Category: Photo of the Day

Before I start with the pictures this week, I’d like to take a moment to say a huge thank you to all of you for your encouragement during my project 365 trip and especially on the launch of the Etsy shop this week. I was genuinely touched by your responsiveness, by your kind words, by the fact that you really do seem to like the photos I’ve taken. (I know, I’m having a Sally Field – “You like my pictures! You really like them!” – moment here… bear with me.)

Doing the 365 out loud on the Internet has been extremely validating, and interesting too. I’m fascinated by your responses to the images, which ones you like and which ones seem to slip by unremarked upon. Seeing the images filtered through your perspective has helped me learn in ways I didn’t expect. I don’t know that I would have had the stamina (or the pure bullish stubbornness) to complete the project if it weren’t for your feedback and interest. You really do inspire me! (cue the swelling orchestra…)

Okay, enough with the schmaltz and on with the pictures. Last Friday, I walked into my office, put my fresh coffee down on the desk, hung my camera and my purse on the coathook and was just about to sit down when I glanced out the window — and saw five giant hot air balloons floating by. I grabbed my camera (and scandalously, completely forgot about my coffee) and headed up to the seventh floor picture window where I had a gorgeous view of the morning launch of the Gatineau Hot Air Balloon Festival, and the balloons floating over the Byward Market.

I loved the conjunction of the sun, the urban landscape and the balloons in this one.

It was a spectacularly photographable long weekend in Ottawa, as evidenced by my posts about the sunset at Britannia Beach and our Mud Lake adventure. In case you missed them, here’s my favourite picture of the sunset. I love the gradient, how the red hot sunlight light fades seamlessly into cold indigo darkness. (I was tempted to photoshop in a tiny, twinkling star right at the top, but I figured it was presumptuous to think I could improve on Mother Nature!)

And I love how this picture tells a rather timeless story of boys and adventure. (I went back to shooting in RAW this week — and for the first time, I can see the difference between RAW and JPEG files, especially in this one for some reason.)

I had the idea for this one in my head for a long time. The light in Lucas’s room during naptime is so nice and soft, and of course, baby toes are a favourite subject of mine. When he’d been asleep for about an hour on Saturday afternoon, I crept into his room and dared to snap a few shots because I loved the way the blankets were perfectly framing his foot. I love this one so much, it’s my new desktop image at work!

Because the blinds were drawn, I had to shoot at my D40’s highest ISO setting, which is part of the reason it has that soft, grainy quality. (If you can’t get more light and you can’t use flash and you don’t have a tripod or a motionless subject, boost your ISO!) It also has a light touch of one of the Pioneer Woman’s photoshop actions, just to enhance the softness. I am seriously addicted to those actions!

As much as I wanted the toes to be soft, I wanted this one to be super crisp and tack sharp. I missed just a bit on this shot, which is too bad because I like the concept. I was going to call it “Dare to be different!” (But I still liked it enough to make it my alternate shot of the day!)

Instead, I went with this one as the shot of the day. The composition isn’t as cheeky, but the focus is tack-sharp. It’s a tad dark, now that I look at it again — I think the brightness is cranked a little too high on the laptop where I do my photo editing. (My mom used to call these September grapes, so that’s what I call them. I think they’re really called Concord grapes. There is nothing like them! They’re one of the few foods that are still truly seasonal — you only get them for these first few weeks in September, and then you have to wait all year.)

(Do you like my sophisticated photo studio backdrop? It’s the top of my stove, right in between the two back burners!)

Like the grapes and the tomato, this shot was an attempt at storytelling that didn’t quite work out as I’d planned — but wasn’t enough of a miss to discard entirely. This was the first day since Lucas got mobile that we went to the park and I could take some time to just sit on the rocks and watch them play, instead of hovering over Lucas or rescuing him from peril. That’s what I was trying to express, that a perfect day at the park equals a bit of a break for mom and but fun for the kids. A near miss, but I still like it!

These shots of Simon and Lucas were just better images, even without the — or maybe because of the lack of? — scripting.

