Category: Photo of the Day

Maybe it’s the cold temperatures or maybe it’s the short days and low light, but I liked the idea of taking pictures a lot more than I liked actually taking pictures this past week. I wanted to take beautiful, thoughtful, meaningful pictures. I actually took, well, these.

I fear that I’m relying to heavily on the kitch factor in my iPhone pix, but I can’t resist the funky frames and effects to spice up pictures like this one of the setting sun through my living room blinds.

This was a concept picture that worked better in my head than in the camera. Possibly because I was trying to take it while also cooking dinner and moderating the bickering equivalent of World War III and also packing lunches for the next day, while not actually reading any of this book.

From toasty toes to frozen feet… it was c-c-c-c-c-o-l-d last Sunday when I took the big boys skating with friends at the rink around the corner, but even c-c-c-c-c-o-l-d-e-r when I plunked myself belly-down on the ice to try to get an interesting skate shot. I didn’t realize that I still had the aperture set at f22, so the motion blur was a kind of pleasant mistake!

Lucas and Katie were both pretty happy to help me by posing for this shot. I call it “one for you and one for me”.

So have I mentioned Lucas’s puzzle fixation? The child is not yet three, and he will sit and do one jigsaw puzzle after another. Not just the toddler puzzles either, but the 100 piece ones for 5 to 7 year olds. It’s quite endearing, until you have to clean the floors!

Homework time, through the viewfinder of my Duaflex.

I found these berries out on one of my Manotick walkabouts. They must be inedible if the birds haven’t claimed them by now, but they looked good enough to photograph!

And speaking of Manotick walkabouts, I found this sign on the dam beside Watson’s Mill, and I chuckle every time I pass it. Who knew the peeps at Parks Canada has such a fun sense of humour? Worthless dam operating equipment, indeed!

So I have a question for those of you following my blog feed. You’ll notice that the daily picture now gets broadcast as well as any new blog posts. Is it picture overkill to have both?

One of my main goals for the 365 project this time around is to take it a little bit less seriously. To that end, I’ve allowed myself a bit of flexibility: if I take four great pictures on Monday and Tuesday ends up being a trainwreck of a day, rather than stress myself out trying to take a picture on Tuesday, I’ll just steal one from Monday. This will be the exception rather than the rule, but it will also ensure that the 365 project is something I enjoy rather than dread. So far, a whole 20 days in, this has already come in handy. And yet, I feel this compelling need to confess it to you, less you are not able to sleep at night after examining the meta-data in my imagery (I swear I’m not looking at you, Angela) and realizing that the picture posted for Wednesday was actually captured on (gasp!) Sunday.

Phew, glad I got *that* off my chest!

And now, some pictures!

We were delighted to discover that the local Chinese food joint prepares what turned out to be the best Chinese food I’ve ever had. In fact, we’ve had to limit ourselves to only having it once a month, cuz left to my own devices we’d have it at least once a week. Totally drool-worthy! It was the neon and the pink interior that engaged me on this picture, and something in it was evocative of a poster called Boulevard of Broken Dreams that I used to have in my room when I was a teenager. Taken with my iPhone.

Lucas and I were playing kick-the-puck in the driveway when the snow removal crew showed up, to the delight of the curious toddler and his sidekick. It was the light in this one that caught my eye. Also taken with my iPhone.

Manotick’s Haunted Mill (you saw this one earlier in the week.)

A boy and his dog.

The treehouse in the back yard on a cold January day. I was trying to capture something more moody, but I couldn’t quite get it right.

The first TtV shot of the new iteration of the 365! This star is part of a dangly ornament that hangs in the kitchen patio door. You would have laughed if you saw me trying to capture this, standing on my tip-toes on a step stool in my kitchen, trying to angle the camera so that I had flat white snow as a background and not the play structure. The diagonal angle is a total fluke that I started out trying to achieve, gave up, and accidentally achieved anyway.

I’ve been admiring this falling-down old silo at the corner of Bankfield and Rideau Valley Drive for ages, and knew it was just a matter of time before it made its way into my photographic repertoire. I took this shot with both my Nikon and my iPhone, and ended up liking the version in my iPhone much better. The frame and processing are from an app called Camera+.

Another iPhone capture: pine cones against snow. This one uses processing from the Instagram app.

And finally, your weekly serving of cuteness. Someone got a haircut!

So I’m thinking this 365 project will be a lot more playful, with plenty of hokey processing from various iPhone apps and retro TtV captures. I think a few of these, the old barn in particular, come dangerously close to being overdone — but I like them anyway.

I feel like there should be theme music to this post, but I can’t decide if it’s a triumphant fanfare or something more ominous. Yes, it’s true, I’m back on the Project 365 bandwagon again.

