Category: Photo of the Day

I mentioned yesterday that I had one last 365 photo from last week to blog about. It’s got not one but two backstories attached to it, though, so I figured it needed a post of its own.

My mom knows I love pussywillows, and she buys them for me just about every spring. I don’t know why I started liking them so much, but now I love them because my mom gives them to me. 🙂

So a few days ago, she brought me a giant bundle of pussywillows, but these ones had something I’d never seen before. Green bits! And roots! See?

They’re easily the most lovely pussywillows yet. I was so intrigued by the sprouting bits and the roots, that I decided I was going to plant them in the yard. I mean, the only thing better than being gifted with pussywillows each year is picking yer own, right? And so I started reading about it, and it turns out they’re dead easy to grow, but I’ll never be able to plant these ones.

You see, pussywillows are in fact a part of the willow family, and willow trees and septic beds do not get along. Willows love water, and their invasive roots get into the pipes of a septic bed and gum it up. And frankly, I do *not* want to antagonize the septic system!

I’m thinking maybe I can plant them in a container or something and keep their roots bound in a pot. Any ideas?

Anyway, as I said, this photo has not one but two backstories to tell. When I posted it on Flickr, I got what is a rare and delightful treat: a complete stranger made a constructive comment with a helpful suggestion on how to improve the image.

Kate said:

Your Mom is a treasure! This is a stunning shot and creatively cropped. I too am on a septic bed and these darling bushes love water and are best planted somewhere else for sure. I would like to make a suggestion..if you don’t mind..and if you do I will apologize in advance… If this was my shot I would clone out the fuzzy flower on the far right as it seems distracting to my eye. The branch on the right offers simplicity to the shot which seems a bit lost because of the flower. Its all subjective so I hope you don’t mind my saying this. This is a shot I would hang of my wall.

And damn if I didn’t totally agree with her. I couldn’t even look at the image without that darn bushy willow flower dragging my eye down, practically flaunting its annoying presence, so much so that I couldn’t see how I’d not noticed it before.

As facile as I’ve become with some aspects of Photoshop, though, cloning things out was not in my repertoire. Fortunately, I’m married to someone who teaches Photoshop for a living — how convenient is that? — and I finally managed to coerce him into teaching me how to properly use the clone stamp and patch tools.

And voilà — pussywillows redux:

She’s right, isn’t she? It’s so much cleaner without that extra fuzzy green puff in the bottom right corner. I know, if you look closely, you can see remnants of the clone stamping — but the kids were all “feed us dinner” on me, and seemed to think that eating was more important than me finessing my pussywillows, so that’ll have to do for now.

So the good news is, my mom IS awesome and I love that she gives these to me. The bad news is, I can’t plant them in the yard after all. The good news is, I learned a new trick or two.

That’s a lot of mileage out of a couple of pussywillow branches!

I‘ve noticed two huge differences between my first 365 project and this one.

The first is that I’m taking less pictures of places and things, and more pictures of people. I think this is partly situational; when I was working near the Market, a daily walk at lunchtime gave me endless photographic inspiration. But more than that, I think it’s a comfort thing. I like taking pictures of people more now because I’m better at it.

The second difference I’ve noticed in this iteration of my 365 project is that I’m a LOT less anxious about it. I was poking through my 365 archive and had to laugh at the sheer amount of angst I was feeling about the project at this point the first time around. The new camera certainly helps me feel inspired about picture-taking, as does the Mothership Photography thing, but mostly I’m just not finding it as difficult as I did the first time around.

And now, with a complete lack of segue or even the mildest hint of a transitional paragraph, here’s the how the world looked through the viewfinder this week.

We’ve been patiently waiting for the weather to turn mild so we can enjoy walking into the village more often. We finally made it out for a wander with Beloved’s visiting family last weekend. We wandered about Manotick, from the Mill to the Gingerbread Shop to the Toy Shop to GT Boutique and back. It’s going to be delightful in the summer, as it was still a little, um, brisk, to be out in the cold March wind.

See? Cold. And this was one of the warmer days of the week — at least it got above freezing when the sun came up this day.

Another frosty walk brought me to this carriage house on Long Island, not too far from our place. I’m curious about the history of this place. I think it belongs to one of the original houses on the island, which was scrubby farmland for the most part until development started in the 1950s and 1960s.

