Category: Photo of the Day

Hmmm, seems a little anti-climactic to be posting about Project 365 again after my big finish on Wednesday, but there’s a couple of last little afterthoughts, as well as the pictures I took since my last update and before the big finale that never got their day in the sun.

But first, you know what the most challenging part of the whole damn 365 was? It wasn’t coming up with things to photograph, or actually processing and posting the pictures. It wasn’t the hassle of carrying my camera *everywhere* or the inconvenience to my family. The hardest part of the whole damn project?

Counting to 365.

I can’t tell you how many times I had to go back and renumber my pictures because I had miscounted somewhere. And ever since I started counting ahead to figure out exactly which calendar day would mark day 365, I’ve been vaguely puzzling over the date in my mind. If there’s 365 days in the year, and I started my project on January 20, 2009, then logic dictates that I’d finish on January 19, 2010? Right? So when I counted ahead in late December and realized the final day would fall on January 20 instead of January 19, I flipped back through a couple of weeks’ worth of pictures and checked the dates, and when everything seemed in order I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and said “Oh well.” But it bugged me, and bugged me, and bugged me, until finally last night I went back through the whole damn project and there it was.

I counted day 204 twice, once on August 11 and again on August 12. Dammit, now I’m going to have to go back and re-label the whole damn thing Project 366!!! Or maybe Project 365+1? Just doesn’t have the same snap, does it?

Sigh.

Anyway, here’s the last couple of pix from last week, including the penultimate pic that was apparently actually the big finale.

On Friday, we spent most of the day and well into the night putting up content on our site at work to show the relief efforts in Haiti. After a long and wrenching week of heartbreaking stories, this was the only way I could think of to explain my feelings. “Light a candle for Haiti.”

Katie for one is thrilled to no longer have to deal with me and my camera any longer.

One last shot of busy hands at work. (I called the Magna-Doodle a classic toy in the caption for this one on Flickr, and people said the Magna-Doodle is far from a classic toy. To me, if it doesn’t have batteries, downloadable parts or a corresponding online life, it’s classic. Whaddya think?)

Now trains? Definitely a classic toy. And although I’ve done the “baby playing with trains” shot before, you can really never have enough baby bokeh in your life.

And finally, the penultimate shot, which was apparently the ultimate shot, could I only count to 365. This is all the gear I didn’t have 365 — erm, 366 — days ago when I started this project: a Duaflex II, a Baby Brownie Special, a Brownie Reflex, an SB-600 flash, an off-camera cable extension for the SB-600, a gorillapod (excellent for securing your Nikon to the chandelier, should the need arise!), an Aurora mini-softbox, a set of four close-up filters, not one but TWO 50 mm f1.8 lenses, a polarizing filter, a remote trigger (also very useful when your camera is suspended from the chandelier) and several bits of lens and camera cleaning stuff — all taken through the viewfinder of my darling vintage Duaflex IV.

So there you have it. Project 365 (plus one!).

The end. 🙂

Holy crap, I did it!

I’m not sure that I was convinced, back when I launched this project a year ago, that I really expected to actually finish it. And I can’t even begin to tell you how much I’ve learned.

A year ago, I was using my Nikon dSLR mostly in the program modes. I didn’t know what bokeh was, and I’d never heard of TtV photography. I had a passing understanding of the basics of photography — shutter speed vs aperture vs ISO, depth of field, rule of thirds, exposure compensation, etc etc etc — but I rarely consciously employed them and even more rarely pushed their boundaries or deliberately ignored them in wondering what the result would be. I never mucked about with my camera settings. I thought using Photoshop made images less “true” and never post-processed any of my images save to correct egregious errors. I was shy about pointing my camera at anything but the most obvious photographic subjects in public, and would never dreamed of approaching a stranger and asking them if I could photograph them. I’d never shot in RAW and posted all my images in straight-out-of-the-camera colour. I didn’t know what EXIF data, rear-curtain shutter, tilt-shifting, hot shoes, photoshop actions or vignetting were. I could count on one hand the number of times I’d posted a photo to a group on Flicrk, or made a comment, or received a comment.

