page now. It’s the “linky love” page, in blue up above the header image. And if you’re not in the blogroll but you should be, drop me a note and let me know!

(Thesis has an affiliate program, so if you click through from my blog a cookie will be added to your browser and if you do decide to buy it I get a small percentage. But that is not why I wrote this post. I wrote this post because I’m blown away by how awesome this theme is, and I’m so so so happy with the result! Best! Theme! EVAH!)

Worldwide Photo Walk

On Saturday, I was lucky enough to be one of 50 official Ottawa participants (and about another dozen or two unofficial participants!) in Scott Kelby’s WorldWide Photo Walk. (Scott Kelby is a Photoshop guru and writes great books about digital photography.) My good friend Beach Mama was there, too!

It was a fun evening, despite the quick downpour that trapped us under some overhanging branches near the locks for a while. I got to meet some nice people, including a few I’d “met” previously on Flickr, and it was nice just to be out and about downtown on a Saturday night. (The walk made a loose half circle around the building I work, though — certainly not unfamiliar territory for me. And yet, I think I found a few new perspectives!)

Worldwide Photo Walk Mosaic


1. Peacekeepers at the gallery, 2. O-train, 3. Cafe, 4. Parliament, 5. Photographer, 6. Music bus, 7. Fountain, 8. Through the gate, 9. Train station reflected in chateau, 10. Statue, 11. Keyhole, 12. Shadow, 13. Over the locks and through the bridge, 14. Water over the locks, 15. Gears, 16. Anna

I took about 200 pictures, but these ones were the best of the lot. I am allowed to upload one or two to the official site, but I can’t decide which ones I like best. Will you help me choose? They’re all numbered in the links below the pictures — let me know your faves!

(You can see the full set on Flickr, or visit the Ottawa Photo Walk group pool on Flickr to see how real photographers do it!)

Oooo, pretty shiny new blog…

So here it is! (You, over there on Google Reader — click through and admire the fancy new design please!)

There’s more work to be done, but I’m tired of hacking it on my test site. I would have thought that early Saturday morning was the perfect time to tinker, except there’s thunder in the background and the power keeps flickering and if I don’t have Bob the Builder on DVD as a distraction, no work will be done here today!

So what do you think? The header is a set of rotating images, so every time you refresh or click a new page, it changes. There’s only half a dozen or so now, but I’ll add more for variety as time (snicker) permits.

I love it! The only thing I’m still waffling on is the sidebars. I do want two, and I think they’re a little less cluttered than before, but if I can’t find a way to clean them up a bit I might just go back to one.

And I did it all by myself!! If you are looking for a new blog theme, I am in love with this one. It’s called Thesis, and it is hands down the best WordPress theme I’ve ever found. I’ll write more about that later, too!

(Thesis has an affiliate program, so if you click the link to check it out, my cookie is added to your browser.)

Like I said, I’m still tweaking and tinkering, but it’s mostly done. I think! Do you like how the photos are framed? I thought that was cool. And the colours in the navigation menu above (with home, contact me, etc) are taken from the text in the banners, which in turn is taken from the images themselves. And of course the images are all mine, most from my 365 project. Scroll down, I love how the older posts are displayed near the bottom, too (if you clicked through from a feed, you’ll have to click the header or “home” button to get to the main page and see how older posts are displayed).

Please let me know if you’re having any troubles with the display or with the page loading, or if anything looks “off” to you, and if you see something, I’d be grateful if you let me know which browser you’re using, too. I’m particularly concerned about the overall size — on one of our computers, the very rightmost edge of the banner and some of the right sidebar text gets lost, and you have to scroll sideways to see it. I’ll have to find a fix for that if it’s more than just our computer that does it.

Ahhhh, it feels good to have a design that I feel is completely “me” again…

Project 365: colours, contrasts and serendipitous mistakes

My brain has been a little bit too full this week, stuffed with insurance claims and residual values for the van, and with css and hex colours for the blog redesign, and with a million other silly little things. Thank goodness I’m on vacation as of this afternoon — I could really put those pesky eight to ten hours a day that work demands to better use! All that to say, the picture-taking hasn’t been my primary (wait for it!) focus this week. Har har har.

