A Photography Blog
Another Toronto Zoo post for you all. This post being about birds, it is necessary to say that every bird is an entirely different photo assignment. Birds will move, turn, and fly away for almost no apparent reason. The huge standing-up bird took me almost fifteen minutes to find a good photo of. And as for the owl, how could you not love the smile on his face? He just makes me want to smile. :)
These here, are examples of my favourite animal to photograph. That's right, I love photographing snakes. Snakeskin contains incredible amounts of details and often unique colours and patterns, making for one great subject. Also their type of movement and relaxed positions leave them in visually interesting poses. And finally, my last reason for loving to photograph snakes, is that they are really great models; they don't move much and when they do, it is usually not very fast.
I just recently completed one of my most interesting photo assignments; I was hired by a client to photograph a Lego city. This city is about 2x2 metres with an unguessable number of pieces, that must have taken the two boys dozens of hours to create. And the coolest part is that it's all original. There are very minimal bits that are designed with instructions, and the entire rest of it is designed by them. So when they called me and told me they wanted me to photograph it before they deconstructed it and rebuilt it, so of course I said yes! After about an hour of photographing with 30 second exposures and some specific colour adjustments I came up with about 30 images of great to moderate quality that I'm pretty happy with. these are a few. For the most part the aim of the photos was for posterity, but I did take a bit of creativity with a few of them (especially the Batman photo up top).
The weekend before last my Youth Group, along with a few other Youth Groups, hopped on a coach bus and headed off to Ottawa for an event called Worshiplude (a mix of the winter-festival Winterlude and a Youth-oriented church service). We stayed the whole weekend in Ottawa, billeting at a church and took in all the sights of Winterlude, along with The Museum of Civilization, Byward Market and Ottawa itself, both on the Ontario and Quebec sides. As a photographer it was lots of fun because of the massive amount of material to shoot. one of the best parts was the Museum Of Civilization. When I went in I my camera with two lenses and my tripod. I had some difficulties a while ago at the ROM and some other museums about cameras so I wasn't sure how it would go. Right away some man stopped me and told me that I needed to go get my tripod registered at the front desk. I panicked a little bit, but it turned out that I could shoot whatever I like in the museum with whatever equipment provided I put a little sticker on my tripod and signed that I wasn't going to use any of it for professional use. I was quite impressed with this approach and I feel that it is very reasonable and understanding of an artists need to create. Over the whole weekend I made about 350 images, which for me is actually rather light. Some good images, a few great but nothing revolutionary unfortunately.
These two seem to be my favourite models. Really, I swear I don't try to photograph them more than anyone else, but just look at how cute they are! How could I help it? So here they are again, Abby (3) and Kenny (1) Walker, my favourite little nieces (technically only nieces but that's inconsequential). Theses shots are being shot up toward the ceiling with the girls suspended above the camera, hence the hair being all everywhere. I enjoy them largely because the direction of the photo is directly forward towards the camera.
I've been making a strangely large number of portraits compared to landscapes and still lifes recently. And why wouldn't I with inspiration like this? As an artist I can't help but act on great inspiration. So I end up with lots of beautiful images with a beautiful model. Perhaps portraiture is what I will go into.
A soft snowy night is wonderful for inspiration. Between that and some new tricks learned on photoshop, I present for you two new images of mine. Hope that you enjoy.
