December 2011

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!

{ 1 comment }

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?????

{ 2 comments }