And this was another “scripted” image. I’d found the leaf and a few others like it in Major’s Hill Park, and wandered around for a while looking for interesting backdrops for them. I tried photographing them on some bricks (those were nice) and some cobblestones, and had just decided I’d had enough and was wandering into the Market for a coffee on my way back to work when I walked past the fountain at the intersection of York and Sussex. The square was full of people eating lunches on park benches, but that didn’t stop me from hopping up on the concrete lip of the fountain and throwing my leaves in, because I thought the colours in them would work really well with the bright sunlit water and the texture in the fountain.

Because I am so grateful for your attention, your feedback, and your support (and your patience!) I’ve decided to give away not one but FIVE free prints from the Etsy shop. See this post for details, but you have to leave your comment before midnight tonight, Friday September 11.

Who loves you baby? I do!

This week was the closest I ever came to missing a day. Somehow, all of Saturday slipped by without me taking a single picture. Then we had company for dinner, and still the camera sat neglected on the shelf. The guests left, we tidied up and I realized that I even though it was well past my bed time, I still had to pull something together for the photo of the day. Luckily, we had this lying around taking up space in the living room.

Let sleeping dogs lie — unless you are desperate for a photo subject and it’s dark and you’re otherwise flat out of inspiration and really just want to get it over with and go to bed yourself.

These little guys were in a shop in the Byward Market. Kind of sums up how I’ve been feeling this week!

(Hey, I just realized that they made it into Explore for a little while there. Kewl!)

This week, I’ve been playing with a new technique I read about way back in the beginning of my 365 project. It’s called TtV, or Through the Viewfinder. You take a picture through the viewfinder of another camera. In this case, I used my little FujiFinepix point and shoot, because it has a terrific macro setting that lets me get within one centimeter of my subject, and held it right up above the viewfinder of my ancient Brownie Hawkeye that my uncle gave me when I was a kid. Then I cropped the image right to the edge of the viewfinder. This is my first try:

It was surprisingly difficult to get everything aligned, which is why there’s a bit of a tilt to the composition. Ordinarily, I’d correct that in photoshop — but because I’m working within the frame of the viewfinder, I can’t correct it. The dark patches are the dust and scratches in the glass of the old Hawkeye.

Here’s another one I tried later in the week with Lucas. There’s a bit of a glare, which is why most people who do any amount of TtV work build contraptions with tubes attaching their digital camera to their viewfinder camera, blocking out all the extraneous light.

The Hawkeye isn’t the ideal camera for TtV, either. I’ve been scouring the flea markets and garage sales for an old Kodak Duaflex IV or a Starflex — let me know if you have one you’d like to part with!! I’m quite addicted to this now, and would like to try a lot more TtV stuff in the future. If you want to be blown away by the possibilities (or maybe it’s just me!) take a peek at the TtV Flickr group.

Of course, I filled some gaps with more conventional pictures this week, too. I took this picture just so I could title it “Show me your melons!”

And then there was this one, of one of the grand old maple trees in our neighbourhood, just starting to show the first blush of fall colour. (Oh, the colours! Think of the photo possibilities of all that fall colour! It’s *almost* enough to make up for the end of all those gorgeous summer flowers.)

And it’s always nice to capture a lovely sunrise, if for no other reason than the picture of the day is in the can by a quarter to seven in the morning! I like this one (snapped from the window of the bus on my way to work!) because of the funky flare shape, the bit of reflection on the silhouette of the railway crossing, and the hint of mist you can see on the fields to the right of the frame.

Of course, I couldn’t let the first day of school go by without commemorating the occasion!

And, speaking of milestones, the end of August means another monthly mosaic. August certainly was a colourful month!

1. 223:365 Back to school, 2. 222:365 TTV Fruitbowl, 3. 221:365 Let sleeping dogs lie, 4. 220:365 Colourful monsters, 5. 219:365 Fake TTV daisy, 6. 218:365 Hair-raising slide!, 7. 217:365 Garden spider and (*cringe*) egg sac, 8. 216:365 Granny and Lucas, 9. 215:365 Lion cub, 10. 214:365 Pug, 11. 213:365 The Black Tomato window, 12. 212:365 Damn hydro lines, 13. 211:365 Contraption, 14. 210:365 Peas, 15. 209:365 Cotton candy ice cream, 16. 208:365 I’ve lost my marbles!, 17. 207:365 The apple thief, 18. 206:365 Summertime in B&W, 19. 205:365 Beer bokeh, 20. 204:365 Doughnut, 21. 204:365 Not quite ripe, 22. 203:365 Connaught Building, 23. 202:365 The lost art of Sunday afternoon, 24. 201:365 Tristan in B&W, 25. 200:365 Colours, 26. 199:365 Weathervane, 27. 198:365 Toddler rage, 28. 197:365 Vintage rose, 29. 196:365 Buskerfest revisited, 30. 195:365 Jurassic Sean, 31. 194:365 Birthday beach bliss

