Monday February 08, 2010

New York, Part 3

Canon EOS300D/EF18-55mm f3.5-5.6 at 18mm f3.5 1/400th sec ISO400.  August 2005.

Friday February 05, 2010

New York, Part 2

Canon EOS300D/Sigma 55-200mm f4.0-5.6 at f8 1/320th sec ISO100.  August 2005.

This is a photo from the Empire State Building.

Thursday February 04, 2010

New York, Part 1

Canon EOS300D/Sigma 28mm f1.8 EX at f11 1/100th sec ISO800.  August 2005.

I'm not honestly sure why I was up at f11 that morning but it was early, like 6AM.

Thursday January 28, 2010

Memory Motel

Many years ago I had a thriving web page which included many pictures.   They weren't really interesting or creative pictures, but they documented the day to day life of our class of Industrial Engineering students.   Today, in an age of push button self branding, where people tweet and status update every ten minutes, the idea of a web page where I actually edited all the album pages myself seems quaint. But back then, it was actually kind of special:  One department counselor once remarked she read it to find out what her students were up to, while a friend's dad, living in Guelph, who I finally met at graduation years later, told me he kept up with his daughter by visiting my web page.

Making these images was similarly unusual:  While today everyone has a digital camera wirelessly connected with the rest of the world, back then, I used everything from Hi8 camcorders to early digital cameras measured in pixels, not megapixels.  I shamelessly carried a box of floppy disks with me for one of these cameras, which was the size of a tupperware container.  Not the snack sized container that you put raisins or grapes into, more like the kind you store leftover lasagna in.   It was embarrassing, but hey, I was capturing little images frozen in time.

I took them down somewhere around 2005, when while sitting in Tokyo on vacation, I got an urgent missive from one of the people in one of the images that I needed to take it down immediately due to his/her coworkers looking him/her up drunk.

Before Christmas last year, I went to my ten year reunion.  It was at an expensive club and frankly, I felt out of place.  But it was nice to see everyone there and this time, I took some pictures.  This time with a 5D/24-70mm, which is larger than the entire tupperware drawer, but I digress.  I also ran into a guy last week that was the subject of my first ever digital picture.  The one above is probably shot the same day I bought my first digital camera.  Anyways, here's those photos again, this time in a friendly Google Picasa album.  However, don't name anyone in them, or that poor guy/gal will be teased mercilessly again by his colleagues.

Tuesday January 26, 2010

Wooden Tower Block Game

Canon EOS5D/EF 24-70mm f2.8L at 66mm f4.0 1/60th sec ISO640

Monday January 25, 2010

Yearly camera update

It seems every few years I need to update this chart. Each camera has a representative picture shot with it:

• 1999: Classmates standing in front of Dalhousie University's sign in Halifax.
• 1999: Our graduating class on Iron Ring ceremony night.
• 2001: Delirium, an amusement ride at Kings Island.
• 2003: The streets of Copenhagen, probably taken the year after.
• 2005: A weed in the park the day I bought the 300D.  I thought, wow, this kit lens is all I'll ever need!
• 2006: Onion rings and root beer using a EF85mm f1.8.
• 2008: Ivan adjusting the suspension geometry on John's SR7 chassis.
• 2009: A swan taking flight on the Credit River, shot with a EF70-200mm with EF1.4x Extender.
  

Wednesday December 16, 2009

Bowling

Canon EOS350D/EF 50mm f1.8 II at f2.5 1/30th ISO800

Friday November 27, 2009

Interactive Media Lab Group 2009, Part 2

Canon EOS5D/EF 24-70mm f2.8L at 24mm f4.5 1/60th sec ISO800 with ST-E2 and 420EX.

This was a neat shot.  I hid a 420EX behind the laptop and remotely triggered it.  The general idea was to show the lab was involved in usability research, illuminated by the world of information systems.

Friday November 20, 2009

Dale

Canon EOS350D/EF 50mm f1.8 II at f2.5 1/80th ISO800 w/ST-E2 and 580EX/420EX

Saturday November 07, 2009

Siobhan

Canon EOS350D/EF 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS at 73mm f5.6 1/80th ISO800 w/580EX

Thursday October 22, 2009

My Sister's Wedding

First page of the album, using the reverse lens macro shot done using Albert's old Nikon lens.

