Alberta Winter Games Wrap-up

 

Last weekend I had the privilege of being able to volunteer at the Alberta Winter Games as a photographer. There were approximately 40 photographers in all covering the 26 sports over the course of three days. I was assigned to cover Men's hockey which featured some of the top Pee-Wee teams from around the province. The games were all held at the Beaumont Recreation Centre (the 'BRAC') and I witnessed some really great hockey and some very talented kids.

This was a challenging assignment to photograph. There were several factors which made shooting quite challenging and a perfect opportunity to practice some of things I've learned during my classes.

The first challenge was finding places to shoot the action. Although I tried a few shots, I wasn't able to shoot through the glass on either sheet of ice. The glass was just too marked up to get a clear shot. At BRAC 1, there was very little room to stand on the benches and my view from the stands was obscured by the protective mesh. Fortunately someone had made a hole in the mesh at one end which was just large enough to get my lens through. Steadying the lens and being able to move the camera around was quite awkward however so I gave up on BRAC 1 and moved over to BRAC 2.

Again at BRAC 2 I was faced with horrible glass and mesh covered most of the area around the top of the glass. Fortunately there was much more room on the benches and even a low wall behind the benches that I could stand on where there was no mesh getting in the way. Probably the best spot however was down at the Zamboni gates where there was no mesh above the glass. One of the games officials was nice enough to get me a ladder which allowed me to stand above the glass and get close in on the action. From here I was able to get some really great action shots in and around the goal.

The 2nd big challenge was metering. Anytime you are trying to shoot in a snow or ice environment, the lighting can play havoc with the metering system on your camera. If it reads it as being too bright, the camera will try to darken the image resulting in the ice looking grey. The metering courses I took came in really handy in understanding this concept and as a result I was able to get my exposures almost bang on every time, avoiding having to spend hours in Photoshop trying to fix them.

Shooting indoors without flash while still trying to capture the action from far away calls for a good telephoto lens. Fortunately my friend Greg had lent me his 70-200mm f2.8 lens. What a beautiful lens it was to work with. I was able to shoot at around f4 at around 1/100 of a second resulting in great exposure while still being fast enough to capture the action. I barely had to use my flash expect when I was shooting in and around the bench trying to get some candid shots of the players and coaches.

A selection of my photos was uploaded to the games web site (www.2008albertawintergames.com). The Photobucket site they are using to host the pictures will only be up for a couple of weeks so I also posted my best shots on my Flickr site at www.flickr.com/photos/momentsindigital.

All in all it was a great experience and a great opportunity to get out there and practice many of the things I learned in my lighting and metering courses. If you get the chance to volunteer for an event like this, I would highly recommend it. It's a great chance to give back to the community, build up your portfolio, and practice the craft.

Santo Domingo - Park Bench Nap

On January 11th, 2008, we took a day trip from Punta Cana to the capital city of the Dominican Republic - Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo is a vibrant city with a population of approximately 3 million people. The main tourist attraction is the colonial city and it is believed that it also the site of Christopher Columbus's tomb.

Once we were finished the main part of our tour we were given about an hour to explore the area and shop. While we were walking down the main shopping street we came upon this man asleep on a park bench and I couldn't resist the photo opportunity.

While the original is in color, I converted this image to B&W in photoshop as I thought it captured the old world feel of the Colonial city and made for a more dramatic image of this man asleep on the bench.

Lens: Tamron 18-200mm handheld at 102mm

f/5.6 at 1/20th of a second

ISO 100

Punta Cana Photos - Gift Shop Boys

So now that I've been back from Punta Cana for a few weeks and my tan has all but faded, I decided it was time to start processing my photos from the trip and talk a little about each one here.

For today's photo I chose this one of two boys hanging out at one of the many gift shops that we stopped at on our various tours. On this particular day we were returning from a great day of Scuba Diving on Catalina Island. It was around 5:30 in the evening and we stopped at a roadside gift shop to shop, visit the bathroom and grab snack. As we came out of the store, my wife noticed these two boys leaning up against the front window.