Ahem, anyway… I’ve been reading a steady stream of photography books, sucking up ideas, concepts and tips and filing them away in unoccupied nooks and crannies in my brain. I just finished the highly rated and highly recommended Learning to See Creatively by Bryan F. Peterson. He gives ideas like “Envision the world from the perspective of a leaf that’s just fallen off a tree.” I loved it! A really great book if you’re feeling a little stuck in the creativity department, with some stunning photography. Not your standard “to achieve minimum depth of field, use a focal length of…” tutorial. This picture was loosely inspired by that, imagining the perspective of a busy toddler at the park. Plus, I liked the purple of his shorts and hat with the lime green of his shirt!

172:365 A long way up

I love my daisies. I love bokeh. What could be better than bokeh daisies? (Bokeh – rhymes with mocha – is the character of the out-of-focus parts of your image. I’m going to put up a whole Family Photographer post on bokeh soon!) Anyway, I was really happy with how this turned out — watch for it to play a part in the fancy-schmancy new blog design to be revealed in the next week or so!

173:365 Bokeh daisies

A few years back, they shut down the Stittsville Flea Market, and Sunday afternoons just haven’t been the same since. On our way out to retrieve our personal belongings from the van (sniff) we stopped at a little echo of the Stittsville flea market and poked around for a bit. Take a look at the bottom-right image — that is by far the largest pile of scissors I have ever seen. And the top-right image got a little bit cut off in the mosaic, but the base says “#1 Mom!” Isn’t she frightful horrid adorable?

174:365 At the flea market

On these busy days, I’m honing a new specialty: the 365-dinner combo!

175:365 BBQ night

We were on our way home from swimming lessons and I was done like dinner, but I still didn’t have a decent picture. I don’t think I’d even put the viewfinder to my face that day… a new record for sure. On our way out of the sportsplex, I said to Tristan, “Go sniff those flowers.” Bless his little heart, he neither questioned me nor even cast a glance askew, he just patiently sniffed the flowers (don’ tell him they’re weeds!) while I took the picture. I do love my boys so…

176:365 Sniff

Although it has been a questionable summer at best, we lucked out on Wednesday morning with a glorious day of sunshine, perfect for a couple of hours at the park. I brought my telephoto lens and took almost 100 pictures, a few of which turned out rather well. I chose this one as the shot of the day because I liked the colours and the composition.

177:365 At the park

And, because I was out of the way and less obviously in their faces with my camera, I managed to get some nice portraits of each of the the boys at play.

At the park: Lucas


At the park: Simon


At the park: Tristan

(Tristan is wearing a fleece vest in the summer sun because it makes him “look like a Pokémon trainer.” It’s hard to argue with that kind of logic.)

This last one is something a little different. It’s an abstract. Can you guess what it is? It caught my eye because of the contrasting blue and orange colours, and because of the really interesting texture. I shot this one with my telephoto lens, zoomed all the way out to 200mm for a close-up.

178:365 Abstract with rust

It’s the safety railing between levels in the parkade where I’ve parked at least two dozen times since I started the 365 project, possibly one of the nastiest places I go on a regular basis. I don’t know why I never noticed it before, but as soon as I pulled up and the headlight illuminated the corrosion on the railing I thought it would make an interesting picture. I wasn’t expecting the background to fade out to black because it was reasonably well-lit in there. In fact, I set up the shot so the red car down 1/2 level would be the out-of-focus background for the railing, giving even more colour constrast — or so I thought. I kind of like how it turned out, though.

And any day when you get your 365 picture in the can before 7 am is a good day!

Blog out loud!

I think this is such a neat idea! Lynn of Turtlehead has been working tirelessly to set up what I think is one of the coolest bloggy events I’ve heard of: Blog Out Loud. She’s invited a bunch of Ottawa bloggers not just to meet and schmooze (or, in my case, blush and toe the carpet), but to read some of their favourite posts out loud.

How cool is that?

And check out this list of participants! There’s Beach Mama and Andrea and Julie and Zoom and XUP, just to name a few. Oh, and me too!