This was one of those weeks that interesting subjects practically hurled themselves at my feet, begging to be photographed. (thank goodness!) I think I could have taken enough pictures to last well into November, if only I could save them up and use one each day.

Sadly, in November we won’t have any of these beauties standing regally in the sunshine, waiting to be admired:

(I loved how the sunflowers turned out so much that I turned it into a blog banner on the spot. Sunflowers used to be a motif of mine, back in the day, and I’ve always had a soft spot for them.)

These beauties grow to a height of six or seven feet in my mother’s garden. The black border and square format mimic a photographic technique that intrigues me called “through the viewfinder” or TTV. In real TTV, you take a picture through the viewfinder of another, usually antique, camera. I haven’t found the right camera for actually TTV yet, but I faked this one in Photoshop. (Yet another way you can use post-processing to add a little zip to an otherwise humdrum photo, IMHO.)

I ran into an old friend on the weekend who happens to be a professional photographer. We both had our cameras with us (of course!) but his was a D80 with an intriguing-looking lens on it. His kind offer of “go ahead and play with my camera, if you like” was barely out of his mouth when I had it in my hands, and it wasn’t long before I figured out his 28-105 mm lens nicely fit on my D40 as well. It doesn’t auto-focus on my camera (I’m running into more and more limitations with my entry-level dSLR these days) but it still takes a fine macro picture. Covet, covet, covet!!!

We’ve now concluded the “Nature is beautiful” portion of today’s presentation, and will procede with our “Ewwww, what was nature thinking?!” theme.

Take this spider, for instance. Please. (My apologies to Julie and any other arachnophobes out there. If it makes you feel any better, I can hardly look at the screen myself, and I’m not even particularly squeamish about spiders!) We found her on our back deck this week, she’s about the length of my thumb, and yes, that’s her *shudder* egg sac she’s sitting on. Filled with *shudder* up to a thousand itty bitty baby *shudder* spiders. She’s a ‘black and yellow agriope’, if you wanted to know, and she looks even more freaky large and up close, if you dare!

(Shortly after this photo was taken, Beloved scooped her and her egg sac up in a jar and we relocated them to the field across from our house. I simply would not have been able to sleep without nightmares of thousands of tiny spiders streaming in through every crack and crevice in the house! Did I mention *shudder*?)

And continuing with the “ugly is beautiful” theme, meet Winnie. She’s a pug, easily the snortiest, drooliest, gruntiest excuse for a dog I have ever met. Of course, I adored her on sight! She belongs to a friend of ours, and spent one night of her three-day vacation at the Humane Society after slipping out the door unnoticed. Luckily, she was reunited with her family the next morning.

(The boys were also enchanted with Winnie. The day after we met her, we took the boys to the SuperEx, and when Tristan won one of those water-squirt games — at a full table, nonetheless! — he chose a Pug Webkinz as his prize.)

Speaking of SuperEx, here’s another trio of adorable creatures. How many kids get to feed a lion cub her breakfast? She’s about seven months old — and apparently, she was starving! The boys held her for at least 10 minutes, and I think I’ve got about 35 versions of this picture in my camera. Thank goodness I brought the telephoto lens for a nice close-up!

Of all the photos from Papa Lou’s Excellent Hot Air Balloon Adventure, I finally chose this one as my favourite. I like the perspective that Granny and Lucas add to the giant balloon (I took this lying on my back!) and the way my Mom’s white jacket and pants compliment the red-green-blues of the balloon, the grass and the sky.

I particularly liked this one as well. I like the triangle created by the balloon, the watchers and my shadow — how cute is her body language, waving to the balloon? — and the way all the shadows point toward the balloon. (The triangle was intentional, the shadows are just a lucky fluke!)