This one is from the other end of the Rideau River. I was at a course for a couple of days this week in the Old City Hall building on Sussex, and went out on my lunch break to snap a few pictures. I liked this lattice fence on the bridge to Maple Island — such a gorgeous area. It was already a monochromatic kind of picture because of the white fence and snow and dark branches, so I pushed it all the way into B&W to emphasize the shapes and tones and depth of the layers.

From monochromatic to technicolour — I can never resist pictures of little fingers at work. (I know, I know, I cut his nails about 10 minutes after I took this one!)

This is one of my favourites for the week. This is Beloved’s dad, drawing ducks at Lucas’s request. He’s just as kind and warm and sweet as he seems in this picture!

This post is getting rather rambly, and I’ve got one more picture that begs for a post and some excessive rambling of its own. Stand by for the pussywillow post-script!

So I am head-over-heels in *love* with my new camera!

For those of you who missed it last week, I finally upgraded my trusty and well-loved Nikon D40 last week. Way back when we bought it in 2007, we waffled over the upgrade to a D80, but it seemed like more camera than I would ever need. And quite frankly, it was the right choice at that time.

Over the years, though, I started to run into a few limitations on the D40. It wouldn’t auto-focus my favourite lens, for one thing. It has a very limited ISO range for another. And not that I use flash a lot, but I was intrigued by the idea of using my pop-up flash to trigger my hot-shoe flash remotely — something the D40 could not do but the 90 could.

It was about half way through my first 365 project in 2009 that I started to actively covet the D90. I couldn’t justify the expense, though, when the D40 was doing 80% of the job I needed from it. Over the last six months, though, it has become increasingly apparent that the D40 is getting a little, um, tired. North of 30,000 shutter clicks, and I’m not sure it’s registering saturated reds and yellows anymore, and the autofocus is getting noticeably soft.

I proposed that I reinvest some of my blog and photography money into a new camera, and Beloved agreed it was time. And then I started looking around and discovered this awesome new camera that I’d been hearing about since it was released by Nikon last autumn, the D7000.

And I wanted one. Badly! In what I thought was a brilliant plan, I used Beloved’s own tactic of mentioning the idea of investing in a D7000 over a D90 every time there was a lull in the conversation for three days.

“Hi sweetie, how was your day? So, did you think about the D7000 yet?”

“Can you pass me the ketchup, please? And did you read that DP Reviews l link I sent you about the D7000?

“Wake up, you’re late for work! And hey, did you know Ken Rockwell calls the D7000 the best digital camera EVER?”

Yeah, it’s totally annoying. And it totally works. That’s how he got his laptop, and BluRay player, and flat-screen TV. He’d been annoying the snot out of me about the iPad, and so we made an unholy deal where I could get the D7000 if he could get an iPad 3 when they come out in September. Oy, what a family!

Do you speak camera? The D7000 has a 16MP sensor, while the D40 has a 6MP sensor. The D7000 has 39 focus points where the D40 has 3. And where the D40 has an ISO range of 200 to 800 (it actually goes to 3200 but I have yet to get a decent picture above 800 even using Lightroom’s noise reduction features) the D7000 has a dizzying 100 to 25,600 range. Be still my low-light-loving heart!!

It is, in short, the most! amazing! camera! ever!

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, though, so all the technical specs in the world don’t matter until you take that camera for a test drive. And here’s what that beauty can do.

This is Tristan enjoying a hot chocolate on our annual pilgrimage to the Log Farm sugar shack.

And Simon, also at the Log Farm.

Here’s my tree-climbing, rope-swinging adventure boy in crisp and lovely detail.

Even the best camera can’t compensate when you choose a depth of field too shallow to keep your ensemble in focus, but a good camera only goes so far! 😉 Still, I’m happy with this capture of the boys and their cousins, who spent most of March Break with us.

At the other end of the generational spectrum, we also had a visit from Beloved’s family this weekend. Ron is a fisherman par excellence, and Dee cooked us up what seemed like about 10 lbs of fresh whitefish. Don’t you just love houseguests who arrive with arms laden with delicious food and take over your kitchen to cook it?

I love love love this next picture. I love the luminosity of it, the warmth in the pose and the background, and the sheer joy of it. All the kids love “Uncle Beloved” because they know he’s just a bigger version of them, totally a kid at heart.