I’ve come a long way, baby! I’ve had more than a dozen photos “Explored” by Flickr, I’ve had a photo featured as the “Photo of the Day” by a large group, and I’ve been asked for permission to use my images on a few websites. My 365 project was featured on CBC Radio at the half-way point last July, and I’ve even sold some of my images. Who woulda guessed it?! Mostly, though? I learned to love taking pictures. And, damn, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it!

When I started the 365 project, I had only the vaguest idea of what I wanted from it. I imagined I’d take a snapshot every day of the boys, or things around the house, or the places I went during the day, and every couple of days I’d throw them up on Flickr and that would be it. I had no idea that within a month or two, I’d have raised my own personal bar so high that I would drive myself crazy for the rest of the year trying to live up to it. A snapshot would simply not suffice. Not content to take just any picture, suddenly I had to take a good picture — and the definition of “good” was a sliding scale. I blame and thank the members of the 365 Community almost exclusively for this. More than just a place to dump pictures, the 365 Community is an amazing collection of really first-rate photographers and super-nice people, and had I not been welcomed into the group early in the project, I imagine things would have turned out much differently. Not only did they support and encourage me with comments and feedback, but they inspired me to do better each time I perused their photostreams.

And then, of course, there’s you, my bloggy peeps. I can’t tell you how pleased I am to know that a few of you started your own version of a 365 project because of me, and the comments and e-mails I received from people who said they were inspired to pick up a camera because of my pictures — dozens of them, over the year — is truly an honour.

If you’re considering starting your own 365 project, here’s my advice for you: go for it! You’ve got nothing to lose (except maybe a few hundred hours) and everything to gain. I had no idea how hard it would be, but I also had no idea how rewarding it would be. I knew I would get a few pictures I loved and would capture in pictures the minutiae that I love to capture in words on the blog, but I had no idea I’d learn so much, meet such amazing people, and have such an amazing body of work to look back upon.

The best and worst part about a 365 project is that no matter how awful your picture of the day might be, in your own estimation, there’s always tomorrow. And no matter how worth of a National Geographic cover you may think your latest image, you’ve got to start over again the next day.

Out of more than 16,000 shutter clicks (!!) since January 20, 2009, here are my top ten favourites:

I think this is my fave of the year. I love everything about this picture — the hand, the way the pear seems to be reaching for Lucas, the reflection in the table, the depth of field, the back lighting.

Fun and silly, but eye-catching. I like the story I was telling as much as the image: “Deep in the Orion Nebula, baby stars grow in translucent eggs until they are ready to hatch and float away…”

The beginning of my obsession with fingers and toes.

Multi-Mom, my cloning experiment. Turns out photoshop is a lot of fun!

Not even an official 365 picture, but representative of all the images of the boys I’ve learned to take this year. This picture makes me smile every time I look at it, and isn’t that the whole point?

Because I developed a love of vintage cameras — and typewriters! — during my 365 project. Besides, you had to know a TtV shot would make the top 10.

A perfect example of the things I might never have noticed, let alone photographed, before my 365 project.

What on earth would make me take my camera into the stairwell at the office to take a picture of the people walking in the rain seven stories below? Only Project 365, I assure you.

And I never would have thought to pull off the road and creep around a park in the pre-dawn gloaming (at minus 2C, no less) poking around for worthwhile images if I weren’t looking for something worthy of the photo challenge I was in — and eventually won!

Okay, so maybe I had some photographic knowledge and instincts before I started the 365 project. This one of Lucas and I reflected in the collandar was taken on Day 5 of the project, and remains one of my favourites.

There’s a lot (really? a lot!) of mediocre shots in the project, too, and a very few that I outright dislike. On the whole, though, I love how they capture the world as I saw it this past year, and how evocative each of them is of the time and place I took them.

So, you might ask, what’s next? I agonized over toyed with a few ideas over the last couple of months, including a TtV 365, a 52×7 (seven pictures a week but not one each day), and a couple of other variants on the theme. Much as I like the challenge of finding new ways to see the world each day, I have to admit it’s become a little tedious recently. You know how much I love my new job, but the industrial park where it’s located is far from the rich milieu of photographic opportunities I had when I was working smack dab in the middle of the Market, the Canal and Parliament Hill, which you’ve seen was a massive source of fodder and inspiration this year. I might yet set my sights on something like a thousand picture project, but one with no time constraints. We’ll see!

