A Child's Gaze....

Here is a natural light portrait of my son Kai. The diffused natural light was coming in from our living room windows and was side lighting Kai. The soft side light really brings out his eyes and wraps around his face opening up the shadows on the right side.

A Childs Gaze

Camera: 5DMk2

Lens: 85 f/1.2

Aperture: f/1.2

Shutter Speed: 1/160

Day 3 of 365 Project

Well today was a cold dreary day, so I decided to head down to the local man made lake here in out neighbourhood and see if there were any geese around. So I packed up my Canon 1DMk3, my 70-200  f/2.8 with the 2 x extender and my trusty tripod and head down to the lake. Well there wasn't very much happening at the lake, the place was barren, just a couple of geese at the far side of the lake and a seagull feeding jut off the shore line.
Well the geese where to far away for a good shot, even with the 70-200 f/2.8 racked out to 400 f/5.6 with the 2x extender so I focused on the feed seagull that was slowly swimming towards me. My shot of the day  shows the seagull diving for lunch and it also show what a fast shutter speed can do for an action shot.

Camera - 1DMk3
Lens - 70-200 f/2.8 IS w/ 2x Extender
Focal Length - 400mm
Aperture - f/5.6
Shutter Speed - 1/800s
ISO - 800

Photo 2 of 365

Evening, todays photo is a studio shot I did for my daughters 6th birthday party. The theme of the party was Barbie Fashion Fantasy.... so we just had to do a fashion shoot with the girls. This photo is from that shoot.

Camera : Canon 5Dmk2

Lens: 85 f/1.2

Focal length: 85mm

Shutter Speed: 1/160s

Aperture: 5.6

ISO: 100

Lighting: Key- Cl- Profoto 600r w/ med soft box w/ 40* grid
                Fill - Cr - Profoto 600r w/ 22" beauty dish
           Kicker - Cl & Cr -2 Elenchrom D-lite 4 w/ 8" reflector w/ 20* grids
  Background - Cl & Cr - 2 Ef 580exII w/ white bounce umbrellas

This shot was taken with 6 different lights, each light adding to the over all essence of the shot. Here are a couple of behind the seen  shots so you can see how the lighting was set up.

So is shot shows the key light ,Med soft box with the grid, the kicker light with grid and the 580exII in the umbrella for the background. As you can see my studio is in my garage so I don't have a lot of room to work with and I really have to control were the light is going, that is why I use grids when ever possible. If I can't use a grid to control light spillage, like in the case of the bounce umbrellas, I set up a flat or bookend to control where the light goes. The big white piece of foam core  is a flat and I'm using it to block the background light from spilling onto my subject.

Here is the same set up, just showing it from the fill side of the shot. The 22" beauty dish was used as a fill light, the 8"gridded reflector is the kicker and last another 580exII in a bounce umbrella for the background that has a flat in front of it to block the light spillage .

I hope you like the shot, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them.
Have a great night.

Photo Number 1 of 365 Project

Well here is the very first photo for my new 365 project. It was my son, Rylan's 15th birthday yesterday so tonight he is having a few friends over to celebrate. They're all downstairs in the theatre room rocking it out on RockBand so I couldn't resist getting a few shots of them.
This first 365 photo is a shot of my son rocking out on the Rockband drum set.

The shot was taken with a Canon 5Dmk2 and the 85 f/1.2.
Lighting - 100% ambiant
Focal Length - 85 mm
ISO - 6400
Shutter Speed - 1/500
Aperture - f/1.2

Now, I'm not much of a tilt shot kinda guy but i think the tilt on this shot does work well with the composition of the shot.

 Happy 15th Birthday Rylan, I Love you.

New 365 Project

Hi there, so I have realy been neglecting my blah and me photography this summer. It's been busy as he'll around the home front, with the kids out of school and trying to finish renovation my basement I just haven't had the time do very much shooting. Well that's going to stop tonight, from this night on I will post a new daily photograph along with a little write on how I took the shot. I welcome all cirques, comments and criticisms, please post anything that comes to mind when you view the photos.

Edmonton Fast Track Photography Meet

Hi everyone, well I finally made it to an Edmonton Fast track meeting. For those of you that don't know about the Edmonton Fast Track organization they are a group of Edmonton photographers that are basing their meetings on Dane Sander's book and business philosophy " Fast Track Photographer ".

This months meeting was supposed to be a pot-luck dinner at Hawrelak Park with a model shoot but mother nature put a stop to that with non stop rain. We ended up meeting at Starbucks and then went out to do the model shoot in an old car parkaid downtown. The shoot was a great time and I have to thank our models, Sara and Chris, for being great sports and pretty much doing all that we ask of them. You guys are the best Sara and Chris.