The weather has been mild and melty, and the Rideau River is cresting this weekend. Last weekend, the water was rushing at Watson’s Mill even with the sluice gates fully opened.

And to my delight, the geese have returned from their winter sojourn. It must really be spring now! Funny, I have always noticed the geese on their fall migration, but only in living so close to the river have I noticed them on their spring return.

(This is a crazy-deep crop of an image I took with my camera braced on my car, standing in the road about 50m from the river. The segment you see here is probably less than 1/5 of the original capture — and I’m thrilled with the amount of detail!)

As you can see, it was a ridiculously busy week, but a perfect one to take the new camera for a test drive!

I‘m still catching up on my 365 pictures. I’ve been taking them every day, it’s just hard to find time to write the weekly wrap posts! This week’s photos include a trip, a party, and a most excellent new toy.

I told you about the trip already, but here’s a recap of the pictures that made the cut as the photo of the day. First, this shot from the window of the plane as we’re ascending out of Ottawa. This is the Ottawa river, just a little bit west of town.

And a few dozen pictures of Lucas as he obstinately refuses to pose for me.

We rushed home from Toronto to make it in time for Tristan’s 9th birthday party the very next day.

We’ve been having some wretched late-winter weather lately. Rain, then freeze, then snow, then more rain. In fact, we had so much rain late last week that we had seepage in the basement — ironically, in the opposite corner of the house from the mold issues we had last fall. Luckily, this is not our yard — but it shows the conditions pretty well.

After a successful transition to the big boy bed, Lucas “helped” me disassemble the crib this week. I’ve managed to move it to the garage, but I just can’t bring myself to turf it entirely yet. Knowing me, I’ll probably let it sit there for another year or two before I actually have the heart to get rid of it.

Poor Katie. This is an old obedience-school trick we learned, back when she was still a rambunctious pup. She has to wait for permission to eat the cookie, which she does, but never without the pained and long-suffering expression you see here.

Between the birthday party shot above and this next one of a cut flower in my mom’s kitchen, there’s a lot of yellow going on. It was right around this point that I realized that my old D40 was having the same sort of trouble processing yellows that it was having processing saturated reds a few months ago.

In the end, it’s not a bad picture, but I had such a hard time managing the colour that Beloved and I started to seriously discuss replacing the aging but well-loved D40. It’s approaching 35,000 shutter activations and is nearly four years old. I adore the camera, but it’s becoming a little, um, eccentric, especially in challenging situations with a lot of saturated colour, and I think the autofocus is starting to wander.

I’ve been coveting a D90 since I started my first 365 project back in 2009, but it seemed financially imprudent to upgrade when the D40 was satisfying almost all of our photographic needs. The D90 has really dropped in price lately, and I had a little money put aside specifically from blog and photography earnings, so Beloved and I agreed that it was time to consider an upgrade. I started doing the research, and realized that for not very much more money, I could get a D7000 instead. When I read about the incredible low-light performance, and the amazing reviews it was getting (Ken Rockwell calls it the best digital camera he’s ever used, period) I was sold.

It arrived late last week, in the midst of a day so insane with a leaking basement and arriving relatives that I barely had time to pull it out of the box. But when I did, it was love at first sight.

It’s the most amazing camera I’ve ever laid my hands on, and I can’t tell you how excited I am. I can see a huge difference already, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it’s capable of.

I am very lucky, and very, very happy. Who knew? Some things *are* worth waiting for!

With all the craziness of last weekend, I completely forgot to put up my weekly 365 pictures! It doesn’t always matter, but the delay makes some of these seem positively ancient to me.

Speaking of positively ancient, it was my Mom’s birthday at the end of February… sorry, Mom, I couldn’t resist!! 😉 This is Granny on her birthday with my boys. (There was supposed to be a long and lovely blog post celebrating my Mom on her birthday, but every attempt I made came somewhere between a Hallmark knock-off and an obituary — I never did get a draft I liked enough to publish. Maybe for her next birthday! I don’t need fancy words to tell you, though, that my Mom is my best friend and the best mother a girl could ever hope to have.)

Because it was one of those milestone birthdays, I wanted to do something special to celebrate. Mom chose a girls’ night out at the local casino, just her and me. Isn’t she awesome? We had such a fun night with dinner and just enough luck to keep us busy on the slot machines for a couple of hours.