Perhaps the first rule of weddings is not to get your brother to be your photographer.  The second is probably not to get an amateur photographer.  So given that my sister agreed to let me photograph her wedding and the fact I'm an amateur, was probably two strikes already.  (The third rule of wedding photography, is to get ladders, and lots of them.  But more on this later.)  This is the story of how I shot my sister's wedding this April, and in it, you'll see the final album page layout, step by step.

We tried the left page in black and white, and with alternate colourings, but the default warm colour balance seemed the least obtrusive.

Admittedly, this was not the first wedding I'd ever shot, having photographed a few weddings for my friends.  I had also shot countless corporate and charity events, so I was an experienced event shooter.  I'd always offered it as one of last resort or budget--I figured I was better than no photographer and probably better than your Uncle Al who got a good deal at the Henry's sale last month.  But I also knew wedding photography was a difficult business, and while I wasn't intending to become a wedding photographer, it required the same discipline of me that any working professional would need.

A coworker who used to work at a studio, Carolynne, suggested a trick on using masks to smooth out blemishes.

So I offered to be her official photographer for two reasons:  One, I'd avoid uncomfortable conversation and wearing a suit, and two, it would be an interesting challenge to shoot under pressure.  Three, it would fit nicely with my sister and future brother in law, who took a very do-it-yourself approach to the wedding.

The guys actually got dressed at my house.  Playing around with the book layout, I left this set of photos in black and white.

Planning

I began by lurking on FredMiranda's wedding photography forum, where the posters put up their pictures for critique and request business advice.  Looking at what the industry was doing was a good start to understanding what was required in terms of shots, but more than that, I noticed there were stylistic conventions different than what I understood as traditional wedding photography.  Even looking at friends' albums who had been married a few years ago, I noticed wedding photography as much more artistic, post processed and creative than ever before.    It also seems wedding photographers are much funnier, hip and casual than the formal, stiff photography I'd remembered.

I used the phrases "Look like a editorial spread in Vanity Fair, dammit!" and "Think Reservoir Dogs", neither of which worked.

I also started to visit wedding planning websites, which prompted unusual stares from my coworkers at the office.  Some of the sites included suggested poses and required pictures.  Some of them also suggested not to hire a professional photographer and hire a starving student off Craigslist.  None suggested getting your brother.

This is the most disappointing spread for me, because there was very little light in the church despite it being a bright sunny day outside. 

As my sister's plans solidified, she brought me to visit the venues she wanted for her wedding.  Unfortunately, she completely ignored my advice to get a reception hall with a low white ceiling.  I guess the needs of bouncing diffuse flash light wasn't high on her list of priorities.  Planning a wedding is similar to staging a corporate event, something I've done before.  However, unlike making sure your 10x10 popup and cut sheets arrive at the trade show on time, weddings have that emotional stress that doesn't come with business events.  I encouraged my sister to have a run of show for the whole day, so I could figure out where I needed to be and what we needed to take pictures of. 

Most wedding photographers often work off shot lists, and while they won't guarantee everybody, they try hard to get these photographs.  I've been used to working off media requirements for PR at events, so I'm used to ticking off dignitaries and celebrities while shooting charity functions.  I got my sister to give me a list of people and photographs she absolutely needed.  Luckily, since I knew most of the family, this wasn't too hard.

These turned out fairly well, with good access to the couple at the front of the church after speaking to the priest ahead of time, and a bit of fill flash.