Mostly, though, I’ve set out what I wanted to do. I’m sure I’ll continue to take way too many pictures, and if you want me to, I’ll continue to talk about them here. In fact, I kind of hope to keep taking at least one picture every day. But on those days when it’s somehow gotten to 8 pm and I still have lunches to make and the swiffer to be run and a load of laundry to fold and no photo? It will be one less thing to worry about.

And so, here it is — the last picture. Almost from the start of the project, I thought about what this image might be. At various points in the last little while, I’d imagined it would be the old Underwood manual typewriter, with the words “365:365 THE END” typed on the piece of paper, or maybe a close-up of the boys with the numbers 3 6 5 written on each of their cheeks. This one came to me yesterday, though, and evolved from the idea of a high shot looking down at me looking through my pictures to this:

(Whatever you do, don’t tell Beloved I suspended the Nikon from the chandelier with a gorillapod and some duct tape during the baby’s nap, or this may well be the last picture you ever see me take!)

There’s good news and bad news from the land of Project 365 this week. The good news is: next week is the big finale!! Only six days to go!! The bad new is: next week is the big finale!!

Okay, not really. While I’m a little anxious about both what will happen on day 366 — I still haven’t decided — and what I’ll do for day 365, I’m still pretty excited about being finished. The bad news is actually that I think I may have killed my camera. The poor old D40 has been acting up lately, and I fear that I may have photographed it to death. I’m getting this weird hypersaturation in the last week or so, and the exposure seems off.

I got curious as to the life expectancy of a D40, and found out that you should get in the neighbourhood of 50,000 shutter clicks, but that in standard “your millage may vary” form, many report D40s that went on to live happy lives in the land far beyond 100K clicks. Then again, those D40s may not have been subject to the rigours inclement weather, being hauled around absolutely *everywhere* (and, ahem, perhaps dropped once or twice), used to placate a curious 18-month-old and the various other indignities to which I have subjected my beloved camera.

So I got curious about the whole counting shutter clicks thing. I’d realized back in October that I’d taken 10,000 pictures when my internal counter rolled over and started using image numbers I’d been using in March, but I didn’t know how to figure out the exact milage on my camera. Turns out you can find out through your EXIF data, which is displayed on Flickr, under “More properties” in the “Additional Information” menu on the bottom of the right-hand menu of any given picture. At least, that’s what it is for me. All that to say, that just before I started Project 365, I had 5,372 shutter clicks on the D40, and as of yesterday I had 21,251 clicks. That means in a year I’ve snapped off almost SIXTEEN THOUSAND images. Yeesh! No wonder I feel like I’ve got a permanent one-eyed squint going on!

So anyway, here’s this week’s pictures. This was from last Friday, a special “Breakfast for Dinner” treat for the boys. I don’t know why I like TtV pictures from my kitchen, but I do!

This week’s subliminal theme is apparently kittens. You might remember we had to put down our 17 year old cat in 2008; you might more recently remember that we had mouse issues this past autumn. The topic of reacquiring a cat seems to be a subliminal theme in our lives lately, especially ironic because I — the non-cat person — am more into the idea than Beloved, the avowed cat lover. In fact, I came *this close* to getting him a cat for Christmas, but sweet though it would have been to have a bright-eyed kitten in a box under the tree, I couldn’t in my heart give the gift of more than 15 years of litterbox scooping. Because that? Is so not my job.

Anyway, all that to say, we already had kittens on the brain when we visited our friends Jojo and Jaimie and were utterly charmed by the Christmas kitten they gave their daughter.

Oh, the cuteness! (I went with the above pic as the photo of the day, but in hindsight, I think this next one is better.)

And then, a couple days later, we were on a family trip to PetSmart to get some dog food for Katie, and Lucas tried hard to liberate this cat waiting for an adoptive family. Universe, are you trying to tell me something?

Speaking of Lucas, doesn’t he look like he was enjoying his excursion out into the cold?

This was almost a throwaway, but I kind of like it. In the 365 Community on Flickr, there was an optional theme on primary colours, and when I saw how the light was hitting the pushpins on my cubicle wall, I immediately thought of that. Don’t they look a little bit like gems? Besides: ooo, shiny!

And, more gratuitous colour: Beloved playing Rockband Lego on the Wii.

