Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

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Fireworks!!!!

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

Casino du Lac-Leamy Sound of Light Fireworks

For several years now, we have wanted to see the “Sound of Light Show” at the Casino du Lac Lemay which is just across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Quebec. Well, last night we finally did.  It is one of the largest fireworks competitions in Canada, every year different countries from around the world compete in this competition. Last night we saw China, the country where fireworks were invented in the 12th century – the show was awesome!

Well over 10 years ago I wrote an article about photographing fireworks. I was re-reading it earlier today, and although I had originally written it for film cameras everything in the techniques still apply for use with digital cameras. Except for the part about motor drives, do they still call them motor drives on digital cameras?

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Digital Photography

Thursday, August 5th, 2010

How often have you heard the term digital photography, probably so often that it doesn’t even register anymore as sounding odd or out of place. I don’t know who came up the phrase “digital photography”, but I have to tell you that I hate it! You can have a digital camera or a film camera, both of them do exactly the same thing – capture light a create a photograph.

Before digital cameras, photography was just called photography. Sort of like in Greece where they don’t say Greek food, to them it’s just food (except for a Greek Salad – which they call Greek Salad). So now that Steve McCurry has shot and processed the last roll of Kodachrome film can we all go back to calling photography, just Photography!

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Halfway through November

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

Sunny days in Novemeber

Here we are halfway through what is normally the most overcast and the cloudiest month of the entire year in Ottawa. And it’s been sunny almost every day of the month so far. Given all the rain and overcast days that we had in the spring, summer and autumn when we should have been having decent weather, it stands to reason that the weather now should be just the opposite of what it should be. Who knows what our winter will be like?

Did you know that Canadians are obsessed with the weather probably more than anyone else in the world. Canada has a reputation of being cold, and in the winter it is. Think arctic cold, but then our summers can have the heat and humidy of the tropics. It can also be as wet as the rain forests and as dry as deserts, it’s the extremes like these that get us talking about the weather.

Now if you’re a Canadian photographer all you think about is photography and the weather!

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Overcast with a Chance of More Clouds

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

As the last few leaves that are left on the nearly bare trees slowly drop off and November begins, we have the most overcast month of the year ahead of us.  November around here is pretty dreary, often cold and as we get nearer towards the end of the month, the chance of snow greatly increases.  This is a great time to stay indoors and work on all of those pictures that you took this spring, summer and fall. There is only one other month that I don’t look forward to here in Ottawa, and that is April. You would think it would be January when the temperature is way below freezing. I can live through that and besides the scenery is just spectacular, but in April everything looks dirty and uninspiring. I know you can or should be able to create and take photos at anytime and of anything, but since I make my living from the sales of my photography I’ve learned that pictures taken here in Ottawa in November and April just don’t sell. You probably won’t win any camera club photo competitions with them either. So spend the time working on your pictures or learning how to use Photoshop to improve your photography. Or get out there and take some pictures that prove me completely wrong about this time of year!

Posted in Photography, Workshops | Comments Off on Overcast with a Chance of More Clouds

Photos from the Ottawa Fall Workshop

Thursday, October 15th, 2009

Ottawa Fall Photo Workshop

Last evening was the final classroom session of the Fall Ottawa Photography Workshop. We had great shooting conditions on the field trips for both of the weekends despite the ominous weather forecasts that had been predicting rain.  And like this past spring and summer, it was also colder than normal this fall. I’ve posted a small photo gallery with 15 of pictures that I took on the workshop here.

During the winter months I will be teaching classes on Photoshop, details of these workshops will be posted to my web site this coming weekend. The next photography workshop in Ottawa will be this spring in May 2010.

 

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Ottawa SuperEX

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

This past week I went to the Ottawa SuperEX a couple of times, not to win a Teddy bear or to go on any of the rides, but just for photography. The last time that I had been at the SuperEX was nearly 20 years ago, when I was the photographer for the Ottawa Rough Riders. Usually one of the home games coincided with the EX. I think it was only called the EX back then, but then we don’t have a professional football team anymore either. Times change, but do you know what, a lot of the rides that I photographed back then are still here, maybe under different names but they’re still the same rides.