Getting ready

The bag, now becoming a trunk, full of equipment, grew steadily.  I had my staple 24-70mm f2.8L and 70-200mm f2.8L IS lenses.   I also recently had purchased a 17-40mm ultrawide angle.  To this I packed my 28mm f1.8, 50mm f1.8, and Brian's 85mm f1.8 primes, all four of my flashes, E2 remote, some flash stands I recently purchased and four bodies.  One of these bodies was left in the car as a spare, one body was given to my friend Iain, who would shoot as second with his more than accommodating partner Phil, who in turn carried a suit jacket for me and a step ladder.   Remember, the third rule of wedding photography, is bring a ladder.  The other two bodies were a Canon 5D and a 40D, for which most of the day I would keep the 24-70mm and 70-200mm setup on, respectively.  I also bought a case of bottled water and six chewy chocolate granola bars and put them in the car.

 Here's where the step ladder first came in useful.  Shot with the 17-40mm on the ladder, it was actually quite a lot wider, but cropped for the album.

One of the things I dreaded the most were formals.  Unlike processional items like readings, ring exchanges, walks down the aisle, I hate setting up formals.  I even sat for a while with little Lego figurines trying to pair up and decide on good layouts for people to stand in.  I read up on how to shoot formals.  No one likes formals, other than parents.

Driving downtown and shooting the couple in the car was difficult, but not for a veterans of several Smart Car rallies and two Tour for Kids rides.

Wedding Day

The day of the wedding turned out to be very sunny.  Upon shooting outside the house with the groom's party, I started to worry I'd be fighting the sun the rest of the day.  I was using a flash for fill, and stopped down a fair bit.  There is a lot of logistics involved in shooting the bride and the groom getting ready, and for the most part, I got pretty well everything I needed.  But there was a lot of rushing around, driving across Toronto. 

My favourite photo of the entire day, was the one on far left.  

I had shot the rehearsal in the church the night before and found I was okay with the f2.8 zooms.  However, the actual day, the house lights weren't on, and the church was in fact actually darker than the night before.  Compounding this was the harsh outside light coming through the front door. The good news about the church was that the priest was very accommodating, which is not the case in many houses of worship.  Despite having to elbow some Uncle Bobs, for the most part I had unfettered access to shooting during the ceremony.

My sister had planned to do formal photos at the Distillery in downtown Toronto.  This would be really pretty, but also a long drive from the church and the reception venue.  As luck would have it, we had a lot of fun shooting pictures on the drive down, and managed to dodge one of the biggest traffic jams ever, where cars actually drove backwards on the highway.  Call it a Slumdog Millionaire moment, but all those Smart Car races Iain and I shot over the years came in handy as he drove my car, and I hung out the window shooting.

For some reason, my sister really wanted a photo of her running away from her husband.

The Distillery on a weekend afternoon in April was packed with tourists and a few other couples getting married with their own photographers and subsequent entourages.  The plan here was to get group formals, then shoot the wedding party alone, then take the bride and groom and shoot individual shots with them.  A good part of the time was shooting formal groups with family, and Phil and Iain helped as we set up the multiple formations and configurations of aunts, uncles, and parents.  Here, I shot each photo multiple times, with fill flash and without, just in case I got some blinks in the groups or the exposure was offset.  Once that formality, neither enjoyed by my sister nor I, was taken care of, we switched to shooting the wedding party.

This image had a lot of Photoshop.  The key part for me was to get the bride and groom in a good pose.  Everyone else was secondary.  I ended up moving a groomsman and repainting a wall.

During my research into modern wedding photography, I had seen all these great ideas for shooting the wedding party, some of which, for example, involved ladders.   (Again, I cannot stress how important these are!)   I also considered sitting on stools, leaning on boxes and crates, walking in a conga line, and everyone jumping together High School Musical style, but ended up shooting the entire group walking together along the Distillery streets.

Finally, we got to shoot my sister and brother in law alone.  We had spent some time shooting engagement shots there a few months ago, so by the wedding, getting the two of them to look cute on camera was a cinch.  Setting them up for various poses wasn't too hard, though it is probably one of the most difficult things to learn as a wedding photographer, I'd think. This set of photos was by far the easiest and most immediately rewarding, and we got it done in the least amount of time.  The instant we finished packing all the equipment into my car and slammed the trunk lid down, the skies opened up and a downpour came.  That was some good luck.

