Postcards from the Mothership

I‘m still on the fence as to whether this is another 365 project, but I did take a picture (or five) each day this week. How can I stop taking pictures when there’s cuteness like this is my life?

Isn’t he so lovely? Oh my, but that boy will break hearts some day.

This last week was mostly about family, even though I did have to eventually drag my sorry self in to work at the very end of the week. I love the expressions on their faces in this one, ranging from indulgence to barely repressed impatience to impish mischieviousness. They’re so patient with me, my menfolk are.

I pulled over on the way home from work when I saw this murder of crows infesting a big tree off Limebank Road. I converted it to B&W, but it was such a flat grey day that it was almost there already.

The idea for this one arrived fully formed in my head one night and I’m pleased that it’s almost exactly as I’d envisioned it. (I can never seem to remember to wear makeup, and I don’t bother to shave half the time in winter, but I do have a soft spot for a multi-coloured pedicure.)(But, I should focus on either the polish or the camera, because while the picture is fun the pedicure is a mess with polish all over the place!)

This one started out as a completely different picture, which failed miserably in the execution, but did inspire me to put this together. I like it very much! The camera is a Polariod EE100, built in the late 1970s and rescued for $5 from a junk shop by me. 🙂 The the scratchy look comes from a texture I found on Flickr. Apparently it (the camera, not the texture) will take Fuji pack instant film — I may have to try it out one day!

Early in the week we had a visit from the boys’ grandparents, Mimi and Pipi. I was taking out the garbage when I noticed Beloved’s dad out there in the snow without gloves, building a snowman to entertain the kids. Have I mentioned how much I love my family?

Grandparents cause the most delightful sorts of disruptions, don’t they?

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?????