You’ve already seen this one from an earlier blog post. This is the day before we put Lucas’s big-boy bed in his room.

This is my new brother, Bubba. My parents adopted him a couple of weeks ago from a shelter. He’s exactly what he looks like: big and kinda dumb but absolutely lovable. He’s also been a fantastic influence on Beau, my other dog brother — remember him, the one who was completely asocial and escaped to lead me on a barefoot chase through Barrhaven at 6:30 one June morning last year? Beau has come miles farther into being a normally socialized dog in the couple of weeks since Bubba arrived than he did in a year of love and patience with my folks.

Snow. More on the way. I’m so very done with winter!

I like this one. This is the sun setting through the Eastern pine in our front yard.

I like this one, too. This is the giant reflecting sphere on the NRC’s Montreal Road campus. I took a picture of it last year and had found a link describing the sphere and its purpose (it’s art) but the link is gone. Still makes a fun subject for shooting, though!

That’s how the world looked through my viewfinder this last week!

The good thing is: I’m really not stressing over the 365 project this time around. The bad things is: I’m “settling” for a picture of the day a lot more.

Like this shot of the boys. It was 6:25 am when I shot it, and I was just on my way out the door to go to work when I noticed they were cuddled up together on the love seat watching TV. Lucas and Simon are like oil and water more often than not, so I grabbed my camera and clicked off one shot. It was adorable when I looked in the LED, and I didn’t take another picture all day, safe in the knowledge that I had a worthy picture of the day.

Then at the very end of the day I pulled the memory card out of my camera and got a good look at the picture in Lightroom and realized it’s horribly noisy because I was shooting at 1600 ISO to compensate for the fact that the sun hadn’t come up yet, and Lucas is just in front of the plane of focus, and the highlights on his hair are completely blown out. Oh well. It still makes me happy when I look at it.

From a technical standpoint, this is a much better picture. It also makes me happy! This is Family Day, in the driveway.

More Family Day fun – Lucas thinks he’s a zamboni on his tricycle!

And Simon the future NHL star:

I kept hearing people rave about the iPhone camera app Hipstamatic, so I ponied up $1.99 to try it out. The lenses and effects are alright, similar to what I have in my other apps, but for this one you have to set your lens and film before you take the shot rather than in post-processing. And the viewfinder makes me a little crazy because it’s not like an SLR where you get an accurate picture, it’s like a point and shoot and they really exaggerate the effect. Meh, I’m not sure about this one. I tested it out on my old favourite, the Underwood typewriter.

Speaking of vintage and cameras, Lara and Angela have inspired me to take a few more self-portraits. Here’s vintage me with my Duaflex:

This was a TtV self-portrait, but I almost deleted it. I really didn’t like the original composition, but with TtV you’re very much bound by what’s inside the viewfinder frame (unless you’re much better with photoshop than I am!) I cropped out the viewfinder and the right half of the frame and ended up loving how this one came out with a bit of a vintage vibe and those crazy roses that are now two weeks old and holding! (Note to self: time to clean the dust off the viewfinder. I know some people like their TtV gritty, but I prefer it clean.)

And more vintage: this is one of the beauties from my camera collection. It’s a Kodak Brownie Starflex, and was manufactured some time between 1957 and 1964. I’d bought it for $20, hoping to use it for TtV, but I’m more partial to the Duaflex viewfinder. It’s still a lovely little camera, though! I ended up using this shot in the banner for my new photography site on a whim, and I think it works well with the typewriter font.

See, even my photography is fixated on photography this week. I am truly an obsessive creature.

This has been a really challenging week for my 365 project, mostly because I was embroiled with two sick kids, a sick caregiver, and a secret project that sucked up ALL my spare time (and more than a bit of my not-so-spare time as well!). More about the secret project later.

So here’s what caught my fancy this week!

Here’s your weekly dose of cuteness. He’s reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, one of our new favourite books.

We’ve spent a lot of time haunting the Manotick branch of the public library lately. Conveniently, we moved into a house just around the corner from the library just about the same time as my mother, otherwise known as my main paperback supplier, bought herself a Kindle — and my stream of free paperbacks dried up overnight. This is the centre of the kids’ section of the Manotick library, where Lucas is “reading” a book about potty training to Tristan. The funky frame is courtesy of the Camera+ app on my iPhone. (I don’t know what I love more, the giant colourful sunburst, Lucas reading to Tristan, or the fact that the page he is reading is covered in underwear!)