The reception turned out to be a bit of tag team effort.  Iain took one camera and a 50mm lens and shot a bunch of little photos of things like table cards, place settings and center pieces.  (I will have you know, I was responsible for those center pieces, which, I would like to say, I think look fabulous.)  On the other hand, I ended up shooting weird reception shots, none of which made the album, but I guess my sister put up on Facebook.  Apart from my cousin (a newly graduated systems engineer) making gang signs, this was largely a waste of time.

I was really happy with this image of the first dance.

The reception venue was beautiful but dark.  I was contemplating switching to using primes, including the 85mm f1.8 I had with me, but Iain convinced me to get out the flash stands and use them as remotes, which really helped.  In some cases, I had available light from spotlights and floods from the venue.  In other cases, I used my 580EX with a home made bounce card. It was ghetto, but I made it using an old mouse mat and some white label paper, like this guy.

By 1AM, it was over.  Now I know why wedding photographers only offer eight hour coverage, it's draining.  We ended up shooting a few images outside in the rain, with the marquee outside the venue.  Coincidentally, the one my sister liked the best was the one where my 580EX ran out of batteries, resulting in a totally underexposed image. Whoops.

Making the Album

I now had 2500 images, backed up over two computers.  Over the past year, I had taken an unusual interest in looking at people's wedding albums.  It was fairly weird to ask them to pull out their books, but I quickly noticed two trends in photo albums.  One was traditional:  8x10's, carefully printed, mounted onto cardboard pages.  The other was more of a "storybook" approach, usually printed into what appeared to be a coffee table book.  Another option, although very expensive, was a flushmounted album, which seemed to be like those kids storybooks that are printed on big cardboard pages that involve dogs named Spot and characters like Dick and Jane.  I liked the coffee table format, but I absolutely hated the cheesy album design examples.  I wanted something really clean and simple, with a mininum of post processing.  The question of post processing style was one I had difficulty getting behind.   I could see how they looked good now...but I wanted the pictures to look good in twenty years.  What scared me about the vignetting and colouring so popular today, is that it will date quickly.

I finally decided on a square album format, with the largest pages possible, 12x12" printed on heavy 306gsm stock, but not flushmount.  The square album, I figured, had the best layout options assuming no borders, transitions or frames, based on 3:2 ratio and 1:1 ratio images.  I also had the option of using 2:1 ratio images for really wide spreads.  It took me several weeks to get the layouts right, but the end result, I think is okay.

Conclusions

It was a lot of fun to shoot my sister's wedding, but I wouldn't do this for a living.  The first issue, is while I'm no stranger to shooting on assignment, there is an absolute requirement to get it right, which is a lot of pressure.  I would like to think I can make some good images and I have done so on this blog from time to time.  But the difference is on a wedding, every image has to be good.  There isn't a chance to make mistakes.  To be consistently creative for a whole day is impossible, which is why a lot of wedding photography seems cliched.  Those who can be consistently creative, for a whole day, and a whole season, I salute.  For wedding photographers, this is part of the daily trade and perhaps they have learned the ins and outs of such a gig, but for someone who isn't always confident with what they're doing, there is no place.

The second thing, is client handling and setting expectations, is difficult.  I had the fortune of doing this for my sister and brother in law.  I couldn't imagine doing this for a bridezilla or groomzilla who had unrealistic expectations.  God forbid, you have a picky sibling.  This is probably why wedding photographers never shoot for family or friends.

The third observation is that the actual task of shooting for 16 hours on a full day is very tiring.  Achingly painful.  I had the help of good friends Iain and Phil during this time, who unfailingly carried lenses, step ladders, clothing, shoes, and tripods the whole day for me.

So in conclusion, it was a good photography challenge.  I think I got a few great shots, and the rest, mostly servicable ones.  I used the power of the ladder too.  But, for all you enterprising amateur photographers out there, it is best left to the professionals--those who are willing to do this day in, day out, for a living.  For me, I'm going to stick with shooting engagement photos for fun.

