Project 365: In which the TtV really gets out of hand!

This week, I went a little crazy with the through-the-viewfinder (TtV) shots. Five of seven days, in fact, the picture of the day was a TtV shot. This is largely for two reasons: first, I’ve been running out of ideas, and I think the TtV shots give things a fresh perspective. Second, I’ve been running out of daylight and too lazy to haul out my lighting gear, and the brightest room in my house, the kitchen, can be the least photogenic. TtV seems to be a lot more forgiving.

This set of pictures of Lucas, for instance, was taken in the kitchen.

This portrait of Katie was taken in the kitchen, too. I didn’t, but I could have called it “Portrait of an unimpressed yellow dog in a yellow room.”

(It still makes me chortle when I look at it. Poor ol’ Katie, she puts up with a lot, as that look in her eyes clearly tells you.)

This one wasn’t taken in the kitchen, it was taken last Friday in my new office on my second day of work. On Flickr, I described it like this: “I really, really love my new job, from the people to the location to the tasks to the way the light streams in my window onto my happy little corner of the world.”

These two pictures I took because the big excavator caught my attention and it was Sunday so there was nobody around to tell me to get away with my camera. (After three boys, i’ve developed a fascination with large construction equipment I might not have otherwise cultivated.)

I like this one in particular. I think it has an otherworldly, post-apocalyptic quality to it that’s grown on me over the week.

Speaking of post-apocalyptic (how often do you get to make that segue?!) I took these stark pictures of bare trees reaching into a cloudy sky because I was trying to capture the bleakness of November before we move on to a December that I hope will be populated with warm holiday shots, bright Christmas lights and — sooner rather than later, I hope! — lots of shots of fresh-fallen snow. But I’m quite pleased with how these ones turned out.

So much so that I really couldn’t decide which of these two was my favourite. At first, I designated this one as the shot of the day, then I switched it to the one above at the last minute. I like the way the branches fill the frame, and the absolute lack of colour — even though I didn’t adjust the colour or saturation on these at all, they’re pretty much straight out of the camera, save for cropping.

In (ahem) stark contrast to the bleakness from yesterday, last Saturday I was delighted to find an actual flower to photograph. Well, it’s actually a weed, but a flowering weed nonetheless. See?

And finally, my other non-TtV shot of the week. This one is another in the series of shots that ended up being far from what was originally intended. In fact, I was going to take some macro shots of the typewriter keys, but I was having a little too much “help” and this is what I ended up with.

I think this is a lot better than a macro of the keys would have been, anyway. And now I can save the macro-key idea for another dark, dreary day’s last-minute shot!