Monthly Archives: March 2008

Snowstorm

Snow surrounds a bus shelter

Snow weighs down branches

Snow taller than a trash bin

Townhouses in winter

Snow is a rel­a­tive­ly hard thing to cap­ture on film. With so much white, there’s very lit­tle con­trast or tex­ture, so noth­ing to lead the eye. You want to give a sense of being suf­fo­cat­ed by all this now, but too much of the same thing in a pic­ture becomes bor­ing. It’s bal­anc­ing the sub­ject and work­ing with avail­able light that becomes impor­tant.

I don’t think we’ve reached the record for snow­fall yet, but we’re close. I tried to walk to work, but gave up. Even trudg­ing through the snow to get these shots left me sweat­ing. It’s days like these that I’m thank­ful that I live in a con­do, because my con­do fees go towards shov­el­ing the park­ing lot. People told me they had to shov­el their dri­ve­ways a cou­ple times in one night.

Traces of Me

I’m just com­ing off a mod­er­ate cold I’ve had for the last week. All the clas­sic symp­toms — run­ny, stuffy nose, con­ges­tion, slight headache, yel­low phlegm — but odd­ly enough, bare­ly a hint sore throat. It’s been unpleas­ant to say the least.

A lit­tle while ago, Tiana wrote “I look in the bowl after to see how impres­sive it was. I’m pret­ty sure you do too”.

This cold has made me real­ize that I not only look in the bowl (I’m sure Freud would diag­nose us as being fix­at­ed in the anal stage of psy­cho­sex­u­al devel­op­ment), but I open my Kleenex after blow­ing in it as well, to check for dis­coloured mucus, phlegm, blood, or bits of brain that may have escaped through my nose.

Moo Minicards

Moo Minicard montage

Thumbnail: The Moo box
Thumbnail: The Moo Minicard package
Thumbnail: The Moo Minicard holder
Thumbnail: The Moo Minicard detail
Thumbnail: The Moo keyfob

My Moo Minicards are in! I want­ed a set to hand out at art shows and to peo­ple I ask to mod­el for me. I also throw a few in with each print I sell. People have real­ly enjoyed them; many have a hard time decid­ing which one they want to take. The great thing about the Minicards is that you can order up to 100 dif­fer­ent pic­tures on the front, so that peo­ple get a sense of the range of pho­tog­ra­phy you do.

Continue read­ing “Moo Minicards”…

A Thousand Kisses Deep

I can gath­er all the news I need on the weath­er report.
Hey, I’ve got noth­ing to do today but smile.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-da-n-da-da and here I am
The only liv­ing boy in New York

Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where,
And we don’t know here.

—Simon and Garfunkle, The Only Living Boy in New York

Every day, we get caught up in our lives.

We adopt pets to give us a sense of fam­i­ly. We eat break­fast at work or in the car to save our­selves time so we can work some more. We scorn those who express emo­tion, we avoid eye con­tact with strangers on the street.

Everything we do — the food we eat, the movies we watch, the home team we cheer for, our cof­fee shop romances — they’re just try­ing to fill that hole, that gap that’s miss­ing, the only way we feel alive.

We don’t slow down, we don’t fig­ure things out. We don’t reflect and appre­ci­ate what we have.

Like straw­ber­ry cheese­cake ice cream with a thick gra­ham crack­er swirl. Like the seren­i­ty of the snow that falls around us, when heav­en decides to bless the earth.

Life gets in the way of liv­ing.

And now I real­ize just how guilty I’ve been of this. I’ve been look­ing for love, but nev­er rec­og­nized it when I found it. All I ever want­ed to do was lie in bed, look into your eyes, and go through my favourite albums with you. But I nev­er did. And now I won­der. Why can’t we just live? We can’t we just love?

Sometimes you have to stop. You can’t cap­ture every­thing. You need to throw your­self in.

A thou­sand kiss­es deep.

Channel Mixer

One of the pho­tog­ra­pher’s great­est assets is the nude mod­el. Without cloth­ing, there’s no chance for some­one to out­ward­ly project their per­son­al­i­ty. Only a human stripped to the bare essen­tials, naked to the world as the day they were born, pure and with­out bias.

This was an exer­cise in mix­ing mono­chro­mat­ic colour chan­nels to bring out details such as cuts, scars, stub­ble, and goose­bumps. Also, some good prac­tice in com­po­si­tion and fram­ing. Best viewed large and on black (so click the pic­tures1).

Torso

Shoulder

oblique

Pectoral

Derrier

backside

And, of course, it does­n’t hurt if he looks like he’s been carved out of mar­ble.

  1. Feed read­ers may have to vis­it the perma­link to take advan­tage of the black Lightbox script. []