From warm and fuzzy to cold and wet — I took this one from the narrow bridge on Jockvale near Stonebridge, but no matter how much I played with it, I couldn’t quite make it what I wanted of it. It’s one of those “good enough, and I’ve got nothing else for today” shots, I suppose.

Speaking of good enough, this one is really a bit of a mulligan. I spent hours glued to my computer on Sunday working on that secret project I mentioned, and by the end of the day had nothing really to show for it — and no picture for the day, either. So I took this with my iPhone and called it “Time Sink” because that’s what the computer can be sometimes. Um, often.

On Valentine’s Day, although Beloved and I had agreed not to get each other any gifts, I came home from work to a dozen of the most beautiful fresh red roses I’ve ever seen. (Good thing I’d picked some chocolates up for him, too!) And I’ve been loving those roses all week!

First, Valentine TtV roses:

Then, roses with a hint of cross-processing:

Roses desaturated in black and white:

And finally (for this week, at least, as they’re still going strong!!) roses with a hint of sunshine:

I think they got better as the week progressed — that last one is definitely my favourite. 🙂

Oh, and did I mention my secret project? Yeah, it’s really not so secret since I outed myself last night on Twitter, and I’ve actually been screwing up my courage to tell you about it here all week.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the schoolyard fence waiting for the boys and got to talking with some of the moms and dads, and one mentioned going to Sears to get portraits done and how she wasn’t really thrilled with the results. I mentioned that I really like to take family pictures, and we got to chatting. She asked me for my website, and I gave her this URL. A couple of days later, she came back and asked me where the information about my photography business was, and I hemmed and hawed a bit and said, “Well, that’s pretty much it.”

It got me thinking, though. I’ve been toying with the idea of putting up a separate photography blog ever since I started my first 365 back in January of 2009, and even toyed with a few themes and galleries, but nothing ever worked for me. I tried building a gallery with Lightroom, but the results were underwhelming.

Last week, with the help of a few friends on Twitter, I finally found a workable (and free!) WordPress theme and installed it. I spent WAY too much time sorting through some of my favourite pictures, and came up with a result that is not quite perfect, but at least worth sharing at this point.

With butterflies in my tummy, and wondering what the hell I am thinking, I am thrilled and terrified to pull back the curtain and show you my latest cockamamie scheme, Mothership Photography.

Eek!

Gah, I am so. sick. of. winter. So sick of snow, cold, wind — and the forecast is calling for three dumps of snow in the next three days.

That’s what I had in mind when I took this picture — STOP winter NOW! (I like this because it’s selective colouring but without the post-processing. I didn’t do much to this image except to tweak the exposure a bit.)

On the opposite end of the spectrum, here’s some soft and fuzzy and fresh from a warm bath to warm you up!

One of these days, I’m going to get around to writing the post that’s rattling around in my head about how we’ve started going to church now. Not every week, but every couple of weeks at least. I like our new church and Father Dan, and I really like these gorgeous sacred candles. I hope it wasn’t disrespectful of me to snap this, but I couldn’t resist the colours.

I took this one with my iPhone one night as the sun was setting (thus the bit of orangey-pink in the bottom right corner). I tweaked the colour of the sky to that turquoise colour with an app called FX Photo Studio. I wish I had a better telephoto to bring that crescent moon a little closer!

Yesterday was the 100th day of school, and the kids were doing special projects. Simon had the number 42 and was gluing 42 mini-marshmallows to it while I made Douglas Adams jokes that sailed clear over their heads. (Tell me somebody gets that reference?) Anyway, I loved the almost straight-on side light and the shadows, so I caught this picture.

Rather unfortunately, while I was busy uploading this to the computer, the toddler tyrant precocious preschooler got into it and ate his gluey way from 42 down to 37 marshmallows before anybody noticed!

And speaking of the precocious preschooler, here’s a couple of shots from his birthday last Tuesday.

Damn cute, isn’t he?

I‘ve heard that the last week of January and the first week of February are the dark heart of winter — the coldest weeks of the year. You can tell based on my pictures this week, featuring lots of cold and snow.

