Thousand Picture Project: Spectacular sunsets and snapshots

You know how creativity ebbs and flows? Lately, I seem to be all gummed up. I’m really enjoying taking pictures, and I always enjoy writing. Well, almost always! But my head seems far more full of ideas and images than I am capable of turning into prose or pictures. I have creativity constipation! Anybody got any Muselax?

Anyway, despite that, when I look back on the pictures I’ve taken this week, I’m pretty happy with them. On Friday night for my photography class, we were supposed to do an in-class theory session but the light was just so spectacular that we went on another walkabout around Nepean Point. I’m starting to get comfortable shooting in manual now, and even prefer some of the straight-out-of-the-camera shots better than the ones I play with in Photoshop.

The timing was perfect to capture this silhouette of Jacques Cartier, his astrolab, and a few of his friends.

We were rewarded with this view from the Point, just at the foot of the statue above:

Then I turned around, and the flaming sunset had set the windows of the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings ablaze. (How lucky are we to have this stuff in our city?)

We walked back down the Point and onto the road where the Alexandra Bridge meets St Patrick. Did you know there’s a little lookout down there? In all the time I’ve spend wandering around that part of Ottawa, I had no idea it was there. And look how the Alexandra Bridge points right into the setting sun! (This one messes with my sense of geography. In summer, the sun sets due west, but Gatineau is north of Ottawa. Hmmmm….)

And this is what I mean about straight out of the camera versus post-processing. I tweaked this one because my exposure was a bit off (damn manual exposure is a lot of work!) and although I really like the composition, I think I overtweaked the contrast a bit.

You know what else is fantastic about late-spring-into-early-summer in Ottawa? The return of flea market season!!! Yay! On Sunday we trekked out to the Antrim flea market to poke around. There was a guy selling a table full of absolutely gorgeous old Yashica twin-lens cameras, which must have been somebody’s collection. He was selling them for $25 each, and at first I thought I could use them for through-the-viewfinder work, but the viewfinders were pretty foggy. I hemmed and hawed for a bit, wanting one just for the sake of having one, Beloved ribbing me the whole time that we truly do not need to add to our vintage camera collection. I stepped away to chase the boys for a bit, and when I went back someone had snapped up the whole collection, probably a dozen or more cameras.

The stinger? I looked online when we got home, and they sell for $75 to $200. Oy! Foregone beauty AND foregone profit. Damn!!

But, at least I got this… it’s the brilliant midday sun shining through a set of sherry / wine glasses onto a white table cloth. I love the refractions!

And the colours of this paintbox were irresistible, too.

The boys were playing with bubbles at my folks’ place on the weekend, and I didn’t realize until after I’d posted this shot to Flickr that you can see a little me reflected in the bubbles. Fun!

This last shot is not very strong from a compositional or technical standpoint. And yet, it’s my favourite picture of the week. Why? Because it makes me smile every time I look at it. I came down the stairs on my way to work and found all three boys scratching Katie’s belly. You can see by the expression on her face how she felt about that! And miraculously, they kept being cute long enough for me to grab my camera and take this snapshot. Not a perfect picture by any stretch of the imagination, but a perfect moment for sure.

And! Happy birthday to my sweet Katie dog, who turned 11 years old this week.