Please help me choose!

So after the pet photo contest fell through (turns out you have to pay $15 for every photo you enter!) I started looking for other photo contests. This is also a calendar photo contest- for Saskatchewan. I need to pick 2 photos to enter by Sunday and they need to have been taken in Saskatchewan (not hard, most of my photos are). Here are a few that I was thinking of- it's tough because some of my favourites just don't have that happy calendar feel to them! Let me know if you have any favourites in this batch or in other posts. I may find a few more to add tonight.

This one I've posted before. I love the composition on it and it gives a unique perspective of one of the bridges. It needs to be black and white because there are bright coloured vehicles on the bridge that distract from the rest of the photo.


This is one of my first and favourite shots. I'm not sure I *can* enter it though- it was previously published in our local newspaper and I can't remember which "rights" I signed over to them. It's completely untouched by the way- just a little cropping to remove part of the bridge railing I managed to catch in the bottom of the shot.


I really love this bridge photo- it's just not that unique. Again, it's completely natural lighting (no contrast and saturation increase here!).


This bridge photo is a little more unique- foggy!


This is a photo from my parents' farm. I like it in sepia but I'm not sure if it suits a calendar photo. I need to get the colour one off of the external hard drive to see how it looks and if it would work better. I like the idea of submitting a city photo and a rural photo :) It's my dad's favourite shot too.


Another foggy bridge- this is my favourite bridge.


I'm just not sure I'm happy with any of them! Maybe I'll get some time to take some great photos on Saturday ...

I love spring!

Here are a few shots from my backyard I took tonight :) As you can tell, I LOVE flowers- and the bonus is that they stay still for photographs!


Our grapevine getting ready to bloom!

A couple more from the weekend

This shot was taken from our car as we drove down the highway. I was trying to capture the rays of sunshine emanating from the sun. It ended up being kind of neat because the foreground is blurred due to the movement of the car. I thought of using it in the photo contest- probably for the song "Wide Open Spaces" by The Dixie Chicks.


This is a shot I took of Kira hanging out in the backyard- she was so happy to have somehere to run!


This picture is of a couple of purple martens hanging out on a electrical wire in the back alley of my sister's house. The sky looked really cool with the cold processing effect! I'm using it as my contest entry for "A picture is worth a 1000 lyrics". It suits the Leonard Cohen song "Bird on the wire" well I think.

My niece's first birthday!

It was my niece's first birthday this weekend and my sister planned a princess themed birthday party for her. I bought her a pink tutu from Etsy that was too cute (although a little too big!). We had a blast :) Here are a few of my favourite photos from her birthday.

Another edit of the first one; I think I like it better!












And this is the castle cake my sister and I made for her princess party! It turned out better than we thought it would :)

Oh how I love macro....

I love macro photography! The flowers on the trees in the backyard are amazing and smell so good. I decided I would take advantage and slap on my extension tubes and cheap 50mm f2.0 lens. All of these photos are uncropped and some are unprocessed as well- although the extension tubes do underexpose the photos a bit. Tomorrow I want to try to get some insect photos and try to get even closer by using all of the extension tubes instead of just two of them. They're the same flowers in the post below.







I also took a few with my lensbaby- once again, the effect is done entirely by the lens :) The dandelion shot is definitely one of my favourites from the weekend!

Flowers & Insects

It's been a gorgeous weekend so far! The plum and pear trees are blooming in our backyard and they are swarming with insects- perfect photo taking! I also discovered the wonders of www.picnik.com so I was experimenting a little bit and I have to say that I love the effects you can add to the photos. So much fun!

My first photo shoot...with Helix ;)

Helix is such a poser! He is super photogenic and was having a blast playing on the bed (which is badly in need of a good wash- but we're in the middle of shedding season, so there's really no point...). Here are a few shots I took of him this evening :)