You saw this one of Lucas from Shiverfest already, but I liked it so much it was worth repeating!

I was driving past a little copse of woods at the south end of Merivale the morning after a night of lightly falling snow, and I had to stop and take a picture. I really liked the almost abstract quality and the monochrome feel to this.

And yes, more with the freshly fallen snow. This is the same old barn off Bankfield that I’ve photographed before, and I am completely enamoured of it. I swear I will keep taking snow pictures until I get one right!!

What’s really nice is when you can take a nice winter picture through the open patio door from the warmth of the kitchen!!

And speaking of the warmth of the kitchen… 😉 I have to tell you, I’m fighting very hard against my impulse to make him STOP mixing all the colours together like that.

(Here’s a sanity-saving parenting tip for you: I carry three of those little mini-containers of playdoh, the size that you can hand out for Halloween, in my purse. Any time we have to wait somewhere — doctor’s office, restaurant, etc — I pull out the playdoh and all three boys are engaged and distracted for up to 20 minutes. LOVE playdoh!)

A little mosaic of pictures from Simon’s party which you’ve also already seen, but what the heck:

This one was too cute not too share. Tristan lost an incisor and put it on the counter in a napkin — but forgot to mention it to me. While I was making dinner, I obliviously scooped up the napkin and its icky contents (give me snot or blood but I cannot handle wiggly teeth) and dumped them into the garbage. I told Tristan that the tooth fairy would likely accept a letter of explanation in lieu of an actual tooth, and this is what he wrote:

So do you remember how I agonized about getting the boys their first hand-held video game? How we only capitulated last summer before the big road trip to Nova Scotia, when they were six and eight, and even then I thought we were on the border of too early?

Yeah.

And this is the not-quite-three-year-old playing Angry Birds on the iTouch with Beloved.

And inevitably, a few moments later:

Sigh. (Nice light, though, eh? ;))

And finally, a 365 tradition that I nearly forgot about — the monthly mosaic for January. Just in case you missed some of these the first five or six times. 😉

Off to a pretty good start on the year, no?

This week on my 365 project, I took a lot of iPhone pictures. I found an app called Diptic that lets you create diptychs (two panels creating one picture) as well as triptychs and up to five-panel images.

Another easy iPhone capture, this one via Instagram:

This was an iPhone capture simply because it was the only camera I had with me at the time. Remember how cold it was last weekend? It was near -25C (-15F) on Saturday morning when I headed out to the gym, and I noticed that even though it was relatively clear, it was so cold that the ice crystals in the air formed a rainbow around the rising sun. Stellar!

One of my favourite groups on Flickr is the “Through the Viewfinder” group, and they had a thread discussing “topless TtV”: TtV shots that aren’t cropped to the viewfinder and with no contraption, so you can clearly see the entire bottom camera. I liked the idea, and this is the result. Photogenic Miss Katie, who, by the way, is still in fine health.

Every year I buy a potted hyacinth from the grocery store. The smell as they come into bloom is delicious and fills the house with the sweet scent of spring just when it seems that winter will never end. And each year I plant the leftover bulb in the garden. I’d cultivated a half a dozen or so of them at the old house, and am looking forward to peppering the new garden with them!

Lucas couldn’t even wait for this one to bloom, so intent was he on sucking in the scent last weekend! This, by the way, was not so much staged as captured. I was shooting the backlit hyacinth when Lucas popped up to “help”. The pose and the vigour with which he sniffed were entirely his own! Don’t you just love that cowlick? It’s *always* standing on end like that!

And, the hyacinth a few days later as it came into bloom, taken through the viewfinder of my Duaflex. The frame is in very soft focus because I used a close-up filter on my Nikon lens so I could get in close and fill the frame.

Here’s my brain-teaser of the day for you. In TtV, the Nikon lens focuses on the viewfinder glass, which is on the top of the Duaflex. The Nikon lens also has a minimum focusing distance, meaning you have to be at least X distance from your subject before it can autofocus. Part of the reason I use a “contraption” is to ensure that minimum distance is kept while blocking out extraneous light.

But! If I get too close to the hyacinth flower with the *Duaflex*, the Nikon won’t autofocus. It wants me to have the Duaflex that minimum distance away from the subject as well as the minimum distance from the Nikon to the viewfinder.

Weird, eh? One of the many wonderful quirks of TtV. 🙂