I’ve been considering it for a while. The Thousand Picture project was great, but there wasn’t enough pressure for me to take a daily picture and I’d gone weeks without lifting my camera when things got truly hectic from September to November. (And man am I glad I wasn’t doing a 365 during those months because truly? I never would have made it through.)

Another reason that I faltered a bit with my pictures, I think, is that during most of my 365 I worked downtown in what is probably the most photogenic area of the city, smack dab in the middle of Parliament Hill and the Byward Market. I mean really, I could point my camera in just about any direction on my way to or from work and come away with a good image. And while my current office is a million times more convenient, it’s an equally exponential amount less photogenic.

Conveniently, however, I just happened to have recently moved to an incredibly photogenic neighbourhood, with a house that is bathed in delicious natural light. So I traded photogenic work for photogenic home — that seems fair!

And, that was about all the encouragement I needed. Well, that and the convenience of taking, processing and posting photos through my precious iPhone.

So, here we are again. I think this 365 will be a little more, um, relaxed than the previous one. As in, a picture will be posted every day, but there may be days when the picture was actually taken a few days before. My project, my rules! Also, I will not be quite so hard on myself when it comes to what makes a “worthy” picture of the day. They don’t all have to be masterpieces, and in fact, I’m looking for more simple documentation than fine art this time around, especially when time is short.

Last but not least, I didn’t think the regular blog fodder would hurt. I missed posting my daily pictures in weekly round-ups. Once I decided that yes, I was indeed silly enough to embark on this adventure yet again, I counted back and realized I’d posted a shot every day since December 23, so I gave myself a 11-day head start. Now I’ve only got 354 days to go!

Always start with the cute, the rest will follow:

From the Christmas Eve photo project:

This was the picture that finally swayed me into deciding to try this again. Expect to see copious amounts of Watson’s Mill pictures here in the coming months!

This one caught me by surprise. I was coming up the stairs from the basement just as the sun was setting, shining through the front door and making shadows of both the wreath on the outside and the hanging decorations on the inside. This is almost straight out of the camera.

This is the locomotive at the Museum of Science and Technology. I have taken dozens of pictures of this thing over the years and liked none of them — and the one I adore was a quick snap with my iPhone. Go figure!

Taken through my bedroom window! Chickadees on a lilac bush. You think I can train them to eat seed from our hands?

More Watson’s Mill. I waited for about 15 minutes in the early morning cold, watching from the bridge and hoping the clouds would obscure the sun in just this manner!

My mother’s holiday table. I loved the greens, and the soft focus. One of those “just because” shots that makes me happy when I look at it.

More cuteness!

These, plus a couple of other pictures I’ve already blogged about in the past week or so, are the beginning of what I hope is 365 days of new challenges and moments captured.

Here we go again!

Hey, did you know that once upon a time I used to take a lot of pictures? I know, you’d never know it from the blog lately. In fact, there was a while there where I didn’t even touch the camera for two whole weeks. I’ve missed it horribly!

After another showing fiasco on Saturday (we cleaned for two hours for a showing, just to be prudent even though we already had the conditional offer, only to find out that our agent had canceled all the weekend showings. And forgot to tell us. Gah!) we decided that we all needed a family day. On Sunday, we took all three boys and the Nikon to the Richmond Fair for a day of rides, games, ponies and cotton candy.

It was, by all accounts, a perfect day.

I almost made this last one my picture of the day, but I think when I look back on this project in 20 years, it will be the pictures of the boys enjoying themselves that will mean the most to me. But damn, this one tickles my fancy. They’ve even got matching eyeglasses. Aren’t they adorable?

Happy Tuesday!

I couldn’t believe I had four pages of unposted pictures to sort through since my last Thousand Pictures update just over a week ago, but then I realized I had all the Calypso pictures in there PLUS all the pictures from the photo shoot with Finola. Still, in the snap-happy groove I’ve been in lately, it’s amazing how many shots I’m going through.

Truth be told, I’m considering just calling it a year and starting a new 365 project. I mean, I’m taking just about a picture every day anyway, and some weeks I’m taking a couple dozen. We’ll see! Anyway, here’s what I’ve been doing since the last Thousand Pictures post.

One morning I woke up to this really dense, dreamy fog and I had to stop and take some pictures on my way in to work. I really love both of these images, for totally different reasons. This first one is the yellow line down the middle of the road, up close and personal! Cuz really, if you’re going to stand in the road with your camera during the morning rush, a day with practically zero visibility is the most logical day to choose, right?

I changed the colour cast in this one to give it that bluish tint, and I think it really works with this image.

This was a lovely moment that I stumbled upon and raced out of to get my camera. That soft light behind them seems to add to the serenity of an already peaceful scene.

