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

Style

My final assignment for Creative Design Level 1 was to use different photographic styles to shoot a subject chosen by the class. Several ideas were suggested but everyone ultimately decided upon keys as the subject. The choices of photographic styles include:

• Studied, Contemplative
• Documentation
• Photojournalistic
• Emotional
• Suspended Animation
• Abstract
• Sidelong Glimpse
• Isolation, Ambiguity

This was one of the images that I finally decided to submit and is representative of the abstract style. The viewer can recognize that this as a key but by shooting only the shadow, I have presented it in a creative way not normally seen.

For this image I had my wife hold up the key in front of a flashlight. The backdrop is white piece of foam core. Camera settings were as follows:

• Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT
• f6.3 @ 1/6 of a sec
• Tamron 30-200mm Lens at 150mm

I will take a break from classes during the Christmas season which will give me some time to practice my Photoshop skills and attempt to digitize some of my older photos that were taken before I moved to all digital. Wish me luck!

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