Category: Photography

Shameless, I am. Completely incorrigible.

I just can’t help myself!

30:365 Vote for our Mom!

Hey, if you won’t vote for me, do it for them. Don’t make my brazen exploitation of my kids be in vain! (Truth be told, they were great sports. Tristan’s developing a fine sense of humour, and as soon as I told him it was a grownup joke, he was in without question. I told Simon his sign said people should give him Smarties, and he was in, too.)

And hey, lookit that, because this is my lastest picture for Project 365, I can just segue into my weekly review of that project, too. See, multipurpose exploitation!!

23:365 Melty24:365 Vote for me!! Vote for me!!26:365 Snack time!
27:365 Winter day at the park28:365 Pest

When I could draw myself away from using my children for my own nefarious purposes (and really, why else would one have children in the first place?) I had a bit of an addiction to photos of the Parliament Buildings this week. They’re lovely in any light!

29:365 Parliament in pink
25:365 Mooning the Peace Tower

And (speaking of segues) I’ll likely have at least one more photo to add to the Parliament Building set today. Sounds like President Obama will be arriving on Parliament Hill just about the time I can take my lunch break. Got my camera and my scarf and mitts (it’s snowing, of course) and I think I’ll go check it out. This morning I was walking up Sussex just in time to see a motorcade pulling out of the US Embassy and heading toward the airport – no doubt the Ambassador heading out to greet his boss.

[Edited to add: I was there! Tried to get to Parliament Hill to get pix of people rolling snowballs to stand on to get a better view – does it get any more Canadian than that? – but by the time I left at 11 am pedestrian access was blocked. Instead, stood on the E&C patio at the corner of Colonel By and Rideau and shared an elevated planter with a little boy of 10 or so years old to get a better view over the crowd. Felt the lovely surge of excitement as the crowd cheered and waved when the motorcade past — but was too busy taking pictures to actually figure out which Cadillac One might actually have Barack Obama in it! Will post pix tonight!]

All that, and it’s my parents’ wedding 43rd anniversary today too, something that needs no segue. Happy Anniversary, Granny and Papa Lou!

Day one of begging for votes, and already she’s exploiting the kids

This is what happens at the intersection of “Oh crap, I need to take a photo today!” and “Oh crap, how am I ever going to get enough people to vote to send me to BlogHer?”

24:365 Vote for me!! Vote for me!!

How could you deny this cutie? If you haven’t already, pleasevote for me!!!!

Project 365 week 3 and a Winterlude interlude

I’m having a lot more success being creative with my camera than with my keyboard lately. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, I guess! I’ve been having fun looking for things to photograph, but I had no idea that sorting through the daily snaps (I seem to get between five and thirty a day) to find the keeper is almost as time consuming as coming up with a couple hundred words to post here.

I think my favourite shot this week, from a purely photographic point of view, is this one of a corn field near my house, in about a metre of snow:

18:365 Cornstalks in the snow

Working downtown provides an almost endless series of ideas for my pictures. Yesterday on my lunch hour I popped down to the Rideau Canal for a little bit of Winterlude action. I’d caught a few nice pictures of the icicles hanging outside my bedroom window last week, so thought I’d check out the ice sculptures in Confederation Park. Hard to believe, but in the 20 yrs I’ve lived here, I’ve never done that! But you know what? Meh. They were kind of disappointing. Not just because it was mild and they were melting, but I dunno, I just expected something a little bigger and more spectacular.

I tried a couple of different angles and compositions, but nothing was working. I headed back to work, and walking across the Mackenzie King bridge I couldn’t help but snap a few pictures of the skaters on the Canal. Each day since I’ve been back at work, I’ve been driving the full length of the Canal on my daily commute, and it’s been crying out to me to be photographed. This was just a quick shot, and perhaps one of the most hackneyed and over-exposed shots of Ottawa, but I like it nonetheless.