This is my favourite photo this week. It’s not the best exposure, and even the composition is a little off — but, you have to move quickly when you’re taking a picture of Lucas in action! IMHO, though, the standing-up hair is priceless, as is the expression on Tristan’s face as he comes down the slide behind Lucas.

Years down the line, these are the pictures that will matter. Sometimes, the best pictures make up for in joy what they lack in artistry.

This week, I spent a lot of time wishing I was less stringent with my own damn project rules. I took dozens of great pictures on two days this week, and spent the other five in a mild state of panic trying to find the shot of the day. NEXT time, it’s going to be seven shots in seven days, or something equally forgiving.

The good news is, I now have the entire family trained not only to indulge me and be patient while I haul my camera around like a life support system, but to actually find excellent photo opportunities for me. My favourite shot this week is a great example of that. I was busy snapping pictures of stacked paperbacks at the flea market when Beloved pointed out this basket of marbles shining in the midday sun. This one was my 10th picture to make it to Flickr’s fickle “Explore“.

I don’t have a segue for this one — I just love it, though. I converted it to b&w because in the harsh, bright sunlight I found the colours were too vivid and actually distracted from the interaction between Lucas and Beloved. Lukey stands out from the trees better in b&w, and you can better see they’re looking right at each other. (This was taken at the little wading pool off Pinecrest in Linda Park — a highly endorsed spot for a bit of cooling off on a sweltering summer morning!)

You’ve seen this one already, too. In addition to its ridiculously high cute-factor score, I like this one because of the contrasting orange and blue. I had to crop it hard on the right side because the light from the patio door was distracting, and I wish the highlight on the table wasn’t so blown out, but it still works!

Did I mention it was hot this week? Really, stinkin’ hot. After losing all of July and most of August to the summer that never was, I certainly won’t complain about a little heat wave, but we spent a lot of time this week looking for ways to stay cool. Simon thought this cotton-candy ice cream cone did the trick! (See note above about desperate scrambling for a picture at the end of the day!)

Apparently I had a subconscious theme of “kids eating stuff” going on this week. I’d originally taken this picture and posted it on Flickr in this version, but I’d asked for opinions as to whether I should crop to remove the bit of bib in the corner or leave it in.

My friendly Flickr peeps recommended a square crop, which I never think to do. This is the final result. What do you think?

Even though Beloved and I have both gone back to work after a fun summer, we managed to take a mid-week Wednesday off and cram in one last family excursion, this time to Valleyview Little Animal Farm. (Blog post to follow!) Like the flea market, it was a wealth of photo opportunities and if I’m ever stuck for subjects I may just fork over the $6.50 to get in and take some more photographs in their most excellent antique farm equipment museum. I can’t remember exactly what this contraption is, but I think it makes for a fascinating photograph with all that chipped paint and mysterious mechanical bits.

This was my alternate pic-of-the-day from Valleyview. I was down on my hunkers taking a picture of this guy when he hissed with enough rancour to scare me back about four feet with a single jump, even though there was a wire fence between us. Geese are mean birds – no wonder people eat them! (Don’t you love his blue eye, though? He’s looking at you!)

Yesterday morning before the clouds set in for good, I was lucky enough to catch this gorgeous sunrise on my way to work. When I was reviewing my shots last night, I almost discarded this one because of the power lines (in fact, the picture is called “Damn hydro lines!”) but the more I look at it, the more I think that they might even add to the composition.

This is the same sunrise, taken just a couple of minutes earlier.

Both photographs are straight out of the camera — no post processing except to add my watermark, and I cropped the second one to pull the sun out of dead centre. (Note to self: stop centering your subjects in the middle of the frame!!!) The difference is that in the first photograph, I exposed for the sky and in the second one I zoomed in a bit more and exposed for the sun. In the first, the camera let in more light, so you see the blues and the clouds. In the second, because I exposed for the bright sun, the camera tried to compensate by dimming the exposure, letting in less light and bringing up the reds in the spectrum. Neat, eh?

This wasn’t the most exciting week from a photographic perspective. The 365 project is like that — day in and day out, some days are just going to be better than others!

