Month: June 2012

Holy cow, I just realized this may be the first week in who knows how long that I don’t have a picture of either Lucas or Willie or both! Well, you can see a wee bitty Lucas in this storyboard of our quick and eventually stormy first visit to Petrie Island last week. We had just arrived and had a little picnic lunch and the boys were splashing their feet (we hadn’t brought bathing suits or towels as the beach was not our original destination) when we noticed the threatening clouds coalesce into rain way up the Ottawa River toward Kanata. We watched the rain get closer and closer, and had just decided we had better move back to the car a little faster than anticipated when this wicked wind kicked up a sandstorm, just in front of the pouring rain. We made it in the barest nick of time!

I’ve planted daisies and pink coneflowers in the front garden and sunflowers all over the place, and the damn things just refuse to grow. Who can’t grow sunflowers?! Apparently, me. But there’s a patch of daisies in the back garden that are flourishing and delightfully photogenic.

I’ve been working on honing my off-camera flash skills in anticipation of two flash workshops (well, one lecture and one workshop) that I’ll be attending later this summer. I’ve made lots of test shots, but these ones were the first ones that were interesting enough to share. I put the flash down on the ground amidst the daisies and pointed it straight up at them, then set my camera on manual with a shutter speed fast enough to kill the mid-day light, so the camera would only register what the flash was lighting. I liked it better in B&W, as it gives a more dramatic glow to the daisies, I think.

We got our first CSA share from Roots and Shoots farm this week. Fresh, photogenic and yummy too!

It was a crazy-busy last week of school! First, there was the talent show.

Then, I helped supervise the fourth grade class picnic. I was talking to Tristan’s teacher when she said, “Oh, the baby goats are here!” I thought it was a colloquialism, but no, a parent had arrived with their family pet goat’s two newborn kids. They were only two days old, fresh enough that they still had their umbilical cords attached! I tell ya, stuff like this doesn’t happen in city schools!

And then it was the last day of school. If you look closely, you can see Simon is fighting back tears here – at least I didn’t have both of them bawling this year. Does anyone else’s kids cry instead of dance the last day of school? I suppose I should be happy they love school so much, and with report cards that have B- as the lowest grade between them, it shows.

Just for fun, here’s last year’s version. Huge difference!

And this is the last year there will only be two in the traditional first/last day of school pictures – Lucas starts JK in September!!!

This week’s pictures are almost all about colour and light. I think because I’ve been feeling kind of scattered, I’ve been drawn to the basics – beautiful colour, delicious light.

Speaking of delicious and colours, did you beets come in different colours? When I stopped to admire the orange beets at this stall in the Byward Market, the vendor did a great sales pitch on all the varieties of beets and how you can cook them. I’ve only ever tried pickled beets, and I have to say I’m not much of a fan, but slicing up some of those orange beets and grilling them sounded pretty darn good to me! Maybe I’ll try that one of these days.

Also delicious? Ontario strawberries. I bought some local ones and some trucked-in California strawberries one day, and could not believe the difference in colour, in size and in the heavenly smell from the local ones. The trucked-in ones were barely a shadow of the local ones, even if they were four times the size.

I like the blue of this summer sky juxtaposed against the red of the strawberries. It’s all about the colour!

And then when I’m feeling arty-farty, it’s about no colour at all. Tristan and I rode our bikes down to the Long Island Locks on Sunday morning to admire the fog before it lifted.

Still stubbornly chasing a self-portrait that doesn’t make me cringe. Not there yet…

I love this picture. It makes me snicker. I was driving home near sunset and the way the setting sun was lighting up this herd of cows near Fallowfield caught my eye. I stopped, and as I crouched near the fence, this cow ambled over to take a closer look at what I was doing. It was actually a bit of a tough shot to get because if I exposed for the cow, the beautiful sky would be blown out, but if I exposed for the sky, the cow and foreground were too dark. And if I used the 50mm lens stuck on my Nikon, I couldn’t get enough of the scene in my frame. My iPhone did a pretty good job, eh? I used a terrific app called Camera+ that lets you choose where in the frame you want to expose for, so I moved it around until I had things more or less balanced. (If you want a serious camera app for your iPhone, this is the one I’d recommend.)

I really saved the best for last this week. I did a portrait session with a fabulous family on Saturday, and I’ll save the rest of the story for the blog post I promise I’ll write soon with more photos from this amazingly fun session. Suffice to say, I was a little nervous going in because I was intimidated by the idea of working with teenagers. I needn’t have worried, they were awesome!

I had such a hard time choosing between that last picture and this next one as my photo-of-the-day as I loved them both (and a good number of other shots from that session, too!) How cute is this couple?

And you see that sparkle in them? They’re just like that in person. Lovely, sweet people and I can’t wait to share the other fun pictures from that session!

And now today, back to my kid comfort zone: I’m doing a session on the porch this morning with yet another family of five (is five the new four or what?) ranging in age from 6.5 months to four years old. Yay for babies!