 

Ottawa Photography from the Ottawa SuperEX

 

 

Ottawa photographer back at the SuperEX

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Ottawa Photography Workshop

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

It’s been 9 years since I last conducted a photo workshop in my hometown of Ottawa. Over all those years, people have been asking when am I going to do another one? The problem has been that my two favourite times of year to photograph in Ottawa and also hold a workshop are in the spring and fall and I haven’t been in Ottawa at those times of year for a long time. Well this year I’m going to be in Ottawa during May as I’m trying to finish all the post processing of everything that I’ve already shot to date.  So I thought this would be the perfect time to hold a workshop in Ottawa again, details of the workshop can be found here.

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Windsor International Photo Seminar

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

I’m heading back to Windsor this weekend for the Windsor International Photographic Seminar Web Site. Last year I was one of the guest speakers along with Tony Sweet and James Sidney. This year I’ve been invited back, but this time as a guest of the Windsor Photo Guild. The speakers this year are Charles Needle, Daryl Benson, Freeman Patterson, Don Martel and Tyler Brownbridge.

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Summer’s Over

Monday, October 13th, 2008

My sincere apologies to those readers who haven’t found anything posted here for the last 3 months! It’s not that I’ve been off to some remote world destination for an extended stay, in fact quite the opposite. After returning from France in June we had decided to stay in Ottawa for the summer, something that we had not done for the last 13 years. We had some house renovations and upkeep maintenance to do, I had a large backlog of images to edit and post-processing and finally I also thought this would give me the opportunity to get out and shoot around the Ottawa area during the summer.

Well now that summer is over, what did I accomplish? All of our home projects are finished, that was big and expensive. It ended up that I hardly did in photography in Ottawa, the weather here was horrible. So with the cameras sitting on the shelves most of the summer we decided that we just had to get away. We had a couple options, either taking the 5th wheel RV out on a road trip or flying away somewhere. A decision that I’m sure anybody would love the opportunity to have to make. We ended up choosing on returning to Europe and on this trip to explore Southern Germany – Bavaria, Romantic Road and the Rhine and Mosel Valleys. We left in mid Sept and returned back home last week. It was another great trip, and now I have lots of material to process from this trip. This only adds to the mountain of other work that I still have to edit and process. I’ve come to the realization that I will always have a backlog of images, but I no longer feel guilty about it. The reason that I got into photography many years ago, was that special feeling you get when you look through the viewfinder and everything just comes together and you know you’ve got the image as you release the shutter. For me that’s what photography is all about!

On the subject of editing and processing of images, this is probably what I spent the majority of my time working on this summer. I finished all the images from our 2 trips to New York City last year (spring and Christmas) as well as the images from a fall trip to Las Vegas. I’ve now started on the photos from Paris and France, but I still have all of the images from last summer’s road trip to Colorado and Utah as well as several thousand images from the road trip the summer before (2006) to New England.

I now have over 6000 images on Masterfile’s web site, I’m ranked as the third highest artist with the most number of images out of more than 300 contributing photographers.

Posted in Photography, Stock Photography, Travel | Comments Off on Summer’s Over

Back Home and Back to Work

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

On the flight back home to Ottawa from NYC (it’s a short flight, less than an hour). I was thinking about all of the photos that I had just taken on this trip and also about all of the work that I had waiting for me back at home. I have never considered taking pictures as work, although it is and I do work at it very hard. And it is how I make my living. But still it’s not like work, taking pictures is what I love doing. I suppose that if you are interested in photography, I’m probably preaching to the choir right now.

What I do consider as work is sitting in front of the computer processing all of these images, I also used to consider processing the film in E-6 chemistry as work as well. The difference is that E-6 was much faster and I could get through huge shoots in very little time. All of the photographers that I know, who are shooting on a regular basis now have a backlog of digital images to process. I’ve heard some people say that because it’s digital you’ll shoot more, there isn’t the film and processing costs to consider so with digital as long as you have free hard drive space shoot away. That may be the case for some photographers, but I think they would be in the minority. I’m not shooting any more now than I did when I was shooting with film, in fact I probably shoot less. Now I can now tell right away when I’ve got the shot, so I don’t waste time shooting repetitive images.

My problem is that I’m on the road shooting for 4 months straight in the summer and then another 2 months of travelling spread throughout the remainder of the year. Then when we do get back home, Val and I spend our time planning for new trips and trying to catch up on the editing and digital processing. Time management is the answer, I just have to figure out how to adjust my time for digital work compared to what I’ve been doing for the past 25 years shooting film.

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