Eli's 3rd Birthday

Well Elysia's 3rd birthday is coming up, so we need to get some invites done. That's my job I said. So this is what I came up with. Used a photo taken at another little girl's birthday party just a couple weeks ago - she got cool 'elton john' glasses in her loot bag. It's absolutely amazing how she loves the camera and will ham it up and glam it up for me! What a sweetie! And this week she brought home the most heartwarming little song from daycare...sung to the tune of 'are you sleeping,..brother john?"

ma belle mama
ma belle mama
que je t'aime
que je t'aime
vien que je t'embrasse
vien que je t'embrasse
tres, tres fort
tres, tres fort

Oh my...how's that for a total heartbreaker/heartsqueeze coming from your little three year old? Of course we get versions for every member of the family, so I lucked in too! Wow! That stuff is like gold! We really need to get this on video or recorded somehow..her little voice is so strong when she belts it out. It's a cross between absolutely hilarious and absolutely heartwarming. Better than icecream. Waaay better.

Matt at Marina

Ok, so I'm experimenting here, with an edgy little look. We were at the Aylmer Marina yesterday, the water is incredibly high, and I snapped this of Matt looking down the line of trees (submerged). I hadn't planned or intended anything, and got playing with it and this is what happened.

Big Brother: Ninja Hero?

So the kids are thrilled to have the backyard back again...with the snow finally having melted. They had just gotten haircuts and new clothes - and Mattias was pretty excited about his Ninja Turtle pyjamas. I, on the other hand, was keen to see how this 54 point focus tracking was going to work on a four year old boy-ninja.

In the end I was impressed by the speed of the autofocus, the number of sharp shots and the ability to catch the action. Mattias was also quite pleased with his little performance as Michelangelo, and Elysia was just overly impressed with her brother...so I thought I'd have some fun and put this little collage together to capture the moment...seemed fitting.

B is for....???

I said..times they are a changin...and so another colleague will soon be leaving, and I have dipped into my rich store of embarrassing staff retreat photos to pull out this one. Fraser is a couple weeks away from leaving, and doesn't know about this yet..but I don't think he knows about this blog...

So I've tried a 'Dave Hill' look to this photo. DHill is the 'it' photographer in the States right now...everyone wants to copy him and everyone in Hollywood, NBA etc wants to hire him to shoot them. It's a cool look, though I can't pretend to have really got it, since in any case it starts with some pretty complicated wrap around 3D lighting, which I don't have here.. But I've given it a run for the money, and I'm not unhappy. I really used a lot of layers and masking and touching up to get it this way. I'm not sure if I'm done or not. But I thought I'd blog it nonetheless...

g

Canadian Policy Gangster

Tis a time of change at our office..my boss recently moved on. I decided to try my hand at a movie poster, so inspired by a poster I had seen of American Gangster, I created a movie Canadian Policy Gangster. I grabbed a bunch of photos from a staff retreat last summer, bought a stock photo of the Parliament building and...6 hours or so later, I had a full size movie poster. I had it printed up and mounted on foamcore and presented it to him at his going away lunch. It was pretty cool - I think he liked it.

Good luck Allen...

g

"The EA"

One of our colleagues recently moved on to a new job, and I thought I'd make him a photo as a goodbye present. He was the EA to the boss, so I called it "The EA", using a very gothic style font. For the photo itself I gave it a '300' treatment - a la the movie. It really helped that I had been holding the flash off camera and somewhat below his face, giving a spooky, almost Halloweenish lighting. I also sharpened it right up so that it had almost a 3D feel to it - he was almost jumping off the print.

I was rather pleased, considering I spent less than half an hour on the photo - and much of that was spent rebooting my computer several times. He was pleased too. Good luck Alex.

glenn

Winter Observations

A short slideshow of some of my favourite images from this past winter.