This one isn’t really out of focus, the focus is just somewhere where you might not expect it – on the basket in the foreground. See the murkiness in the colour, though? That’s part of what makes me think my camera is ailing.

That’s it for this week. Six days — SIX DAYS!!!! — to go!

After more than 350 days of taking pictures, I’m running out of steam. I still love taking the pictures and processing the pictures and especially sharing the pictures, but I have to admit that I’m just not as keen to go out and hunt for the pictures, yanno? So most of this week’s photos were taken of things that were nearby. Call me lazy! (And, I just noticed, probably the first week since I got my Duaflex in October that I don’t have a TtV shot.)

This may be my favourite shot of the week. We went tobogganing on New Years Day. Okay, so that’s not quite true. The big boys went tobogganing (and somehow Simon coerced Tristan to pull his sled up the hill for him each time, cementing my assurance that he will go far in life) while Lucas sat in the snow and ate large handsful of it.

This was not the same day, but just as there were lots of flower shots in July, there’s lots of kids-playing-in-snow shots to be collected in January!

And even when they’re inside, kids at play make for a charming subject, don’t you think? (I called this one “Building a fort with Tristan is a hair-raising experience!”)

This is part of a blog post I was planning to write this week and never quite got around to it. I was poking around in the basement looking for my old LPs for a half-formed 365 idea and I came across an carton with tonnes of old school papers in it. I found this, the journal I was required to keep in English class the year I was in Grade 11: February to June, 1986. One word: boycrazy. Another word? Painful. Really, it’s a wonder I survived to see 17.

This next one? Classic “oh crap, what am I going to take a picture of today?” Oh look, there’s my makeup bag. Haven’t taken a picture of anything in there yet. *sounds of rummaging* Stubby lipstick? Nah. Mascara? Not feeling it. Compact — pretty colours. Excellent! Reflection — even better. Macro filter? Delightful. Picture done!

What’s that? You say you can’t get enough of the baby fingers at work pictures? Me neither.

This was from my mental checklist of “things I noticed that might make a good picture some day.” Now that I’m within two weeks (eep!) of finishing, I can start using them up! This is from the pine tree in front of the boys’ school.

I like this one because it reminds me of those blissful three or four days over the Christmas holidays when I spent most of Lucas’s nap time in heaven with a hot cup of coffee, a wee snack, and the latest Stephen King, a gift from Beloved. I can’t remember the last time I spent back to back to back afternoons curled up with a book!

And finally, last week marked the last day of December, so here’s the full month in pictures.

Less than two weeks to go!

Wow, only three weeks to go in my year of photos! A few of you have been asking what happens on day 366, and I’ve been chewing that question over myself. Back in July, or October, I might have told you enthusiastically that I couldn’t imagine a day without a picture any more, and of course I’d be starting a new Project 365 right on the heels of the old one. In late November, when the picture-taking was an onerous duty instead of a delight, I wasn’t sure I would make it through one year and would be thrilled to be relieved of the millstone — erm, I mean camera strap — constantly around my neck.

I’m still waffling. I hate to stop, I really do, but I think if nothing else, my family has had enough of the 365 for now. I might try something a little easier, like a 52×7 project, where I take seven pictures each week instead of one picture each day. Or, I might take a little vacation and see how keenly I miss the challenge. For all the angst, the annoyance, and the additional stress that this silly project has brought into my life, it has more than redeemed itself in the improvement to my mad photographic skillz, and it’s simply amazing to me that I have this pictorial tribute to a year in our family’s life. Much like the blog has captured little moments that might have been forever lost otherwise, I’ve learned to take pictures I would have never conceived of just a year ago.

Pictures like this one from yesterday, of Lucas playing my cousin’s piano. (A piano has been on my 365 to-do list almost from the start. I still have to get to a billiard hall some time in the next three weeks, too. Anybody got a pool table in their basement I can borrow for half an hour?) The hands-and-feet project has been one of those unexpected and delightful outcomes of the 365.

This was my Christmas Day shot. After the Christmas Eve 12-Hour Photo Project, I was pictured out and this is one of the few shots I took all day.

I got two days worth of shots from the ice storm that moved through the Ottawa Valley just after Christmas.