Monday October 19, 2009

Green Apples

Canon EOS5D/EF 24-70mm f2.8L at 70mm f4.0 1/250th sec ISO800

Interactive Media Lab Group 2009, Part 1

Canon EOS5D/EF 24-70mm f2.8L at 24mm f6.3 1/50th sec ISO800

Professor Mark Chignell with his graduate students.  I used a 420EX remoted with an ST-E2 on a light stand to my right.

Sunday October 18, 2009

Painting 1: The Eiffel Tower

Final painting.

Many people are drawn to the fine arts as a hobby.  If you were to divide up an ontology of life pursuits amongst say, filing your taxes, sorting pennies and painting, I would say the former two would not be termed by a casual passerby as a passion, but the latter probably would.  Either way, I was led to painting this summer for the goal not of fulfilling some sort of lifelong passion and dream of painting, but to fill a large open wall above my sofa. 

This probably will not become a regular feature, like Val's Art Diary.  But sit back, dear readers, and enjoy a few minutes of how exactly this project came to fruition.

It starts on a wet and rainy April evening in Paris in 2008, with friends Estelle and Iain, shortly after where Estelle and I have decided to have a quick dinner at a bistro near the train station, and Iain and other friends have abandoned their plan of all-night European-style fairground rides at the Foire du Trone.  We have both somehow managed to rendezvous at the Eiffel Tower and are huddling under the platform of a metro station amidst a flurry of rain and American teenagers.  Iain, Dave, Paul and Arianne want to see the tower, and though Estelle and I have seen it before, we want to go regardless to see the night display.  We decide to walk, rain be damned, and make it through the puddles and downpour to underneath the tower.

The tower is bathed in the glow of sodium flood lamps, its age-old iron work basking in the warm, orange tones.  And somehow it occurs to me, hey, I should take a picture of this.  I pull out my trusty 5D/24-70mm and the rain is drenching the camera, so much so that I'm wiping the lens with my t-shirt pulled out from under my fleece jacket.  Iain kindly rushes to help cover me with his bag as I take this picture.  I was so happy when I got it.  I was smiling, rain puddling up on the camera display.

The issue of what to put over the sofa on the other hand, was less dramatic.  I bought a couch, and there was a big white space above it.  I could print a photo onto a large canvas, but it would be very expensive.  Iain and I tried to build a robot to paint something onto a canvas, but my programming skills were weak compared to his mastery of building large robots.  I also thought of a Lego mosaic, albeit all of my Lego building friends already have such a creation in their living rooms.  So it occurred to me that I could actually try and paint something myself.

Resized and cropped image from original from camera.

I started by measuring out the space on the wall, using sticky notes placed at the corners.  I looked at all the stretcher bars and pretreated canvases from the local art store and laid their dimensions out on the wall. Choosing between the Eiffel Tower and a duck swimming in a lake, I decided to submit the duck to the Costco photo contest and cropped the Paris photo to the dimensions of an easily available canvas.  The original was cropped 3:2, the standard 35mm film frame, but in this case, I had to crop to 2:1, as the 48" tall canvas looked too large.  I had a long discussion with a nice man there who didn't discourage me given my amateurish questions.  Basically, I did the equivalent of walking into the camera store and saying "Which of these cameras will make good pictures?".  Needless to say they didn't laugh as I proceeded to pick out a 30x60" canvas, brushes, and paints all in one shot.  Derek helped transport the huge canvas home in his Honda Element.

Eight colour reduced version at 720x360 pixels.

For several weeks before, I had been analyzing how to actually paint the canvas.  I wasn't confident enough in my painting skills to do it without help, if it were in fact just a large ink drawing, I could easily do it freehand.  However, I haven't painted in a long time, so I needed some reassurance.  I had this fear of doing something like this horrible painting I did in high school of these curling stones which turned out in the worst way possible, a big pink and grey fleshy mess of dirty colours.

I then though I could project the image onto the canvas or use some sort of mechanism for transferring the image.  Such a system does exist--you can use something called image transfer medium, which is the paint equivalent of the silly putty newsprint trick to get an image from a paper printout to the canvas.  One could also use iron on t-shirt transfers, of which I had many from my experimentation as a teenager with making t-shirts using my multi colour Star NX1000 Rainbow 4 colour dot-matrix printer.  Another approach is to divide the image into a grid and freehand that. 