As I mentioned a while back, I got an SB-600 flash for my birthday, but haven’t had much of a chance to play with it. I’d asked a couple of different salespeople whether there was some way to get the flash off the camera, and kept being told there were no options for the D40, I’d have to upgrade to the D90. (Sigh) Then last Saturday, with a couple of Henry’s birthday gift cards burning a hole in my pocket, I stopped in to buy a replacement memory card and asked one last time, and the guy said, ‘Sure, you want one of these!” and pulled out a cable. Yippee!!!

I feel like I’m learning photography all over again with the flash, but it’s fun to play with! I think maybe the flash is a little too harsh here, and I should have diffused it more, but I love the way it brings out his beautiful eyes.

Flash photography and b&w are both a bit of a mystery to me yet, but I’m learning to experiment more outside my comfort zone. This is the alternate shot of the day, and I dialed back opacity of the b&w layer in photoshop, so you can see just a hint of colour bleeding in.

This picture goes with my underlying theme of the week: the chaos of three kids. (Can you tell I’m fresh off three weeks in the house with EVERYONE?) Even though this is my favourite way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon, I honestly can’t remember the last time I sat down like this.

This is the Connaught Building, a gorgeous old building that has housed Customs operations since the days when they’d bring their entire horse-drawn wagon through giant doors and right into the first floor of the building. It also happens to be my current office building and I’ve been trying to find a way to do it justice since I started my 365 project. I think the screen of purple flowers gives it just the right romantic feel, doesn’t it? The building should be a little bit more out of focus, I think, but I had the wrong lens on the camera for that.

I’ve been stalking this tomato in the garden for quite some time. No signs of ripeness yet, but I’m trying to be patient! I used a wide-open aperture and backlighting to make the little hairs on the stems stand out like that.

Speaking of green and wide-open apertures… I actually already have a nice bokeh shot of the morning dew glistening on the grass from earlier this spring, but Lucas and I went on a long walk on morning not long after sunrise and I couldn’t resist the sun gleaming like gemstones on the dewy grass. All those circles in the top part of the frame are just out-of-focus dew drops. Kewl, eh?

And more fun with focus on this one! Actually, this was almost an out-take. I noticed the Coronas in the ice bucket and liked the repeating pattern and the way the light was hitting everything, but I didn’t realize I had my aperture wide open. When I first looked at the image when I was sorting things at the end of the day, I almost discarded this one, then realized that the out-of-focus beer kind of tells its own story!

This is my favourite shot of the week. Again, it was an intentional play with focus. I love the details in the powder on his fingers, the perfect crescent-shaped bite, and how his lips are smacking in the background!

Baby’s first doughnut. It’s all capturing about the milestones!

Now that all the excitement of passing the half-way point has settled, the reality becomes obvious: oh my sweet lord, I have more than 180 pictures left to take? (And, since I take about a dozen pictures for every one I post, we’re actually looking at another thousand or two pictures until the end of the year!)

Last Friday was one of those days. I was disappointed in some of the pictures I’d taken for BOLO the night before, and frustrated with the camera. I didn’t put it to my face all day, and by dinner time I had no idea what to photograph. I rooted through Lucas’s toy box until I found something mildly colourful and thought I might be able to catch the beads of this rattle moving. Meh. I took about 20 pictures, trying to get one I half-way liked, and this was as good as it got. Thank goodness for digital! I’d’ve been sick about spending for a roll of film and processing and ending up with this, back in the day!

The next day, still lacking inspiration I defaulted back to my comfort zone: the coneflowers in my garden. The first one is the official photo of the day, but I liked the other two enough to post as well. (And deleted about 30 more!)

(I’m partial to how that last one turned out. I turned the frame off, because I think it looks cooler just floating in the background. I was down underneath the flowers, shooting toward a lightly overcast sky, and metered for the flower in the background. The highlights in the sky were blown out, but it turned into a nice flat white — that was done in camera, I have no idea how to achieve the effect in photoshop! The first two, I played with in photoshop a lot more. The top one was desaturated a bit, and on the middle one I torqued the noise for that grainy effect. Photoshop is FUN!)

