With warmer weather comes … photo shoots!! Finally, I had the opportunity to get outside and start doing shoots in the Ottawa area. Using Facebook to network with models and other creative people,I have managed to work in some diversity in the types of shoots. Joining Meetup groups have gone a long way to meet fellow photographers as well as the models. They also have introduced me to other areas of the region. So the next few weeks should be featuring many new photo sets in the area of cosplay & fantasy and several portrait shoots.

Before the advent of digital cameras, people rated cameras by the quality of the pictures that the cameras were able to produce. It was highly subjective of course. Brand names were important of course but there many factors involved: the type of lenses used, the type of film used to capture the image, and the controls used to handle the picture taking process. I remember when I had my father’s Minolta 35mm with its fixed lens, and the controls used to set the ASA speed and the aperture and shutter speed settings. Later on, I had a compact 35mm with a zoom lens and the limited ability to program the camera for various environments but no ability to set any controls as the camera set the shutter speed accordingly (the aperture was fixed). While father’s Minolta was thirty years older than that compact, the quality of the photographs from that camera was superior in all respects. When digital cameras started to become more popular and became more affordable, one of the biggest drawbacks to having one was that to compare a digitally generated photograph to one from film illustrated that the quality of the resolution of the digital image was […]

I came across a reference to a new photo effect, the Orton Effect that has become popular among many photographers as an alternative method of processing photos. The Orton Effect is named after Michael Orton who first used the technique is a sandwich of two images, one in focus the other out of focus. The Orton image has traditionally been done using slide film with the first, sharp, image overexposed by two stops and the second, out of focus image, over exposed by one stop. This creates a dreamy sort of image where the image is sort of sharp but retains the glow like effect from the blurry aspect of the creation. The effect can be accomplished in two ways. The first is as described above with two images taken of the same subject but at different camera settings. Needless to say, to make it work, you will need a steady tripod and a sure hand or preferably as little hand touching as possible to keep the image exactly straight. The other and now more common way is to replicate the effect through photo-editing software like Photoshop where duplicate layers of a single image can be set with different settings […]

This past weekend I had the pleasure of working with Natasha, a young model from North Bay. This is the first model shoot in Ottawa I have done. Since it has been only a few months since my arrival in Ottawa, my knowledge of shooting locations is limited and since she was headed back to North Bay later that afternoon, my time was brief. So a totally improvised shoot in the Byward Market area of Ottawa followed by a trip to Confederation Park allowed me to set up a few set pieces. On the whole, it was a nice introduction to shooting models in Ottawa.

No doubt, nearly anyone who spends some amount of time on the Internet, has had at least some contact with social media sites if they do not have their own presence on line. Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and so on seems to fill our days with posts both profound and mundane. Of course, the  explosion of usage has come hand in hand with the near ubituquos use of smartphones and their ever present camera.  Now it is not enough that everyone are posting their lives and running commentary onto the cloud; it must come with a photo or illustration of some sort. Millions of photos are posted each day just onto Facebook alone. So against all of that noise, I need to be hear or rather more importantly, seen. So too, I need a vigourous social media presence. The original social media for me is my personal website which has gone through so many changes over the years before settling down to its current focus. It will be dedicated to all things photography and a home base of sorts for all of my other social media forays. which are, also, singularly focused on my photography. Of course, the primary site for […]