From no colour to too much colour — this is a longer exposure of the pinwheel in my garden, set spinning by my helper Simon. I set the aperture at f16 to slow down the light a bit, so I could set the aperture to 1/25 to catch the motion blur.

And, back to desaturated again! Just waking up from naptime… just one of those moments I wanted to keep, because in just a few minutes he’ll be sleeping in a big-boy bed, no more soothers or cribs…

We were at the boys’ annual school BBQ, and Lucas was fascinated by the visiting fire trucks and this police motorcycle. I figure it’s just a matter of years before he has a motorcycle of his own. He rolls like that. And I loved the composition of this one.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the jump shots, but holy hell it’s hard to get the timing right! I won’t even tell you how many shots I took this night trying to get air under my feet and Lucas’s feet at the same time. I had to give up for fear my dear old garden bench would collapse!

I can always rely on the boys for great jumping shots, though!

This is more Flickr-inspired fun, my first contribution to the group Story People. The quote that goes with this image says “this is the moon dark as a bird wing & softer, he said & at that moment I knew only the joy of my child”.

We went out to the flea market at the Rideau Carleton Raceway one Sunday and it was, well, meh. But, driving the back roads back to Barrhaven we came across this bucolic scene and my menfolk were patient enough to stop the car so I could capture a few images.

Lucas had the sense to watch from a safe and dry distance as his brothers goofed in the bloody cold refreshing spray of the “waterpillar” toy from Granny.

I haven’t forgotten my TtV gear this week — I managed to get this collage the other morning on my way out to work. I couldn’t decide if I liked the cross processing effect (the slightly more yellow/green toned ones) or not, so I made a collage of some of each.

I’m not the only one who loves the daisies that grow in my garden. Isn’t he perfectly lovely?

I love this shot, one of those rare and perfectly serendipitous captures when everything comes together. I was out with my photography class on Friday night, supposedly shooting landscapes at Hogsback Falls. I was, to be honest, a little bored with the whole landscape thing when I looked up on the rocks above me and saw this woman sitting against a tree, reading and enjoying the last minutes of golden light before the sun set.

I had my tripod set up, and so the image is far sharper than my usual hand-held shots. I absolutely love how the fence and the tree intersect right where she is sitting, and the bit of diagonal to the fence line, and that delicious golden light. And, most of all, that HAT — perfection!

After I’d taken a few shots and knew I had my keeper, I scrambled up the rocks a bit to say hi and let her know I’d taken her picture, and gave her one of my little moo cards with my blog and contact info on it, and told her that if the picture turned out as nice as I thought it might, she could have a copy if she wanted one. She was very sweet, and thanked me. So that’s also #5 in my very lack-a-daisical hundred strangers project, too!

Last year, I discovered the June is for Jumping group on Flickr late in the month, but so enjoyed looking at everyone’s shots (really, click through, they’re quite impressive!) that I looked forward all year to this year’s edition. I was full to the brim with enthusiasm as I headed into the backyard on the evening of June 1st to start contributing what I thought would be the first in a month’s worth of clever, well-composed and perfectly executed shots.

This was, I kid you not, the best of the 20 shots I took.

Best by quite a margin, I might add. You might think me brave to post such a ridiculous shot of myself; you only say that without having seen the other 19 exponentially more ludicrous shots for comparison. Out of focus shots, shots of me standing flat-footed with a look of consternation on my face thrusting the remote toward the camera in a distinct “is this thing on?” sort of gesture, shots that prove that perhaps June Jumping is a game best left to women who are less than 40 or have borne less than three children. Really, you should THANK me for not posting them. Trust me.

I remain undeterred, though. And besides, the bar is low for considerable improvement to my jump shots through the next month!

As you can see, I’m taking a lot of inspiration from groups and themes on Flickr lately. I blame Angela! This is my second “Bench Monday” shot, and I’m quite pleased with it. I like how the bench and the fence in the back intersect at my sparkly shoes. Okay, fair enough, I just love my sparkly shoes.

And speaking of things I love, things at the park, and TtV pictures, how adorable is this? We were playing pop-up peekaboo, and both of us were laughing. I called it “Golden Boy” because of that delicious evening light, and because he is truly worth his toddling menace weight in gold.

These next pix are a little less frivolous. (But perhaps a little less, um, interesting??) At my Friday photography class, we were discussing the elements of composition, and then had to go out onto Dalhousie Street and shoot several examples of each element.

The elements in question are: line, shape or form, texture, colour, value and space. Line is one-dimensional; shape and form are three-dimensional. Texture and colour speak for themselves. Value is the amount of light or darkness. Space can be positive (the amount of space taken up by things) or negative.

Here’s four of the shots I particularly liked and the elements I thought they represented.