Blog Out Loud will be next Thursday, July 23, at the Raw Sugar Café. If you can make it out, I’d love to see you there! And if you’re feeling really keen, I see that Lynn is looking for a few volunteers to make sure things run smoothly.

A bloggy work in progress

So I’m redesigning the blog again. I know, I know, it’s just been a couple of months since the last one. Even though I really like the design (and frankly love certain elements of it) it’s just not working for me — both metaphorically and literally.

It’s the literally not working problem that’s getting me down — there’s a bug with Internet Explorer 6 that causes the browser window to shut down entirely when you try to scroll sometimes, and though I’ve spent a month or two poking through more code-hacking forums than any self-respecting girl should admit to, I can’t find a fix. (I’ve seen it argued that IE6 itself is a bug, and I’m inclined to agree, but since it’s what I’m stuck with at work, and what some of my favourite readers are using, I’ve got to find a way to make it work. At home, I’m all Firefox all the time.)

Previously, I’ve done a big surprise “ta da” moment with the blog designs, but this time I’m getting you on board at the design phase. The blog is for you as much as it’s for me, so this time you get a say. Well, technically, you get “to” say — I’ll listen, but I don’t promise I’ll take all of your suggestions into account. Think of it like a big bloggy focus group!

After a quite a lot of searching, I found the perfect theme-building kit. I’ll tell you more about that on the reveal (I love it, though, truly and madly) and I have the basic structure in place. There’s lots of variables to play with, though, so let me know what you think. Here’s the kind of things I’m considering:

  • banner: one of the things I’m most excited about with this design is the ability to have rotating banner images across the top, so each time you refresh you get a new header. (Right now, I’ve only got a half a dozen made up, but at least it’s a bit of variety.) They’re made up of some of my favourite photographs, which is way cool, but it’s posing a few design challenges. I’m afraid of photo overkill, for one thing. And it’s difficult to pull a colour scheme for the rest of the blog out of the header because it’s always changing. And finally, I’m worried about consistency in the ‘look’. What do you think?

  • sidebars: one or two? The whole reason I moved to this design was because I coveted two sidebars. Right now, though, the design seems a little cramped. Thoughts?

  • sidebar content: do you even look at all that crap? Back in the day, I loved widgets and whatnot cluttering up the sidebar, and when I visit a new site I still find myself scanning the sidebars to get a feel for the place. But now I wonder if too much clutter doesn’t take away from the content?

  • fonts: do you find the current fonts readable? What do you think about coloured headlines on posts? And, for the design-conscious among you, if I’m using a sans-serif font in the body, which I favour, do I need to use a sans-serif in the post titles? Should I match my fonts across the site?

  • colours: going back to my original blogspot roots, I favour a clean white background. One of the things I wanted from the last redesign was multi-coloured sidebar boxes. I like the way they worked out, with a hint of colour, but they’re still not what I’d envisioned. What do you think of a really colourful site? Does it detract from the content? There’s a fine balance between colourful and cartoonish (or garish) and I see a lot of sites that trip rather spectacularly over that line. Do you have a preference?

  • photographs: are the pictures too big in the posts? I’ve been putting them at 500 pixels across in the new design, but they seem pretty cramped. I’m trying to balance the best way to feature the pictures against having them ‘shout’ and seem crowded

    • .

Anyway, these are just some of the things I’m chewing over. Your comments, observations and random thoughts are greatly apprecaited!!

Have you ever bought a house that hasn’t been built yet? Not only do you have to find the layout that’s right for you, but you have to make sure the paint in the kitchen matches the paint in the dining room while going with the new countertops, and the countertops have to match the fancy tiles on the backsplash, which can’t clash with the drawer pulls and cupboard hardware. But the dining room looks onto the hallway, which opens onto the bedrooms, and so you have to coordinate those colours as well.

That’s what I’m feeling like with this blog design. I’m giddy with the opportunity to build EXACTLY the blog design I wanted from the ground up, but am currently paralyzed by all the potential and possibilities. So please, save me from myself and talk to me about blog design!