Lucas at play seems to be another favourite theme of mine — go figure! This was taken through the viewfinder (TtV) of my Kodak Duaflex IV. I don’t think I’ve missed having a TtV shot each week at least since I got the Duaflex in October. This is another thing I never would have tried, probably never would have even heard of, if it weren’t for the 365.

Speaking of TtV and old cameras, check this out. I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I found this in the bottom of a box in my own basement. I had no idea it was there. It’s a Kodak Junior Six-20, made in Germany in the 1930s. It must have belonged to my grandmother, who lived in Germany until my father was born, or maybe my grandfather. Makes a nice addition to my vintage camera collection, though, don’t you think?

And finally, another bit of play that I never would have thought of before the 365 project: light painting with Christmas lights. Leaving the camera on aperture priority on a dark night keeps the shutter open for a long time as the sensor tries to gather enough light. By moving the camera around in little circles, the Christmas lights on the maple tree in my neighbour’s yard make cool light trails that look like a psychedelic spirograph! (After much deliberation, I designated this one an outtake and chose the next shot as the picture of the day.)

And by holding the camera (relatively) steady but zooming in on the same tree while the shutter is open, you get a different kind of light trails.

It was only after I’d posted it to Flickr that I saw the impression of the angel in the light trails. Can you see it? Total fluke, a serendipitous bit of luck.

Kind of sums up the whole project sometimes — a bit of skill, a bit of observation, and a whoppingly large dose of serendipitous luck!

It’s a Christmas miracle! (Okay, maybe not so much a miracle, as a really nice Christmas treat.) Slogging through much of the last couple of weeks of the 365 project, I’d realized that I was enduring it rather than enjoying it. But my 12 Hours of Christmas photo project reawakened the joy of picture-taking for me, and I am once again enthralled with the hunt for the photo of the day. Good thing, too, because there’s only a little more than three weeks left in my year!

Maybe I’m feeling rejuvenated because I’ve starting taking pictures of some of my favourite subjects again this week. Old barns, for example. (And old barns in TtV are like faves on top of faves!)

And you know I am fascinated by hands and feet. This is my father-in-law’s hard-worked hand being held up for a tentative high-five from Lucas. As is often the case, not quite the image I was going for but I like it nonetheless.

Sometimes, the photo of the day presents itself and begs to be photographed. Although, when the boys came in and excitedly told me they’d made a snowman (their first on their own!) I have to say I expected something a little, erm, taller. Don’t you love the look of self-satisfaction on their faces, though?

Tristan didn’t actually lose his tooth playing hockey, but when my father-in-law mentioned a similar picture taken by a relative, I knew exactly how I wanted to make this one up. A quintessentially Canadian image, I think!

“Mom, could you get me another spoon? This one doesn’t seem to be working very well.”

By the 23rd of December, I realized that the entire Christmas season had almost passed by, and I had taken hardly any of the warm, brightly-coloured images that I’d been anticipating throughout my 365 project. (I think that’s part of the reason why I was inspired to do the 12 hours of Christmas project, and I’m so happy I did!) Also, I think by the time I took this on the Eve of Christmas Eve, I’d reached that Christmas tipping point where the stress was pretty much gone and I was simply excited about Christmas.

I was delighted when the Karma group on Flickr, with more than 13,000 members, chose this as the Photo of the Day for December 24. What a nice honour!

And finally, although I liked all of the images from my Christmas hourly photo project, I think this one best captures the day.

As I type, the ice is building up outside from freezing rain. I can’t wait to get out and play with my camera. Taking pictures is suddenly a treat instead of a chore again. Hooray!

Looking back over my year in pictures, I’m surprised to see how many of my favourite images were shot outside. There really is no substitute for natural light, I suppose. And even though the temperatures have really bottomed out in the last week, most of my pictures were in fact taken outside.

The only time I feared for my camera was yesterday morning when I took this shot of a windswept farmer’s field off Fallowfield. It was -30C with the wind chill, but I loved the colours of the snow and sky just before the sun came up. Mind you, I was so cold and anxious to get the shot done that I made the one “rookie” mistake I seem to have the most difficulty overcoming: putting the subject dead centre in the viewfinder! Oh well.

This was another early-morning shot, of that spectacular ice fog that caused the 60-car pileup about 10 minutes after and 5 km away from where I was taking this picture.

