A while back Lexus Lee and I had started conversing about a non-glamour photoshoot, something fun and different. One thing we both zero’d in on was the idea of an Underworld / Selene look… NO sparkles for us! I really like shooting in landscape orientation (ie, wide), as if making a movie, so this was something I could get into. And she got to do something that was interesting to her, personally… this wasn’t just another T&A shoot (which she ...read more

I finished reading the photo.net series ‘Becoming a More Creative Photographer‘ last weekend, and today by happenstance I had a few minutes to shoot on the way home.

But what to shoot?

Lucky me, I had printed the entire series of articles, and left them in my camera bag. All I needed to was pick out an assignment from the articles and shoot.

Just for fun I had mounted a Soligor 135mm f/2.8 on my K20D as another ‘one lens for the day’ ...read more

I’ve been shooting a lot with the Best Camera iPhone app lately, and I’ve learned to shoot what I see (rather than what I’d like to see), and to trust my instincts as to what to shoot.

What’s weird is applying this technique to shooting with a ‘real’ camera, and getting wildly different results than I’m used to; and framing shots in ways that I’d never had thought of as ‘proper’ before.

It feels good.

The last week was interesting, productive, and frustrating, all at the same time.

I was in Toronto for SecTor, a conference that’s somewhere between Blackhat, DefCon, and something more mainstream like RSA, after which I was in Vancouver for a few days of R&R, shopping, and of course, some shooting.

Actually, I had planned on doing a lot more shooting than I did. My preparations were a bit rushed, and I wasn’t really able to put together a shot list for the ...read more

Of all the kinds of photography there is, the easiest has to be food photography. I have no idea if I’m any good at it, but man-o-man do I like the subject matter!

A couple of nights ago we had deep fried zucchini flowers; tempura batter, some beer, a chilled bowl and hot oil in the wok. Wow.

Then tonight was a baked onion dish with bacon, cheese, and herbs in cream. A heartstopper. Just a few spoonfulls on a plate and you are ...read more

Some time ago my Dad gave me a Kodak Stereo Camera as a novelty from one of his antique store forays. I’d wondered if it still worked, so I took it to the Lethbridge airshow. With lots of aircraft on static display, it would be a good place to try it out. It has some very limited settings for aperture and shutter speed, and focus is by guesswork, using a distance scale; the viewfinder is actually the square window between ...read more

Last weekend we snuck down to the city of Lethbridge, Alberta, for the ‘Alberta International Airshow’. It’s not as big an affair as the old airshows at the old base at Namao (Edmonton), but the more relaxed atmosphere meant lots of space up at the fence to get close to the action… not that you needed to be very close with a unexpected treat like this old girl:

All of these shots were done with the Pentax K10D and K20D.  The ...read more

Back in June I shot a wedding, and at the same time photobookcanada.com was having a promotion, so I thought … ‘What the heck, let’s try printing their wedding as a book!’. I’m glad I did… one of things I need to do is build better estimates of the actual amount of time it takes to perform all the post work, and assembling a whole book was an unknown to me. Short answer: it took more time than I thought… ...read more

I was just reviewing some shots of Kasandra (one was poster earlier). She is a make up artist that did double-duty as model on a recent shoot, and what a gem she is:

I had been experimenting with white umbrellas (reflective, not shoot through), and found I really prefer the light over a harder reflective material, like silver.

This shoot would be a chance to try out a lighting arrangement ...read more

I used to have a quiet chuckle to myself when I saw someone hiking with a tripod lashed to their backpack.

Well, turns out there still IS a place for that archaic camera support… the HDR (and maybe Panoramas… next post…)

Well, maybe.

It took me nearly an hour of cropping, rotating, tweaking, and otherwise fiddling to get three exposures to line up to produce this small sample shot, using an older version of Photomatix (2.3.2):