Shooting for Kananaskis Heli Tours
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Sometimes it’s good to take a break from the normal and go do something different. In this case I headed out to the Nakoda Casino and Hotel resort on the junction of Highway 1 and 40 in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies to help a friend of a friend build a new HeliPort for the tour company.
After a week of carpentry in the cold wind but under the sight of the stunning rockies, it was up at 6am to take off in a spanking new chopper to get some promotional photos.
The rest of the photos are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonchester/sets/72157616633844728/
Published!
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So the last 24 hours has seen two of my photos published! Well stoked 
The one above is of my brother Matt (www.11-hour.com) in DJ Magazine’s February issue (http://www.djmag.com/) and yesterday I saw a final copy of a computer book on K2 with the photo of my friend Sergio del Piccolo (www.avantage.com) on the cover.
Very cool!
Callahan Valley
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I got to spend a couple of days up at whistler this weekend and we took a quick side trip to see the FIS Ski Jumping World Cup at the Whistler Olympic Park.
Ski jumping is insane! Average speed when they leave the jump is in the high 90 km/h and a good jump was around 125 with the best I saw at 142 meters! It’s a little like watching people in swooping suits (see this if you don’t know what I mean – http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1778399&server=vimeo.com&sho).
I took my camera and learned a couple of important lessons;
1) Don’t try and shoot ski jumpers from about 300m away with a 105mm lens. It’s a waste of time and shutter cycles.
2) If you ignore 1 remember that you need a fast shutter speed to capture someone moving at nearly 100km/hr from 300m away. 1/200 was too slow. The shots at 1/30 are ridiculous!!
The only shots I was happy with were the ones on the walk out. Like the one above.
Golden Opportunity?
Sunset-4, originally uploaded by Simon Chester.
Life can be quite amusing sometimes. Recently I have been increasingly fustrated with my job and pondering how I can escape and become a professional photographer. Like everyone else though I always wonder if I can take the risk and afford being broke while building up a business. Mostly I think that’s fear. But the fear is strong enough while I am working and earning to stop me from taking the risk.
Well on Friday I was credit crunched! In hindsight it’s not hard to see it coming and I can’t claim to be too upset since I was miserable at work. Now I suddenly find I may have the opportunity to earn enough to pay my bills AND have the time I need to develop a business with photography. Or I can hunt down a equivilent job to the one I just lost and keep doing what I have been doing.
The way I see it I have three options;
1) Cool my heels in a good but static IT type job and accept I’ll never be top of the game in IT.
2) Use this opportunity to get a really risky but rewarding job in IT
3) Persue photography as a career.
I’d love to do the last one, but the question is am I good enough to make that a reality. I think I could easily make a fairly good job of photography, but really I wouldn’t want to be an OK photographer, I’d want to be a stunning photographer.
What to do….?
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Shooting Sequences
Sometimes a single image stands alone. National Geographic has a whole book full of them. However sometimes a series of images has more impact, telling a story that cannot be expressed in a single image.
From a shoot last night with Erin and Jocelyn;
Erin and the Vacuum
Erin and Jocelyn-3, originally uploaded by Simon Chester.
Last year I shot Erin and got some pictures I loved; this ones a particular favourite…
Last night after much faffing about with dates wardrobe and so on I finally got to photograph Erin and her friend Jocelyn in a secret concrete bunker with a vacuum cleaner.
After 4 cans of Beaver Buzz (it’s a real drink – honest) the insomnia kicked in well and truely giving me the chance to process some of the shots.
So, lessons learned;
1. Check you pics while taking them – that screen on the back of the 5D is great but it HEAVILY over does the vibrancy of the photo. Pics that looked well exposed on the camera turned out to be almost completely underexposed. A quick check of the histogram would have shown that.
2. Have a shot list. I did, none of them really worked out, but at least I didn’t look like an idiot scratching my head waiting for inspiration to strike for the first hour.
3. Tunes help! Little bit of post punk Joy Division, Cure and REM on full blast got the mood going fast.
4. KEEP SHOOTING. Sitting on the couch doesn’t make good pictures. Funny that.
De-digital
I love my camera; Canon 5D. It takes beautiful pictures, rich in tone, and if I ever miss a moment it’s my fault not the camera’s. It does exactly what it’s meant to but sometimes I can’t help feeling the results are a little flat. It’s that curse of digital perfection. There is nothing organic with digital – or probably more correctly there is nothing wrong with digital. And like beauty it’s the flaws that make an image or person fasinating.
Recently I have started playing around again in Photoshop. I have been deliberately staying away from Photoshop for the last few years as I wanted to develop my shooting skills not my post production skills. But now I see the possibilities in taking those “perfect” digital shots and messing them up in a more organic way.
This image is more of a starting point than a final product for me – the frame comes from here (http://www.640pixels.com/articles/free-photoshop-grunge-borders.aspx). There are lots of posts on “grunge borders” that have either links or actions to creating these types of borders, but the most interesting idea I’ve see so far is the way Diane Arbur used pieces of cardboard on the negative holder in an enlarger to create her borders. I think there is some interesting experimentation to be done with a well lit background, some cardboard and photoshop….
Busy weekend – Shooting Rebecca
It seems pretty obvious when you say it, but for someone with a full+ time “real” job (think Clark Kent – with the glasses!) it can be hard to fit it in. The golden rule is shoot lots. The nice thing about being a novice at something is the learning curve is steep, so every time you put some effort into something it feels like you move forward in leaps and bounds.