This one was a lot warmer, both from a colour and a climate perspective. (He’s such a ham. We’re in so much trouble with this one! I called it “I’m so cute I can barely stand myself.”)

Call this one my abstract period. It’s actually a silver star-shaped Christmas ornament, with red, blue and yellow LED lights reflecting off it, shot with a screw-on macro filter on my lens. I like the movement and the shapes in it. Plus, it was late, I was tired, and this was an easy shot!

This one has a not-so-nice story behind it. It’s the train trestle that passes over Prince of Wales just south of Colonnade, and I’ve always thought it was interesting-looking. Last Friday on our way to the Land Staff luncheon at the Cartier Drill Hall, two of my colleagues were in a fender-bender practically underneath the trestle. Nobody was hurt, and it wasn’t my colleague’s fault, but we spent about half an hour waiting for the police and my eye kept wandering up to those creosote-covered beams against the bright blue sky. Finally, I couldn’t resist any more — and of course, I had my camera with me.

It’s been a busy week. No really? BUSY! So it was good to multitask, piggybacking the photo of the day on to other important seasonal activities, like the annual baking of the shortbread.

Christmas lights and snow. A hard combination to resist. This was almost the shot of the day, but in the end the next shot won out.

There was no way I’d be able to do an entire 365 project without trying my hand at a long-exposure Christmas-tree lights shot! I cranked my aperture way down (up? I always get that confused) to f22, and the camera selected a 30-second exposure to get this one right. (The tiny f-stop helps make that star-shaped flare on the lights, but I guess LED lights don’t flare very well — and they also “burn” the image on long exposures up close, but I’m not sure why.)

This wasn’t my tree, by the way, and I’m pretty sure the neighbour who watched me haul my tripod out of the car and set it up on the curb was thinking some very unChristmas-like thoughts, based on the stink-eye she was giving me. I think I’ll go photograph her house next week, just to freak her out.

And, ahem, there are only two days (phew!) of voting left in the Canadian Blog Awards. I’m just sayin’. 😉

In our house, the holiday season officially begins on December 4, with Beloved’s birthday.

Once we have that out of the way, we can officially get on with the Christmas mania! After the mouse-poop fiasco and a good sanitizing, we decided that we love our Christmas tree too much to sacrifice it.

The boys each lost a tooth on Friday, Simon from the bottom and Tristan from the top. So now, they can together sing, “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!” (Somehow, I forgot to upload the picture of Simon. Oops!)

One of the restrictions of taking pictures through my Duaflex is that you have a really wide angle of view with a very long depth of field. (Everything is in focus, from close to the camera to the far distance.) I’d seen some talk in the forums on Flickr of using a close-up filter to get a larger image of the viewfinder, which worked well, but had a really interesting effect on depth of field. See how the closest bits of cedar are sharp and those further away are blurred? The close-up filter does that, and for reasons I don’t understand, it also blurs the edges of the viewfinder.

(You’ve seen this Christmas mouse already, but you can see the same effect as above.)

In addition to being Beloved’s birthday, this week we also celebrated Lucas’s 22 month birthday. He gets cuter by the day, don’t you think?

On Wednesday, I was puttering around the house looking for something to turn into a still life. I started with my grandmother’s antique soup bowl, and then tried adding some clementines. That didn’t work so I started tried some nuts, but it wasn’t very interesting. Then I added my macro filter and got in real close, and this is what I ended up with. (That’s a fairly accurate summary of how I approach most images you see here: something catches my eye as potentially photographable, I try a few different angles and approaches, add some things and subtract some others, refine my approach and end up with a final image — about 20 shots after I started!)

Last but definitely not least — poor ol’ Katie, the best doggy in the world. I called this one “All I want for Christmas is some peace and quiet!”

Only 40 more days to go!!

One might think that 10 months into a year-long photo-a-day project, the going would be getting easier instead of harder. Not so much! In fact, I’ve had more days that I almost didn’t get a picture at all this week than I think I’ve had since the second week in. I’ve just been so busy… finding time for not just any old photograph, but a good photograph? Challenging, to say the least.

But, I made it through another week. Remember last week when I said I’d save the close-up pic of the old Underwood typewriter keys for a day when I had nothing else to photograph? Yep, here it is!

