As you can see, that's an Owl.

Once a year, usually in the summer, I take a few days to come up to the family cabin up north with Mom. It's almost a 6 hour trip so we can't just jet up for the weekend and generally it's assumed a 5 day visit is about right. We pack all the food we need, and the dog, and we head up through Prince Albert and beyond.

Both my parents were born and raised in Prince Albert, and generally Mom and I will stop on our way through to change the flowers on her parents' grave stone. This year was no exception. It's a nice little ritual and also a good chance for the dog to get out of the car to stretch (though not often to fulfill his other contractual obligations... stubborn little brat...)

As we got ready to leave, having decided I would drive, I climbed into the driver's seat and set my iPhone to move like Jagger. The car started to move forward until I saw something in the grass and trees.
    "That looked like a small monkey." A fuzzy gray one... the type you would see bathing in a snowy hot spring in Japan.
    "That seems unlikely." My mother pointed out. In general I agreed. But something made me stop and back the car up a bit. I guess the "monkey" got curious when it heard the car making noise, cause it turned its head and I realized it wasn't a monkey, it was a WOL (for you Winnie-The-Pooh fans).

Afraid that it was going to eff off as soon as I opened the door, I calmly grabbed my bag from the passenger side and pulled out my camera, assembling it clumsily.

Birds of prey know they're cool. In most of my experience, they typically don't like to hang out when they've been made. But the owl continued to observe me and I tried getting a couple shots just from the car with the window open. The shots worked, but you could barely make it out. So I chanced it and opened the door. The Owl stared at me. I closed the door quietly and moved forward getting a couple more shots. When I stepped forward again, an unseen mate suddenly took off. It had been sitting closer to where I was but was hidden by the small hill and the tall grasses. The other one continued to eye me cautiously as I kept slowly getting closer.

Some breaking (and unavoidable) twigs eventually spooked it enough to take up to the trees where its mate had just gone. Undeterred, I took the long way around the marshy area. There was a lot of stagnant water lying around and the area looked as though there had been low-lying sections that had probably been swamped earlier in the season and were only now just somewhat drying up.

Sadly, due to constraints, I was unable to get really close images because I didn't have a 70-300 lens with me. However, a 21 Megapixel camera ain't nothing to sneeze at none-the-less. I took these images with my 18-105mm lens and they cropped rather nicely. Given the sun was bright it created some harsh shadows, but I cleaned them up a little. For a completely unexpected nature shoot, I was happy enough with the results. :)

Don't let time pass you by! Here's a chance to get some up-to-date photos of your kid or kids before the snow flies! Trust me! Their grandparents/aunts/uncles/God-parents/Honorary Family Members will thank you for it!

Session spots are limited and will fill up fast! Contact Andrea to book your session now!

So I happened upon a great deal the other day - another photographer I know in the city decided to offload some of her equipment including an 85mm 1.8 lens. It will be a good portrait lens, with its ability to pretty well crush distracting elements in the background for selective focus, but it's proving to be not bad when photographing plants too. Taking my dog on his daily walk yesterday I decided to bring my camera and new lens with me and got some images from around the neighbourhood.

Enjoy!

Call or email to book your session now!

Tags: Portraits, Business Portraits, Promotions

As a small business owner, I know what it’s like trying to make ends meet. Arguably still a start-up, having been in business for less than 5 years and not born with an innate business sense, I know I occasionally have to make executive decisions on where my hard earned money goes.

Business planning experts will tell you not to scrimp on advertising. It is, in fact, one of the most important areas to plan for because if people don’t know about you, they’re never going to hire you. And part of that advertising is you. Your image. This is particularly true in the services. If you are building client relationships, along with face-to-face networking, you need to have something to anchor the potential client. Something that presents you as the person they will be working with, something that gives them an impression of who you are. It makes you a familiar face (many people are creatures of habit and comfort. So if you’re not already a habit to them, you need to make them comfortable with you) and should present you in a professional way.

This one is not full of pictures. Sorry.

I've been dealing with depression for the last three years. The last few months have been generally pretty good, though the fact I've been having a quieter period the last little while is sort of the perfect opportunity for the crazies to start working their way through my easy-to-misfire neurons anyway. I've never been on medication, and I've been pretty adamant about not doing it if I can avoid it. I'm not suggesting that in some cases, meds are necessary, but in my case, my depression is caused largely by a history of defeating thinking patterns, and medication would only serve to treat the symptoms, not so much the cause.

A few months of work with my therapist has helped greatly to develop better coping mechanisms for my triggers and I'm much more able to recognize when I'm having an episode and, in some cases of anxiety attacks, I'm able to talk myself off the ceiling. One of the things that has helped me in some cases is an attitude of gratitude. It sounds cliche, but humans are trained to focus on the negative. If you have 10 good things happen to you and one bad thing, you're most likely to focus on the negative. This was an evolutionary tactic our brains developed that made sense at the time when considering the worst case scenario meant you were far more likely to live another day rather than become a meal to a sabre-tooth tiger. At the time, however, we were only living for 30 years or so. Now, with the threat of sabre-toothed tigers at a minimum, technology has removed those types of environmental threats and medicinal and lifestyle changes have helped triple our life expectancy. Unless, of course, you are depressed or suffer from a lot of anxiety, the sorts of things that contribute to hypertension and poorer health.

I am by no means completely "cured" of my depression. It is something that I will likely have to be aware of and deal with for the rest of my life. But it's something I'm constantly working on. And an Attitude of Gratitude has been helping me.

Another bit of messing around in the kitchen... the creative type anyway. I've never tried doing timed exposures with sparklers before, and Lord knows the dollar store can provide all SORTS of weird and wonderful little things to entertain you for hours soooo...
    At some point when I have a model and an assistant and can run around outside, I'll do more with this sort of thing.

So I was supposed to do a shoot this evening with a model and a couple assistants - but the model/assistants bailed so I decided I still needed to get some shooting done because I need to try to keep up some momentum.

These are some of the results... kinda cool I think...

Last summer I headed to Toronto for a couple of weddings I was attending and decided that since I'd never been, I would make a side-trip in the week between weddings to Ottawa. My friend Brooklyn happened to be working there for the summer, so I stayed with her and did the tourist thing during the day while she worked on/near the hill.

Recently, due to a problem with my computer, in a cruel irony (if you believe in fate or God or that sort of thing) as I was trying to back up my trip photos, the original photos ended up getting magicked away. If nothing else, at least I had posted some of them on my Facebook page, so at least I have those. But apart from that, 80% of my photos from the Museum of Civilization are gone. Quite upsetting as the skies were, as you can see, quite dramatic that day. But again, I'm trying to see the silver lining, in that at least I have SOMETHING to remember them.

Also, I feel I should share the shit out of them so that they're out there from now on.

Little Lexie. The Lexinator. She's growing way too fast, something I'm sure her parents Whitney and Jason both marvel at daily.