Alberta Winter Games 2008 - Turn It On!

 

Starting tomorrow (Friday, February 15th) until Sunday, I will be volunteering as an official photographer for the Alberta Winter Games in Leduc. I have been assigned Men's hockey which takes place at the Beaumont Recreation & Athletics Centre. It's going to be a long weekend of shooting but I'm really looking forward to having the opportunity to practice my skills while giving back to the community.

I am also excited to try out a couple of lenses that my co-worker Greg was kind enough to lend me. I will be trying out his wide-angle 10-22mm f 3.5 and his 70 - 200mm 2.8 telephoto. I hope to get a good combination of candid, group, and action shots over the course of the weekend.

Photos from the games are going to be uploaded each day to a Photobucket album which will be available for 2 weeks after the games so that the participants can order prints. We've been given a limit of 100 photos per day and then they'll pick the one's they think should go up. The photos from Men's hockey will be at http://s242.photobucket.com/albums/ff172/2008awg/Hockey-Male/. I will also try to post up my favourites on my Flickr account.  

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

Winter & Spring Classes

Well after a very busy Christmas & New Year's, my wife and I took a couple weeks off to rest and relax on the sunny beaches of Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic. It was a great chance to recharge the batteries and to practice my photography skills. Over the next few weeks I'll try to blog some of the photos I took and discuss them.

Now that we're back it's time to plan which courses I'll be taking during the remainder of the winter and spring. So far here are the courses that I am tentatively looking to take:

• Photoshop for Photographers Level II (NAIT)
• Lighting Techniques for Portraits Level I (Metro)
• Night Photography (Metro)
• Understanding Light Level II (Metro)
• Creative Design in Photography Level II (Metro)

Hopefully my schedule and my tax refund will allow me to fit most of these in before the summer. If not, I may divert some of them to the Fall. In any event I'm looking forward to getting out and practicing more in 2008 and hopefully doing a better job of blogging more frequently.

Volunteer Photographers Needed

I got an email yesterday on Facebook from Rachael Yeung. She is the Games Assistant for the Alberta Winter Games which will be held in Leduc and Edmonton from November 14th - 17th. They are presently still looking for volunteer photographers who would be interested in coming out to photograph the various events. It's a great opportunity to build up your portfolio and add a major event to it. It is also a great chance to make some contacts and give back to the community. Volunteers also receive a free jacket.

Details and an online registration form can be found at http://www.2008albertawintergames.com/association.aspx. I have signed up to shoot from the 15th - 17th. No word yet on where or what I'll be shooting but I think the experience will be very worthwhile.

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.

Managing a Growing Collection

So this new "digital" world of photography is great right? No more fussing with film, waiting for prints to come back from the lab, wondering if the shots you took turned out, etc. You can instantly view, share, print, upload, email, crop, rotate, fix, delete, convert, enlarge, and do a myriad of other things to your photos. What's not to love?

Well, with every new advancement in technology that comes along to solve a problem, a whole new set of problems opens up. Case in point with digital photography. It's almost too easy to get snap happy these days and you wind up with a massive amount of photos. If you're anything like me, most of these wind up living on my laptop and never get printed. Today I've decided that I need to get a handle on my growing collection and start to do something with it before it becomes so unmanageable that I won't know where to start.

First step - go through and clean up all the crappy photos that I'll never print. Start with the obvious ones - blurry, total blown out, too dark, etc. Once I've filtered down the collection, the next step is to consolidate all of my digital photos into one central location.

Step Two: Backup Backup Backup. Your hard drive will fail. This is not a prediction but a guarantee. Eventually these things just wear out and when they do you better have a backup. I'm looking at adding a Western Digital 2 TB drive to my network to backup all of my media files. Costco has this thing on for only $599 right now and I think it will be a great addition. I have a 500 GB external drive that I backup to presently and then I burn a DVD every month or so with the new stuff I've shot. This little puppy should give me some good storage space for a least the next couple of years. Merry Christmas to me.

 http://www.costco.ca/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=10305569