Month: January 2012

Oops, has it really been a week since I’ve put up a new blog post? That has to be a new record for me. Sorry about that, I’ve been knocked on my keister by a cold and a migraine and kindergarten registrations and the preparations for birthday season, which begins here this weekend.

I did still manage to keep taking pictures, though! The absolute highlight of my week was spending some time with the kind and talented Ottawa photographer Christine Denis, assisting while she took portraits of these nine-day-old twin boys. *melt*

Isn’t it almost enough to make you want to have more babies? They were so calm and docile and delicious, and I learned so much about newborn posing and portraiture from Christine. Wow, is it ever a lot of work, but oh my goodness, how adorable is this?

I’ve got a few more I hope to share later in the week, but I think those were my two favourites from the session. From warm and fresh to old and cold — I was delighted to find what I think is a pretty unique view of the Peace Tower when I was out on a walk downtown. This is the ruins of the former carbide mill on Victoria Island, build in 1892 by Thomas “Carbide” Wilson. I noticed the windows and shifted my perspective back and forth a bit (“zoomed with my feet” as they say) until I had the Peace Tower lined up in one of the windows.

We visited friends who foster reptiles on the weekend, and they introduced us to Edgar, the Florida King Snake. Tristan, Lucas and I thought he was pretty cool, but Beloved feels about snakes pretty much the same way Indiana Jones does. (“Snakes? Why does it have to be snakes?”)

The rest of the week was all-iPhone, all the time. You know I love my vintage typewriter, and I finally got a Hipstamatic print of it that I like.

This was one of the days I was home sick. It was literally the easiest shot I could compose, short of lying on the couch and shooting a picture of the ceiling. Lucas draws at least half a dozen or so pictures each day, lately almost always of characters from Club Penguin (which he is not, ironically, allowed to play.)

I’ve had these silk daisies as a centrepiece on the table for nearly a year and taken quite a few pictures of them, but never any I liked enough to keep and none that capture what I like about the colours and the glass vase and the bits of sea glass in the bottom of it. The late-afternoon light was hitting it just right, though, and I’m really happy with how this one came out.

And finally, a shot from the snowy, blustery drive home yesterday. I don’t know why I am so fascinated with rural mailboxes, but I am. Maybe I was a country girl in a former life? I called this one “mailbox minimalism”. I don’t ordinarily like the dark frame film on Hipstamatic but I think it works well for this one.

I promise to be a little more diligent about getting you some fresh content for next week!

My friend Heather thinks I owe you a retraction. Remember this post, where I congratulated myself for my level-headedness and maturity in managing to pull myself out of a frenzy of consumeristic covetousness and NOT impulse-buy a new iPhone 4S? She thinks I owe you a retraction because I went out and actually did buy the new iPhone four days later. I think I deserve a medal for waiting for four whole days. And pro haggler that I am, I managed to wrangle a deal on my data plan so that I’m actually paying less per month for wireless than I was for our ancient non-data-plan Krazr, so we’ll save the price of the new iPhone in about a year and a half. Yay!

And oh my sweet lord, what a treat is the new iPhone 4S! I have only barely begun to figure out the voice-activated Siri stuff, but the camera? Wow! Well here, don’t let me tell you — let me show you!

“Hey, look Willie! Mom got a new iPhone!”

I went out for a drive on Sunday to take some pictures and started playing with Hipstamatic, an app I’ve had on my iPhone for more than a year but never warmed to. I’m kinda digging it now! (Do you like the digital sticky tape holding the collage together? I added that in Photoshop.)

This was the view from my office window when the sun hit an icy tree on Sussex Drive, also via Hipstamatic.

And this one is straight-up out of the iPhone, no app required. (I have been coveting a wide-angle lens for my Nikon so I can do this kind of big-nose distortion, but the iPhone’s angle of view is just wide enough to satisfy my creative urge for now!)

And speaking of the Nikon, I didn’t abandon it entirely this week. I’m glad I had it with me on Monday when this spectacular sunrise lit up the sky over the Byward Market. No colour enhancement on this one, I just pointed my camera and clicked.

You might have seen this one in my post yesterday. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but only recently had enough skill to be able to make it come out like I planned in my head. The text is actually added after the fact in Photoshop, which means I can put up just about any message I want. I’m thinking it might make a fun new blog header one of these days.

As I said on Flickr, stand by for the “I am so much more than just a mom with a camera” version. 😉 Speaking of which, I’ve made a few allusions recently to Internet drama. I thought you guys would get a kick out of this. I got tangled up in a war of words on a Flickr forum recently with Ottawa photographer Paul Couvrette, who called me a “mamarazzi” and criticized me for (among other things) undercharging for prints and making my pictures available online. While the criticism stung at the time, especially since it was more or less unprovoked and definitely overly vicious and personal, the apology he later posted was laugh-out-loud funny. I had no idea at the time, but apparently he had “personified [Dani] as an icon of the ill direction towards which I believe photography may well be headed.” Nice, eh? I’ve never been called an icon of anything, let alone the downfall of an entire industry. And I thought I was just taking pictures because it made me happy. So if I hike my prices next year, you can blame Paul Couvrette. 😉

Mostly, though? I still just love taking pictures.

And hey, this made me feel a lot better. I got my Getty Images sales statement at the end of the week, and this picture from October apparently ran in the Wall Street Journal during December.

And this picture of Willie was bought by a company that makes greeting cards and calendars with titles like “Napping Cats of 2012.”

Hmmm, can you guess which one I’ll be adding to my “as seen in” portfolio? I mean, the WSJ is great, but the Napping Cats of 2012 calendar? Does it get more prestigious than that?!

After a notable absence, winter has arrived with a vengeance in Ottawa recently. I can’t wait to get out and start taking pictures of the great snow dump we got yesterday — but I might wait until the temperatures warm up a bit beyond the current minus 30 with the wind chill. Brrrr!

But heck, winter lasts a long time here in the world’s snowiest capital city, so you kind of have to suck it up and get outside and enjoy it. Like this!

And then you have to stand by patiently and look cute while your mom takes your picture. Again.

Or maybe you ham it up a bit and hope she’ll go away and let you get back to playing in the snow.

And then you can go back to this.

Speaking of getting out in the winter, can you believe I’ve never walked the full loop from the Interprovincial Bridge to the Portage Bridge and back? It’s a gorgeous five kilometre loop and takes just a little bit less than an hour to walk, even if you stop every now and then to take a picture or five. I’ve vowed to try to do it once a week, weather be damned, until my jeans are feeling a little less snug.

(I’ve also discovered the Pano app for my iPhone. How have I missed this before now? This one was taken on the Portage Bridge, facing Parliament Hill.)

More Peace Tower shots. I can’t help myself!

From icy and blue to warm and soft — you might remember this shot from earlier in the week. Tristan spontaneously asked if he could read Lucas a bedtime story, and then proceeded to read to him for half an hour. This one is a keeper.

Heh. The boys pointed out that not only do my multicoloured toes match my jammies, but they both match my coffee cup.

Photo tip: to catch the cat staring directly into your lens, compose your photo and then scritch your fingernail against the side of your lens. Snap! (There’s nothing I can suggest to erase the vague look of disdain, though!)

(If you read an earlier version of this post, there was some misinformation from a hacked account in here. Carry on, folks, nothing to see here.)

I’ll let ee cummings have the last word on this one. 🙂

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?