These are the photos from that shoot, I hope you like them.

Once again a special thanks to our models Chris and Sara, you guys rock.

Latest Assignment Shoot.

Yesterday I spent part of Canada Day on assignment for Mayoral Candidate Daryl Bonar. The assignment was to shoot Mr. Bonar at the Canada Day celebration in Borden Park where he was a volunteer, helping to hand out hotdogs and pop to all of the Canada Day celebrators.  He was also there with his great group of volunteers to promote and support a petition to Stop the Closure of the City Centre Airport.

The day was just beautiful, sunny with only a few clouds floating on the breeze, great weather for all of the celebrators, not so great for said photographer. For those of you that don't know, trying to photograph on a bright sunny day IS NOT ideal conditions. The sun produces to much contrast, were the highlights are to bright and the shadows are to dark, to produce a nice photo.

So what do you do when you HAVE to shot on a bright sunny day? Well there are a few things you can do to get a better photo;

1) Pray for Clouds..... clouds act like a gigantic softbox to the sun, softening the light and reducing the contrast of the scene, so when you do have cloud coverage, put you subject into the shadow of the cloud for nice soft light.

2) And what do you do if they're isn't any clouds in the sky, look for SHADE.  Shade has the same light qualities that a softbox or cloud coverage gives, nice soft light with alot lower contrast than the bright sun. The easiest place to find shade is to go to the north side of a building, in the northern hemisphere, the north side of a building is in the shade most of the day. What if there isn't any buildings around to shade your subject, well then you look for anything that is producing shade, whether its some trees or a rock outcrop, just make sure your subject is completely in the shade or your subject will have mixed lighting on them which will increase the contrast of the photo and will mess up the colour balance of the photo, sun light and shade have 2 very different colour temperatures.

3) Ok, so the first 2 suggestions are great if you have cloud coverage or your in a spot that has some shade, but what if your in the middle of a field, a parking lot or on a beach with no clouds and no shade. Well you make your own shade by using a scrim, a scrim is anything that blocks light. In this application you will want to put your scrim between the sun and your subject to cast a shadow over your subject so again you get a softer light onto your subject and produce a much nicer photo.

4) So the first three tips work great if your subject is stationary or is confined to a small area. But what do you do if your subject is constantly on the move as in my situation yesterday. Well there is only one thing you can do and that is expose for the highlights. What I mean by this is that when you meter for the light you want to make sure that you don't blow out the highlights. Your shadows will be darker but you can fix that in post production, if you blow out your highlights there is no way to recover that lost information. You can tell if your blowing the highlights if you see any spots on you LCD screen that are blinking, if you see blinking then lower your exposure by either raising your shutter speed, stopping down your aperture or lowering your ISO.

I hope these techniques help you the next time you have to shoot out in the bright sun, if you have any questions please leave a comment and I'll try to answer them for you.

Ok so enough talking, on with the photos from yesterdays assignment.

The Wonderful World Of Macro Photography

I've start on a bit of a macro photography kick as of late so I thought I would share a few of the macro shots I did the other day. All of these shots where taken in my backyard, thats the great thing about macro photography, you don't have to travel very far to get interesting subjects to shoot. You own backyard is a wondrous natural studio just waiting for you to explore. 

All of these photographs where taken with a Canon 5Dmk2 and the EF 180 f3.5 L Macro lens with the Extender EF 2x II which doubles the focal length of any lens thats its attached to and reduces the aperture of the lens by 2 stops, turning my 180 f3.5 into a 360 f7.1. Even with an aperture of f7.1 the depth of field is very shallow so you will want to have the camera mount to a tripod and trigger the shutter with a remote. Even the slightest movement ( pushing down the shutter button ) of the camera will throw the focus out so do use a remote trigger of some kind. If you don't have a remote trigger you can set the timer on your camera to fire the shutter.

I mentioned that the depth of field is very shallow when the aperture is at f7.1, so shallow that we are talking millimetres and you will be able to clearly see this in the photos. Some parts of the photos are very sharp but as soon as any part of the photos is on a slightly different focal plane it turns blurry thanks the amazing depth of field that this lens produces.  

  

Ok enough talk, on with the photos, I hope you like them and if you have any questions please feel free to ask.

To view the photos in large size just click on the photo.

This is a shot of some Lilac flowers with a couple of insects exploring the flower. This is a great example of very shallow Depth of Field, notice the 2 insects, the first insect is in focus and yet the second insect is out of focus even though it is millimetres away from the first. Now thats shallow depth of field.