Four of us piled into my car to make a venture out west, in search of ghost towns. Areas that weren’t developed enough for the Canadian railway to go through, and the lack of major transportation eventually killed them.

What we found were not-so-abandoned places, black flies biting us all over, and dead ends.

Still, it wasn’t a total loss. There’s something to shoot almost anywhere, as long as you can change your perspective. And riding in a car with three new people means you get good conversation, if not good photo opportunities.

Taking portraits of families is a lot harder than I expected. It’s not so much the amount of light and large depth-of-field required (although that does play a part), but the fact that there are so many things going on at once. Getting everyone to co-ordinate what they’re doing becomes exponentially difficult with every extra person. And if only one person blinks, the photo is ruined.

One of the biggest assets a photographer can have is a sense of humour. If you can make your model laugh, you lower their apprehensiveness, which brings down their guard and provides you with much more natural expressions. Not to mention the fact that it’s a pleasure to see someone smiling or laughing.

I generally don’t take photos of wildlife, because I don’t have the right equipment; the most telephoto lens I have is a 100mm macro, where I’d say at least 200mm is needed. Wildlife also tends to be difficult to capture, since the variables are so hard to control (especially with models that don’t understand verbal commands), and the chances fleeting. Every now and then, an opportunity presents itself though.

For the In A Flash photo contest this year, I got runner up to the main prize for this photo I took of my muse, and an honourable mention for my picture of Pat in Jen’s wedding dress in the humour category.

I didn’t tie with myself like last time¹, but I was still glad to get two of my photographs in there.

1. It was a blind judging again, where there are no names to the photos, so there’s no favoritism. At the same time, this means more than one photo by the same person may be awarded. [↑]

 

The holidays are over. I suspect that I’ve eaten more chocolate over the last two weeks than ever in my life.

The two New Year’s parties were great, although I missed seeing Rob at Aaron’s. I did get a New Year’s kiss though, something I normally feel awkward about when the couples are all partaking and I hide behind my camera.

The holes in my ceilings have yet to be fixed, and it makes me cringe every time I walk into my bedroom or bathroom, so I spent all my time in the living room. Every day, I’d wake up, eat, play games, watch movies, then fall back asleep there.

On occasion, I’d visit friends or see a movie, if only for the sake of getting out. Some nights, I’d open the blinds and let the burning sky pour in, just so I could know that there was something out there outside of my little microcosm.

I’m glad to be back to life. I was feeling so lackadaisical and disconnected, drifting aimlessly without any reason or purpose. In a strange way, I feel recharged, if only because I had two weeks without a regular schedule.

Sometimes, I feel like I’ve been waiting to capture moments like this my whole life.

 

Still playing around with black-and-white tones. This time, I went with less contrast, so more of a low-key feel, not just in the overall scene but in the figures themselves. In doing so, the texture isn’t so blown-out as in my previous black-and-whites.

I love the dreamy look of high-key, but for more focus on facial features, I’m starting to turn to a greater range of light.

 

In return for modeling for some of my other projects, I agreed to give Agnes and Soph some portraits. Siblings are generally easy to work with. There’s a comforting familiarity that lets them act naturally together. To tell them apart, one simply has to observe how differently each acts in front of a camera.

Tiana asked me to take some pictures of her during her pregnancy so she could have a record of what her body looks like compared to the rockin’ body it was before. In return, she posed for some other projects I had in mind.

It was an exercise in colour tones and mood. As I’m getting more comfortable in working with RAW files, I wanted to try my hand at adjusting tint, exposure, saturation, and contrast.

At one point I asked her how to spell “pregasaurus” (a term she came up with to encapsulate her girth), and she reminded me that it was a made-up word, with no commonly accepted way of spelling it.

The media makes pregnancy out to be such a glamorous affair, with designer clothes and celebrity births, that it seems to be deleteriously affecting the younger generation. I wanted to portray pregnancy in a much more casual, natural light. Hence the ghetto T-shirt and the belly sticking out.

Thanks goes to Tiana for not only getting nude for me, but for being so photogenic at eight months through the pregnancy, and working with me on these ideas.

This little vial, along with a few drops of anti-coagulant, is filled with blood. My blood. I needed some for a photography project I’m working on, so I got a friend of mine in the medical industry to take it from me.

Now I’ve both figuratively and literally bled for my work.

Babies seem to have a different expression every second, and the expressions are so innocent. They hide nothing. I like to think each expression reveals the drifting thoughts going on in their tiny little brains. Rather difficult to photograph because the face they wear when you press the shutter release button is invariably different from the one you get.

Rosella here is half-Persian, half-Caucasian. Aside from being so cute you could chew her cheeks off, you can already tell how beautiful her mixed blood is going to make her.

Some more practice with photographing couples. Ellen and Ziny are both med students who used to be roommates. They happened to be in Ottawa at the same time for internships at different hospitals, so it was the perfect opportunity to get them both together for a few shots.

Getting black hair and clothes to show up against a black background is very tricky. I suspect darker textures need their own dedicated light source to increase the exposure.

The woman I’ve been looking for my entire life.

Her name was Christine. She was thin lipped. Frail limbed. Not the least bit camera shy, as she pulled her shirt up to expose a breast, like she had fallen on the grass this way and the folds in her clothes rearranged themselves on her body.

Here she is on a horse in the night. Here she is, grim-faced, cradling her son. There was a scar on her neck from a suicide attempt years earlier, and through a series of photographs, you could see the scar heal.

For seven years she was married, before she successfully jumped to her death from the 9th floor of an apartment in East Berlin.

This is someone who understood his art, his morbidity, his need to capture her suicide in a frame, then publish the image of her body on the pavement, looking down from the 9th floor, along with insouciant pictures of a teacup, a playground, a tank, three plants.

And as soon as I had found her, she’s gone.

Should I be happy that she existed? Should I be sad that she’s gone? Should I be punished for comparing the women I’ve had to her?

Is this painful, or beautiful, or both?

Playing around with black-and-white, an off-camera flash, and a nice Cuban cigar.

Sometimes, enjoying life is as simple as this.

Been working on photographing couples the past few months. It’s more difficult than I initially thought. You want to express love, but there are only so many ways one can do so without kissing.

You’re no longer photographing an expression, as with a single person portrait, but an interaction.

Having two people express themselves in such a way can be tricky too. Many are too shy to kiss in public, let alone on camera.

When it works, though, it works. You can see it in their faces. The way their eyes shine. It’s almost like they lose themselves, because they’re drowning in each other, and nothing else in the world exists.

And, of course, best viewed large and on black. Click through for full size.