Now seeing kids hanging outside the tourist stops isn't unusual but what struck me most about these boys was that the one on the right was wearing a t-shirt that said "Life begins at Hooters" I thought it was quite amusing that here we were in the Dominican Republic, and here was this boy of around 10 years of age wearing a Hooters t-shirt. Ah, the great spread of capitalism and American "Culture".

Lens: Tamron 18-200mm handheld at 67mm

f/10 at 1/50th of a second

ISO 100

Video Mash Up from Northern California Trip

This is a little mash up of some of the photos from our trip to Northern California. I used a great little service called Animoto to create this video. You can upload your photos from a variety of online photo sharing services such as Flickr and Photobucket, select your music and then Animoto goes to work producing a custom video. Once you've created your video, you can embed it on your website or post it to a variety of blogs and social networks such as Facebook, etc. Visit www.animoto.com for more information.

Field Trip to Fort Edmonton Park

I had the privilege of being able to do a night shoot at Fort Edmonton Park a couple of weeks ago. As part of the Painting with Light course that I just completed last Thursday, our instructor arranged a field trip to the park from 7-11. For those who are not familiar with this technique, it basically involves setting your camera on bulb exposure and then"painting" a dark scene using a variety of lights and colored gels. The effect is quite amazing and the results you get are only possible using this technique (unless you were a real master with Photoshop I guess).

Preparation

In preparation for the field trip, I need to arm myself with a few tools. The first was a couple of high powered flashlights from Canadian Tire. I managed to find a couple 1,000,000 candlepower rechargeable lights for around $30 each. The next step was to visit AllStar Show Industries in the west end to get some black foil which I used to create a 'snoot' on the lights. The snoot is wrapped around the front of the flashlight and provides a place to insert your colored gels. The snoot also helps to concentrate and pool the light while cutting down on the amount of spill.

Time Flies

Armed with these tools, freshly charged batteries, my wife's cookies, and thermos full of Tim Horton's coffee, I made my way down to Fort Edmonton Park. The goal was to capture 6 good images in four hours. No problem right? Not as easy as I thought. One of the hardest parts of doing painting with light is setting up your scene. When you're working in the dark and wearing gloves it takes twice as long to try and do anything. Once you do have your scene setup, it then can take anywhere from 3-30 minutes to paint your scene depending upon the amount of available ambient light, your subject, size of the scene. Once you are done painting the scene with your lights, you may leave the lens open for an additional time period to allow ambient light to fill in the background and foreground so your subject doesn't look like it's just floating in the dark. Then, once you have finished, your camera goes into noise reduction mode which can take the same amount of time to complete as your exposure (for more information on noise reduction visit the following Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_noise). Only once this process has completed will you see the fruits of your labor and discover whether your image is crap or not. If your exposure is off, or you paint too long in an area resulting in blown highlites, or you don't paint enough resulting in a black image; all that time you spent is wasted and you have to go back to the drawing board. Before you know it, 4 hours have gone by and you don't have much to show for your efforts. I'm sure this will get better with experience.

The Results

After 4 hours, I managed to get 12 photos in the can of which, six of which I was pretty happy with. Here are the fruits of my labour.

In the spring Chantal will be organizing another field trip to the Devonian Botanical Gardens so I hope to practice more between now and then so that hopefully I can produce some great images that I can print and frame.

For more information on painting with light or to see more sample images, visit my Chantal Thorlakson's site at www.nightstockphoto.com.

Creative Design - Assignment #3

It's week 3 in my creative design course and this week's assignment is on creating a focal point by using emphasis (contrast). Below are some of the photos I submitted for this week's assignment.

This shot was taken from the top deck of the ferry on our way back from Alcatraz. The wind was blowing just enough to get the flag unfurled. I had to play around with my angles to get the flag and Alcatraz both in the frame. I really liked the iconic nature of the photo with two such highly recognizable subjects in the image.

This was taken in Napa Valley at the Berrington Vineyard. Some of the staff members at the vineyard grow pumpkins each year and this was one of the smaller ones that one of them brought in. It's only 800 lbs! Now that's a lot of pumpkin pie. I thought this was a good candidate for this assignment since it's clear that the focal point is the large pumpkin due to the contrast in size to the other pumpkins.