1. Space, colour and form:

2. Colour, shape, texture and line:

3. Line, value, colour, shape and space:

4. Colour, texture, shape and space:

I’m not sure how on-track I was for the assignment in the interpretation of the various elements. I’ll tell you after tonight’s class!

This one really belongs above, from a thematic perspective, but I wanted to end with a strong picture and this is another one of my faves for this week. It’s another theme-inspired picture, this one for Positively Ottawa’s Lyrical Thursdays: photos inspired by music or lyrics.

When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. And in the 1970s, when IBM Selectric Typewriters were the latest technological toy, it was this kind of machine that I envisioned pecking out my Great Canadian Novel.

Inspired by The Beatles: Paperback Writer.

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?
It’s based on a novel by a man named Lear
And I need a job, so I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

It’s the dirty story of a dirty man
And his clinging wife doesn’t understand.
The son (The Sun) is working for the Daily Mail,
It’s a steady job but he wants to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

Paperback writer (paperback writer)

It’s a thousand pages, give or take a few,
I’ll be writing more in a week or two.
I can make it longer if you like the style,
I can change it round and I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

If you really like it you can have the rights,
It could make a million for you overnight.
If you must return it, you can send it here
But I need a break and I want to be a paperback writer,
Paperback writer.

Actually, I just love it when word and pictures so perfectly intersect. THAT’s my happy place!

Edited to add: Apparently my brother felt the Jumping shot lacked a caption so he sent me this. All these years later, he’s still a pain in the ass.

You know how creativity ebbs and flows? Lately, I seem to be all gummed up. I’m really enjoying taking pictures, and I always enjoy writing. Well, almost always! But my head seems far more full of ideas and images than I am capable of turning into prose or pictures. I have creativity constipation! Anybody got any Muselax?

Anyway, despite that, when I look back on the pictures I’ve taken this week, I’m pretty happy with them. On Friday night for my photography class, we were supposed to do an in-class theory session but the light was just so spectacular that we went on another walkabout around Nepean Point. I’m starting to get comfortable shooting in manual now, and even prefer some of the straight-out-of-the-camera shots better than the ones I play with in Photoshop.

The timing was perfect to capture this silhouette of Jacques Cartier, his astrolab, and a few of his friends.

We were rewarded with this view from the Point, just at the foot of the statue above:

Then I turned around, and the flaming sunset had set the windows of the Centre Block of the Parliament Buildings ablaze. (How lucky are we to have this stuff in our city?)

We walked back down the Point and onto the road where the Alexandra Bridge meets St Patrick. Did you know there’s a little lookout down there? In all the time I’ve spend wandering around that part of Ottawa, I had no idea it was there. And look how the Alexandra Bridge points right into the setting sun! (This one messes with my sense of geography. In summer, the sun sets due west, but Gatineau is north of Ottawa. Hmmmm….)

And this is what I mean about straight out of the camera versus post-processing. I tweaked this one because my exposure was a bit off (damn manual exposure is a lot of work!) and although I really like the composition, I think I overtweaked the contrast a bit.

You know what else is fantastic about late-spring-into-early-summer in Ottawa? The return of flea market season!!! Yay! On Sunday we trekked out to the Antrim flea market to poke around. There was a guy selling a table full of absolutely gorgeous old Yashica twin-lens cameras, which must have been somebody’s collection. He was selling them for $25 each, and at first I thought I could use them for through-the-viewfinder work, but the viewfinders were pretty foggy. I hemmed and hawed for a bit, wanting one just for the sake of having one, Beloved ribbing me the whole time that we truly do not need to add to our vintage camera collection. I stepped away to chase the boys for a bit, and when I went back someone had snapped up the whole collection, probably a dozen or more cameras.

The stinger? I looked online when we got home, and they sell for $75 to $200. Oy! Foregone beauty AND foregone profit. Damn!!

But, at least I got this… it’s the brilliant midday sun shining through a set of sherry / wine glasses onto a white table cloth. I love the refractions!

And the colours of this paintbox were irresistible, too.

The boys were playing with bubbles at my folks’ place on the weekend, and I didn’t realize until after I’d posted this shot to Flickr that you can see a little me reflected in the bubbles. Fun!

This last shot is not very strong from a compositional or technical standpoint. And yet, it’s my favourite picture of the week. Why? Because it makes me smile every time I look at it. I came down the stairs on my way to work and found all three boys scratching Katie’s belly. You can see by the expression on her face how she felt about that! And miraculously, they kept being cute long enough for me to grab my camera and take this snapshot. Not a perfect picture by any stretch of the imagination, but a perfect moment for sure.

And! Happy birthday to my sweet Katie dog, who turned 11 years old this week.