21:365 Winterlude on the Rideau Canal

I have the same problem with picture-taking that I do with writing: how to make something fresh when I know that nothing I am doing is truly original. With a picture like this, I think I just have to get over that and recognize that some pictures are just nice to have in my collection. And now that I have this one, I can stop trying to compose and snap a photo or seven of the skaters on the Canal as I barrel down Colonel By Drive in rush hour traffic.

For those of you following along, these are the rest of this week’s Project 365 photos. (You can click on any of them to embiggen on Flickr.)

15:365 Picture window16:365 Icicles in the sun (3 of 4)17:365 Toes
19:365 Happy Birthday, Lucas!20:365 Friends and family at Lucas's birthday breakfast

An old blog, a new project

Sheesh, as if two birthdays in one week weren’t enough excitement, there’s more! First of all, today is my first day back at work after my year of maternity leave. More on that some other time, because there’s still more!

Can you believe that four years ago today, I wrote my very first blog post? Yowza! And here we are, more than 1,300 posts and 18,000 (!!!!) comments later, still going on about not much in particular and everything in general.

As if all that weren’t enough, I’m taking the occasion of my blogiversary to tell you about a secret project I’ve been working on for the last little while. Back in November, I was listening to archived podcasts of the CBC radio program Spark. In one particular podcast, they were talking about a guy who took a Polariod a day every day for years; from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. Listening to it tweaked memories of having seen something similar on the web, and when I went looking I found a couple of sites talking about Project 365, the idea of taking one photo per day for an entire year and posting it to the web.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to try it. I mean, you know, I don’t have anything else on my plate right now, right? *grin* And hey, I’ve made it all the way through 11 of 365 days already; how much harder could it get?

My own rules of the project are fairly simple. A photo must be taken every day, but I can slip a little bit on the posting of them. I really want to expand my subject repertoire beyond the boys, and to learn to look at things and ‘see’ them in a new way. And I want to include at least one self-portrait every month or so.

I’ve been toying with ways to show you my pictures. I was thinking of a separate gallery on the blog, or even a separate photo blog. Rather than make extra work for myself, though, I think I’ll just keep uploading them to Flickr. You can see the most recent pix under “Project 365” over there in the sidebar, and I’ll make a post of my favourites each week. And you can see the full set on Flickr, including the captions, explanations and other random thoughts that accompany each photo.

Here are my favourites so far:
2:365 Peek!4:365 Club soda8:365 Lucas in the morning light10:365 Sunlight, snow and shadow11:365 Coloured pencils

(Click on any of the thumbnails to see them full size on Flickr.)

And this is one of my new all-time fave photos. I love the reflection of both Lucas and I in the collander!

5:365 Lucas and me in the colander

Funny, but I am already seeing how this project is getting into my brain. Just like I used to often see the world around me in terms of blog fodder, now everywhere I look I feel like I’m looking through the lens and scanning for photo opportunities!

Fun in the snow

I spent a good chunk of yesterday playing on the computer, thinking about new themes and layouts and whatnot for the blog (what *is* it about January?) and updating to the latest version of WordPress (ack! Change!!) I hate that I have nothing to show for it, aside from no longer being able to comfortably navigate my own dashboard. Sheesh, usually a couple hours online gets me at least a post or two!

So, in lieu of a real post, I invite you to admire these pictures of Tristan and Simon enjoying the toboggans Granny and Papa Lou gave them for Christmas. Bonus: you can admire the nice pix courtesy of my new Fuji FinepixS2000. It’s no dSLR, but it captures some nice moments, no?

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Of course, there’s more on Flickr!

(Nearly) Wordless Wednesday: First skating lessons

They’re Canadian; of course I had to sign the boys up for skating lessons!

They’d never been on skates before. The morning started out with a lot of this:

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After a while of crawling around on the ice, Tristan had progressed to this:

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I honestly never expected him to get to this during his very first lesson:

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But, most of the time was spent more like this:

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Simon was content to stay more or less like this:

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Guess which one said he wants to sign up for hockey lessons next year, and which one said he thinks he’ll stick with swimming?