Inside Alcatraz

Sarah and I just got back from a trip to San Francisco and Northern California. While walking through Alcatraz I managed to get this great shot looking at the cell blocks through a hole in the visitation area. I only wish I could have taken this photo while the prison was empty although the addition of some people in the scene does add some interest.

Camera settings were as follows:
Canon Rebel XT
Tamron 18-200 XTi Lens

Focal Length: 18mm a f/3.5

ISO: 200

Creative Design - Lines

So I started another course at Metro. This course is entitled Creative Design in Photography and covers various elements of design as they apply to photography. Our first assignment was to produce 3 images that show strong use of lines. There are many different types of lines - straight, diagonal, parallel, horizontal, spiral, convergent, etc. Each type of line can convey different feelings or emotions depending on how they are arranged. I had several ideas for this assignment and of course as soon as you start to look for lines you start to see them everywhere. I finally decided on the following three images:

The first image I took in the River Valley near the Valley zoo. It was a birch tree that had a very interesting pattern and an almost perfectly straight line running across it. There were also lines in the dark part of the bark as well as lines created by the shadows of the trees behind me.

The second image was a still life entitled "Bachelor Fine Dining" I played around with this one quite a bit but finally settled on this one because I felt that I was able to capture the correct color without blowing out the hilites on the fork and knife.

The third image happened accidentally. I had actually been shooting three books stacked one on another. As I was putting the books back on the shelf, I happened to flip over this copy of East of Eden and realized that the pages of the book formed some very interesting lines as they were rough cut instead of the nice smooth edge you normally found on a book. I flipped the book on edge and snapped away resulting in the third image.

Based on feedback I received in class, my instructor thought that the image of the book would have been just a bit stronger if it had been turned forward slightly so that you could see the back of the book. Anytime you have text the eye is drawn to it and the view wants to see more. The shadow cast on the bottom bothered me at first but some people found that it added another great line to the image and gave a sense of depth. Another comment from Chantal was that she would have liked to seen more separation between the book and the background as it tends to just look like a book floating in space. If I had added some light or overexposed the shot by a about a 1/2 stop, I probably could have revealed more of the background.

Overall it was a great exercise and now I can't stop looking at lines everywhere I go. Next assignment - color.

iPhone - Revision 2

So it's only been a few months since the iPhone was launched and I managed to scoop the exclusive photos of the 2nd generation Apple iPhone. Check it out!

Okay, just kidding. This was actually a test shot I submitted for my class on Understanding light. To achieve this shot, I first setup my props on some inexpensive black velvet. Then I setup my camera on my tripod and used my Canon 50mm f1.8 lens to shoot this scene. The objective was to illustrate the four different lighting positions: front, back, side and three quarter-lighting.

In this particular shot, I propped up a piece of white foam core on top of my camera and then shone an LED flashlight up from below the camera. I was pretty pleased with the even lighting effect I was able to achieve which gave the image a very lifelike 3D look and feel. Class is tomorrow so we'll see what Chantal has to say about it.

My First Ever Winning Contest Entry
I belong to a Facebook group called the Young Edmonton Photographers Group and each month the group holds a challenge. The first challenge was for the month of August and was a portrait challenge. I entered this photo that I shot in Barcelona and it was selected by the group as the winning entry! The reward is that my photo will be used as the group's photo for the month of September. Not exactly something I'll be able to retire on but it was great to have my portrait selected by my peers. There were some great photos submitted so I was definitely suprised to win.

The next challenge is an Urban Photography Challenge where we will try to capture Edmonton's urban soul. I have a couple of shots that I plan on submitting. I can't wait to see what the other members of the group come up with.
(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2888804300)

Kaiya in the Sunlight
Our friends were up from Calgary last weekend and I managed to capture this photo of one of their daughters with my new Canon 50mm f1.8 lens. I thought the lighting in this one turned out very nice although the blanket got a little washed out. I probably should have underexposed it by a half stop or so. Perhaps I'll play with it in Photoshop to see what sort of results I can get.