I’m finding photography is like music (and yes there is definitely “elevator” photography!). You find inspiration everywhere and sometime you start off with an idea you have seen elsewhere and replicate/extend/try not to blatantly rip off. Over the last few weeks I have been very inspired by these pictures (http://fashionphotographyblog.com/2008/10/our-first-tutoria/ by Melissa Rodwell. Hint: She runs a fashion photography blog which is gold dust as far as I am concerned). Last year I shot a model called Rebecca and I thought her look would go well in some pictures like that.
I decided to return to my favourite location for the shoot. I know; everyone uses it, but I love it so why not. As we we shooting in public near a bunch of workshops an underwear shoot was out so we went the other way; trenchcoat.
On the technical side the whole shoot was done with one SB800 with a softbox and one Speedlite 430 with a very nice home made snood. Details for construction can be found here. Camera was a Canon 5D with a 24-105 L lens most of the time, and a few shots with a 50mm 1.8f prime.
I learned an interesting lesson about the SB800. It will fire even if it has not had time to fully recycle. This turns out to be very important since you will think the flash fired, but when you check later, the pictures aren’t always properly exposed. On fully charged batteries the full recycle time for 100% seems to be about 3 seconds. Not bad, but kind of sucks when you are getting hyper!
I haven’t had a chance to fully process the pictures yet, but in the mean time, here are a couple of the shots. Enjoy
Shooting Surita
In order to develop those skills (after all, what’s life about if not learning?) I am taking a course in Contemporary Portraiture at FocalPoint in Vancouver. The teacher, Katie, coincidently shot my friends Tracy and Chris’s wedding a couple of weeks ago. Small city!
For our first assignment we had to shoot a model/friend/victim outside with natural light in an urban decay setting. We were given a location and told to have at it! After a little confusion over the day and subsequent loss of a model Surita kindly agreed to be my model and we set off on a beautiful Sunday, hangover and all to get some photos.
First off, timing is everything. Due to the hangover and later commitments, the only available time to shoot was midday. And it was BRIGHT. So bright in fact my poor little Speedlite 430 was unable, on full power 1/2 a foot away from Surita, to have any impact. So unless you have some brighter strobes (think nuclear) shooting midday with no cloud cover and expecting to be able to modify the light with strobes is probably a non-starter. Unless you bring along some silk screens to reduce the direct light.
Shooting non-models is always interesting as people tend to be somewhat put off by a large camera (Canon 5D). So finding a way to reduce the fear is always a good thing. In this case I happen to know Surita likes her cigars, so a quick mad drive around Van to find a good cigar and we were ready to go.
I always find the first 20-50 shots are throw away’s. That’s why I am doing a course I guess! The first location was pretty good until we got told to leave… I had been previously warned about that possibility, but at least I didn’t have to wipe my card, and I got a brief history lesson on the warehouses we were at. But the pictures didn’t really pic up until I switched to my Lensbaby and the cigar got lit up! By then stage fright had gone and we settled down to enjoy the sun and shoot some photos.
Enjoy…
Enjoying that Cigar
Daylight night shot
The rest are posted here.
Putting together a shoot
A while back I shot one of my kickboxing instructors for a laugh and mutual experience (photo wise that is). We had a blast and got some good photo’s out of the process and even managed not to get arrested in the process. Which was nice…
Now my friend is getting serious about his acting and modelling career and needs to build out his portfolio so we are getting back into pre-production to pull together 6 distinct sets to showcase his abilities. This time around though he has pulled in a stylist to work with us to get that extra sharp look. I’ve not had the opportunity to work with a stylist before so this is all gravy for me. The stylist, Nery from Muum Productions, turns out to be a blast to work with; lots of creative flair and a good eye for turning the obvious into the subtle.
We met up for a pre-production meeting at the start of the week to put together a set and shot list. After a little backing and forwarding we came up with a shot list that should show a good range of capability for the model, and take into account the wonderful stable weather in Vancouver! 2 sets are outside and 4 inside to be shot at a later date.
Equipment-wise a fairly straightforward set-up is the way to go. After contemplating setting up ProPhoto Pro7b’s on a railway track and hoping for no trains, I am leaning towards using SpeedLites on stands with an umbrella, a softbox and some PocketWizards to allow us to shoot and run. A long conversation with a very helpful guy at Leo’s in Vancouver help determine a boom arm with a heavy light might not react very well to a quick grab and run in the event of a train showing up.
Next fun thing to work out; tethered shooting. The stylist would like to see the photos on a laptop as I shoot. Now Canon has a nice Wi-Fi solution (Canon WFT-E1a Wireless File Transmitter) but that seems to be a cool $1500+ which seems like the most expensive wireless card on the market. So cabled it is. USB cables can be daisy-chained together to give approximately 20ft of cord. Hopefully that will be enough to stop me from getting dragged off my feet or pulling the laptop to a quick demise (although with new MacBooks rumoured to be out next week, maybe that’s not a bad idea!). Set the camera to "PC Connect" and away you go. Hopefully.
I had a wonderful location (see this post) but that’s out. So a little more scouting is required this weekend. Along with a mad dash around Vancouver with the model and the stylist…. more details to come.