I swear, I’m beginning to think there’s nothing I haven’t photographed, and some of my pictures are starting to look alarmingly similar. I didn’t realize until I saw them side-by-each how much this lamppost and my TtV trees looked to each other — occupational hazzard of taking pix at the same time of day with the same camera, I guess.

You’d think after 40 years on the planet, I’d get used to mid-afternoon sunsets in December — but they still seem improbably early to me. I caught this on the way home from work, and thought it was nice of those geese to oblige me with a little extra flair in my sunset picture. (As opposed to the flare. Snicker.)

We got our first snow here in Ottawa this week, so of course I had to record it for photographic posterity.

And at the other end of nature’s spectrum, we have my sweet little Christmas cactus. I love my Christmas cactus. For most of the year, I completely ignore it, only remembering to water it when the poor thing is covered in dust bunnies and cobwebs, and it sits unobtrusively on the windowsill in my stairway, catching about 10 minutes of sunlight each day. Then each December, it erupts into spectacular blooms like this. I wish more things in my life thrived on benign neglect!

You’ve already seen this one, but its unbearable cuteness bears reposting, right?

And speaking of unbearable cuteness, when I set up the tripod to capture a picture of me playing with Lucas, I was thinking of the amazing style of my friend Angela, one of my fave photographers on Flickr. She may have inspired these shots, but I have a loooooong way to go before my stuff is as good as her pix of herself and her kids. Besides, I said I wanted to do a selfie each month in my 365, and I don’t think I’ve done one since July. This one is the only outtake that was worth keeping — selfies are a lot harder than they look!

And this one is totally not what I was going for, but I really like how it came out in the end. (Hmmm, a lot of my faves end up being a long way from my original conception. I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere!)

And finally, was it me or did the month of November just fly by? Here it is, November 2009 in pictures.

This week, I went a little crazy with the through-the-viewfinder (TtV) shots. Five of seven days, in fact, the picture of the day was a TtV shot. This is largely for two reasons: first, I’ve been running out of ideas, and I think the TtV shots give things a fresh perspective. Second, I’ve been running out of daylight and too lazy to haul out my lighting gear, and the brightest room in my house, the kitchen, can be the least photogenic. TtV seems to be a lot more forgiving.

This set of pictures of Lucas, for instance, was taken in the kitchen.

This portrait of Katie was taken in the kitchen, too. I didn’t, but I could have called it “Portrait of an unimpressed yellow dog in a yellow room.”

(It still makes me chortle when I look at it. Poor ol’ Katie, she puts up with a lot, as that look in her eyes clearly tells you.)

This one wasn’t taken in the kitchen, it was taken last Friday in my new office on my second day of work. On Flickr, I described it like this: “I really, really love my new job, from the people to the location to the tasks to the way the light streams in my window onto my happy little corner of the world.”

These two pictures I took because the big excavator caught my attention and it was Sunday so there was nobody around to tell me to get away with my camera. (After three boys, i’ve developed a fascination with large construction equipment I might not have otherwise cultivated.)

I like this one in particular. I think it has an otherworldly, post-apocalyptic quality to it that’s grown on me over the week.

Speaking of post-apocalyptic (how often do you get to make that segue?!) I took these stark pictures of bare trees reaching into a cloudy sky because I was trying to capture the bleakness of November before we move on to a December that I hope will be populated with warm holiday shots, bright Christmas lights and — sooner rather than later, I hope! — lots of shots of fresh-fallen snow. But I’m quite pleased with how these ones turned out.

So much so that I really couldn’t decide which of these two was my favourite. At first, I designated this one as the shot of the day, then I switched it to the one above at the last minute. I like the way the branches fill the frame, and the absolute lack of colour — even though I didn’t adjust the colour or saturation on these at all, they’re pretty much straight out of the camera, save for cropping.

In (ahem) stark contrast to the bleakness from yesterday, last Saturday I was delighted to find an actual flower to photograph. Well, it’s actually a weed, but a flowering weed nonetheless. See?

And finally, my other non-TtV shot of the week. This one is another in the series of shots that ended up being far from what was originally intended. In fact, I was going to take some macro shots of the typewriter keys, but I was having a little too much “help” and this is what I ended up with.

I think this is a lot better than a macro of the keys would have been, anyway. And now I can save the macro-key idea for another dark, dreary day’s last-minute shot!