On Saturday, we reached a milestone on another project — the 365th Maggie-a-day. Only four months after I took the picture! I’m really speedy with this photography stuff.

Not quite 99 Luftballoons, but I still feel pretty good about it.

We’re not stopping here, of course. Maggie-a-day will continue as long as I enjoy taking pictures of her, and she’s willing to put up with her dad following her around with a camera.

So here’s one of my favourites from that day:

I call it The Accidental Beer Ad — I was taking a photo of the “hockey player” (aka, man-on-stilts wearing a Habs jersey) who is the focus of the shot, and didn’t realise that there was a beer advertisement in the background until editing later.

Still, it works wonderfully well. Here’s to happy accidents.

Photo is available in higher resolution on Flickr.
By Mr. Topp.
Published under a Creative Commons license for non-commercial use.

So today — a few days late, and in no particular order — I bring you the eleven photos (of mine) that I like most from 2011:

The miniatures

As regular readers of the Big Bad Blog will know, roleplaying is a hobby of mine, and I play D&D on a semi-regular basis. I often take my camera along, to take photos of the minis in action.

Here’s an example of minis in action:

Engagement

Two friends of mine got engaged (to each other) early in 2011, and so I took the opportunity to have an “engagement photo shoot”. A number of the photos resulting from this can be found at this post in April.

My favourite photo from the shoot is this one. The epic feel just feels right.

Greenwich foot tunnel

For most of 2010, Karen and I lived in Greenwich. There’s a tunnel there, that crosses the Thames to the Isle of Dogs. We didn’t use it at all.

When we moved back to Wapping, however, it started to get regular use — we would walk or jog to Greenwich, to spend time in the park or one of their many lovely pubs. The tunnel is quite picturesque, but usually the pedestrian traffic is too heavy to make for a good photo opportunity.

One day in March, however, I found myself in an uncrowded tunnel with my camera. I like the result.

Bubblehead

Summer, a visit to a friend’s, bubbles in the garden. A beautiful day.

Maggie

The Maggie-a-day project is an endeavour in which your blogger attempts to add a photo of his daughter to his Flickr stream every single day.

The project has met with partial success — I certainly do not take a photo every day, and I seem to miss posting a photo approximately one day in four (she’s about 450 days old, and there are about 350 photos in the stream). But with so much of my energy spent on photos of Maggie, it should be no surprise that they make up a significant portion of my top eleven.

Reflections on a nephew

All that practice taking photos of children comes in handy when I get to take photos of other people’s children. These stand out to me, as they are different from the Maggie photos I take daily.

My favourite of these is this photo of my nephew, taken while in Canada:

The green wood

I don’t get out hiking or walking much — while London has a fair bit of green space, none of it is “wild”. And it’s tough to drag a child who isn’t up to walking along with you.

Exceptions are made, however, and one such exception led me to find this little green gem:

The road to the sea

This summer featured our first family holiday — we went down to the French seaside. It was gorgeous, and filled with a dozen photos which would all be featured were this “the top 25 of 2011″, and I did not have an aversion to filling such a list with a group of photos taken in the same short timespan, in the same place.

Out of these photos, two made the cut to the top 11. The first is the final photo in the Maggie sequence above. The second is a black and white photo I took of a pier jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. There’s something special about photos of water in black and white.

All photos are CC licensed by Mr. Topp, and can be found in my Flickr stream. Alternatively, just click on the photo to go to it on Flickr.

It’s very impressive stuff (you should support her), and I’ll be there cheering … and taking photos.

I took some photos at a 10 km race this past summer — I meant to snap some photos of a friend, but of course I somehow managed to completely miss him running by. There were still plenty of photos of other runners, however. With the race coming up this weekend, these photos seem a suitable lead-in to this weekend’s race.

When photographing a race, of course, I first get the lead runners:

Once the leaders are photographed, I continue to snap away at those following. These photos are usually thrown out, but sometimes I get something pretty good:

Men and women usually race together, but are counted separately. I keep my eyes open to get the leading lady, though sometimes she can be lost in the crowd:

Once this is done, we get to the masses, and I begin looking for interesting people and situations.

For instance, some people insist on running with their headphones in. I understand why people do this in training, but a race is about more than your own running — it’s about the course, the fans, and the other runners too. It seems wrong to wear headphones while running. But some people do. And for some reason, I found a group of these people clustered together:

Of course, most of the remaining photos are of runners in costume (“fancy dress”, as they say here in England).

First, you get those in lightweight costumes that are unlikely to much impact their performance:

Then you move on to those with more elaborate costumes:

Finally, towards the back of the pack, you find people racing in costumes that make you wonder how they do it. I admire these people:

One last photo before we’re done — the obligatory black-and-white arty photo with the runners out of focus:

Don’t forget to donate to Shelter in support of Karen by clicking here, and come cheer her on in Hyde Park this Sunday.

All photos by Mr. Topp. Photos were taken at the Ascics British 10K London Run on July 10th.

Today Maggie crawled up the stairs.

Holy fucking shit.

If that’s possible.

Today is a photo, which I have decided to title Recursion. A mother breastfeeding while reading a book about breastfeeding with a photo of a mother breastfeeding on the cover. It would be a bit more perfect if the mother on the cover was also reading a book about breastfeeding, but alas, this is not a perfect world.

Whatever sort of monster she is, she is a myopic monster.

What else to do, then, but tiptoe through the tulips, and try my hand at the photography of colourful flowers.

Happy Canada Day to all the Canadians (and wanna-be-Canadians, and people-living-in-Canada-who-get-a-day-off) out there.

Here in the UK, we do not get time off for Canada Day – perhaps not unexpectedly – but your intrepid blogger has taken the day off, anyways. Though never one to be overly celebratory regarding the birth of the nation when living in Canada, since arriving in London I have gone out of my way to make sure I celebrate my Canadian-ness every year on July 1st.

Every year, the location is the same — Trafalgar Square, where we celebrate with a mix of odd Canadian music (this year: Canadian throat singing), musical acts waning in popularity (this year: Blue Rodeo), and things that don’t quite fit the Canadian theme (this year: Yoga).

Throw in some low-quality poutine and Sleeman beer, and we have ourselves a party.

We are on a four year run of good Canada Day weather, so fingers crossed that the unpredictable British weather behaves itself once more today. We will be there, rain or shine.

We now leave you with photos from last year’s festivities:

All photo by Mr. Topp, taken on July 1, 2010, at Trafalgar Square, London. Published under a Creative Commons license.

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