I had my camera with me when we went for our weekly two-family Sunday breakfast and snapped this picture of a shad fly (also known as a may fly, I’m told) on my friend UberGeek’s finger. (UberGeek’s been around since the beginning of blog, but been largely silent lately, until this week!) Flickr’s magic donkey must like shad flies, because this one made it into Explore.

(Funny that that one made it into explore, because I almost made this second picture from Sunday the pic of the day. I’m either biased against bugs (ick!) or a little bit too into my coneflowers these days!)

Monday, we went to the Central Experimental Farm for the first time this year with a couple of friends, and I enjoyed watching Lucas’s reactions to the animals. He was partial to the chickens (he even said “chicken” quite clearly) and the cows, and by the end of the day every four-legged creature was a “moo”.

After seven years of Farm visits, it’s hard to find an original shot to take! I liked this one, though – I’m partial to the expression on the centred cow’s face! I zoomed in during the exposure to get the dizzying effect. I may just enter this one into the Farm’s annual photo contest, if I don’t get something better later this season.

And this one is item number 271 of things I thought would be much easier to photograph. I’ve seen some stunning pictures of spiderwebs with morning dew on them, and have been hunting all summer for a good one. I finally found this one right in our driveway, and though it wasn’t a misty morning, I made my own moisture with a water bottle. Didn’t help though. Who knew spiderwebs would be so darn hard to photograph?!? (And don’t be expecting to see a whole lot of bugs in my photostream now, either. Two in one week? Unheard of! And ick!)

I’d stopped by my parents’ house to take a picture of their used sofa and recliner to post for sale on Used Ottawa and Kijiji, and my mom showed me this cute garden ornament she’d just put out. I loved the colours and textures and snapped a picture, but certainly didn’t intend it to be the picture of the day. Then the day got away from me, and at the end of the day I simply had nothing else in the camera. Good thing it caught my eye, or you’d’ve been treated to a nice soft-light portrait of my parents’ used sofa here! (And it sold in literally about 15 minutes, entirely because of my mad photographic sofa-portrait skillz, of course!)

We were at the waterpark, and the pattern in the bricks caught my eye. This would likely have been a better shot if the footprints were more distinct and led directly to the feet, but oh well.

What can I say, I just love those little feetsies.

Well, I hope not every week is this exciting. I don’t think I could stand it! Could you stand another post about Project 365 this week? (It’s been so crazy, I almost forgot to post my weekly round-up, and that’s often my favourite post of the week.)

The week started off on a good note when this picture was the eighth of my collection to make it into Flickr’s Explore. I call it “Mama and Baby Coneflower” and it’s even prettier printed out on paper.

Saturday, which seems like about a million years ago now, was the Scott Kelby Worldwide Photo Walk. This was my favourite picture of the day, and one of the two I submitted to the official competition.

(This is the other one I submitted to the official competition. Like the Café picture, it makes me smile when I look at it.)

Despite the endless rain and abject lack of sunshine so far in this so-called summer, this little raspberry in my mother’s yard fought its way to ripeness.

One of these days, I’m going to capture a good bubble picture. In the interim, here’s a bubble wand picture. (I suppose it would help if he had the bubble end up, right?)(This makes me smile because for my first child, I would have prevented him from making the mess on his shirt.)

I’d been counting down to the half-way point of the project for some time, but I put no real thought into a fun way to represent “half”. I was going to do an entire half-breakfast (half a waffle, half an orange, maybe even on half a plate and half a glass of juice) but the day was so busy I didn’t get a chance. At the end of the day, I played with half an egg, half an apple, and half a glass of milk. In the end, I finally settled on this one (with a much more than half-full belly!):

You’ve seen this one before, of course. This is Adrian Harewood and the folks at CBC, snapped less than surreptitiously during my appearance on All in a Day. As I titled the photograph, it’s much more exciting than half a cookie!

Appropriately, I ended the week on another high note. I’d had a version of this picture in my head for most of this week, but I had to snap it first thing in the morning because there was rain forecast for most of the day. (I’d meant to be wearing my shades, but it was so overcast I’d forgotten them.) And sometimes, ten seconds is simply not enough time — if you look closely, I think you can still see my hair settling as I dropped on to the windshield just as the timer went off!

All I can say is thank goodness I was on vacation this week. I hope the rest of my vacation is a little less exciting…