Example colour separations from the eight colour downsampling.

I finally decided to use an overhead projector, some transparencies and printouts from my computer to trace the image over.  I would approach it like the now infamous Lego Mosaic my colleague Mario and I built during the waning days of Nortel Toronto Lab, the one where we built a giant picture of his two kids.  It still hangs in their kitchen to this day.   Given that I knew the size of the canvas, I guessed I could pull off about ten "dots" per inch, so I chose a resolution of 720 dots by 360 dots.  I ran a colour reduction on the computer to bring the number of colours down to eight, a manageable level of complexity, then printed each sheet onto an overhead acetate.  My sister, ever helpful, helped me with this step.  My sister's friend Emily lent me an overhead projector and I set up in my garage.

From blank canvas to sorta looking okay.

Picking paints, I decided to take the most dense colour, dark brown, and buy a dedicated jar matched at the store to the eight colour separation on my Blackberry.  The rest, I tried to pick tubes of paint to match.  The least dense colours, which amounted to highlights, I would mix from a palette of cheap tubes of paint bought at Walmart.  With everything finally gathered, Derek helped me hang the canvas in the garage using leftover 3M hooks affixed to the roughed in drywall, and I was off on my new painting adventure.  I first covered the canvas with dark brown paint using a roller.  This would be the most dense colour, so I used this as a background.

Once I had the projector and acetates dialed in, I could start by dotting each pixel.  I chose each layer based on density.  I figured that as each layer was painted on, the chances of dots colliding grew higher and higher, so I would put the denser layers on first such that the layers with less dots could go on last and be on top, free from the mess of the first sets.  This went against the suggestion of the guy at the art store, who suggested painting lighter to darker colours.

The first layer was incredible.  Burnt orange against the dark brown looked spectacular and I was really enthusiastic.  I was spending about two to three hours a layer, but I was really enjoying painting.  Put on an episode of random television or radio play in the background, and I could paint for hours on end in the garage, whether it was morning, afternoon, or late into the night.  However, by the fourth layer, the alignment of the transparencies was getting very difficult to get correct.  The colours were also getting very muddy--I had predicted there would be a natural antialiasing effect much from pixels to acetate to paint, but I didn't realize how the alignment and the lack of precision would make everything jumble together.

From sort of looking okay, to looking much worse.

Around this time, John told me that I wasn't actually painting, but in fact, taking the engineering approach to painting.  While my real artist friends were in fact, telling me I was really painting and making art, I didn't really feel I was painting.  I suppose the misalignment of the transparencies guided me to give up on the layers mid way.  

The next week of painting became adding colours arbitrarily based on both the image I had in hand and the thought of the rain in Paris that night.  I started mixing up colours and adding them for no real reason.  One thing I had to address was the spartan nature of the dots.  They felt generic and sterile.  So midway through this process, I started rubbing at the canvas with a rag.  It was kind of like defocusing an image.  Depending on the dampness of the rag, and how recent the paint was, I could smear parts of the image.  The problem was that the smearing had a random factor involved, which made the whole outcome very organic.  Smear too much, and I found myself painting new colours to smear again to compensate.

I wasn't sure how the painting ended.  I'm sure a real artist would have some sort of rationale as to when a piece of art is finished, but for me, I kind of squinted at it, and after two weeks of solid painting and several more of planning, I felt it was complete.  Siobhan came over, helped me take it out of the garage and mounted it to the wall.  It was done, at least until the 3M hooks fell off an hour later and the painting wedged between the wall and the sofa.

Painting finished, I couldn't quite leave it behind.  So, this week, I am embarking on Painting 2.  There will be some analyzing, some acetates, some image transfer.  But I think I know where I want to make it a lot better and I've got some more techniques to try.  Painting 1 was fun.  Painting 2 will be much better.

Thursday September 24, 2009

Swan Flying

Canon EOS40D/EF 70-200mm f2.8L IS with Extender 1.4x at 280mm f11 1/2000th sec ISO400