Posts tagged with "photography"

Small Town Photo Trip

Field 2

Tina and I head­ed to a cou­ple of small towns around Ottawa. She had her Nikon and I was armed with my new Canon 5D Mark II, which is a full frame cam­era and gives me such won­der­ful­ly wide angles. You can see her shots at her flickr set. They give me great ideas on how I can look at things from anoth­er per­spec­tive because they’re so dif­fer­ent from mine, approach­ing shots from clos­er ranges and com­pos­ing with more diag­o­nal angles.

Field 1

This is by far my favourite shot (above), and I’ll prob­a­bly get a large print of it when I have the mon­ey. There’s a series of acrylic paint­ings by Ken Vincent at the Koyman Galleries in Ottawa, and I’ve always want­ed this one in par­tic­u­lar because the colours and the moody clouds speak of pure emo­tion to me, and I nev­er believed I was capa­ble of cap­tur­ing such moments with my last cam­era1. The price — $2300 for a 28“x61” paint­ing — had always held me back, but now I’m con­fi­dent I can get that elu­sive look I’ve been try­ing to cap­ture, myself.

Continue read­ing “Small Town Photo Trip”…

  1. A Canon Digital Rebel Xt [↩]

University of Toronto Photographic Art Show

University of Toronto Dentistry art show

If you’re in Toronto, you can check out one of my prints at the University of Toronto Photographic Art Show. Rita Bauer, to whom I owe so much in sup­port, asked me if she could sub­mit the print she bought from me. Also fea­tur­ing the work of some of the amaz­ing peo­ple I met the last time I was down there, such as Jeff Comber, who does awe­some work with skate­board­ers, and Kate Tarini, whose work with panora­mas won her best in show at Maximum Exposure last year.

Photographic Habits

Julie in her aviators

I gen­er­al­ly don’t show my mod­els the pic­tures I’m tak­ing of them until I’m fin­ished the shoot, and have had a chance to do some post-pro­cess­ing. That’s because I want them to see the final prod­uct, not the draft, and the impact is much greater. But if a mod­el is inse­cure, or I want them to get a bet­ter sense of the idea I’m going for, I’ll show them a pic­ture or two. It helps build their con­fi­dence, and they start to trust me a lit­tle more, which, in turn, gives me a lit­tle more cre­ative con­trol.

Dolly on shoes

I also try to look at the LCD screen as infre­quent­ly as pos­si­ble. It forces me to have faith in myself and my pho­to­graph­ic abil­i­ties. Some peo­ple laugh at those who chimp; admit­ted­ly, when I see a “pro­fes­sion­al” who checks their screen after every shot, I lose con­fi­dence in them. That does­n’t mean I won’t look down to at least make sure my flash­es went off, or the auto expo­sure isn’t going wonky due to some extreme light con­di­tions, but that’s it.

Tatiana

Chest bone

Thumbnail: Three quarter body
Thumbnail: Bust
Thumbnail: Legs
Thumbnail: Hand
Thumbnail: Torso

Lying down

Some por­traits of Tatiana. As a per­son into voyeurism (more specif­i­cal­ly, on the end being observed), she’s more com­fort­able with her clothes off than on. I love work­ing with peo­ple who are com­fort­able with their bod­ies. You get total cre­ative free­dom, instead of the frus­tra­tion of hav­ing to walk on eggshells, lest you offend a mod­el’s sen­si­bil­i­ties.

I’ve dis­cov­ered that when doing nude pho­tog­ra­phy, you need to open up the aper­ture so that a greater por­tion of the per­son is in focus than in con­ven­tion­al por­traits. If you focus on only the eyes, you lose the nudi­ty and it becomes a dis­trac­tion. If you focus on naked­ness, you lose the eyes and it becomes vul­gar.