The Drive

Another reminder that I need to take my bike out and start riding again.

On a wall on Commercial Drive. aka "The Drive"

Panorama and HDR

I was playing around and took a few shots from the Stanley Park Seawall looking back across to downtown Vancouver. I took about six shots and combined them into a panorama and then also took some shots and combined them to form a HDR image. I usually don't like to do too much post processing if any at all but these are fun things to try out once in awhile.

Here is the panorama. You can click the picture for the full size photo.

Here is the HDR shot followed by a few of the seven shots that I used to combine together for the final output. You can click the first photo for the full HDR photo.

A little bit of this and a little bit of that

Today was a beautiful day and I decided to play tourist for a day and run around taking some pictures. Actually for most of the day I was pretty uninspired taking shots of the mountains and buildings and didn't really come away thinking I had done anything creative. As I was out I ran into a stranger who was a photographer that had his camera with him and he instantly spotted me with mine. I stopped to talk to him and compare cameras and he said that he had his camera since just after Christmas and he was already over 4000 shots. As I left he said to me "shoot lots!" and gave me a smile. That little exchange lifted my spirits. Here are some shots from today.

Three little house boats.

In with the new reveals the old.

I am just a bit ....

Isn't this the Starbucks girl?

Grandfather, Father and Son

Snakes and Ladders

Stairs

Under the Lions Gate Bridge

And finally the Inukshuk, which is what they are using for the 2010 Winter Olympics as the logo

Natural Light

During the Location Lighting Workshop class I also took some shots with just natural light and for these I had to really work the ISO to get the shot. I had to also use a tip I learned from Joe McNally in a You Tube video about how to properly grip your camera body to minimize camera shake for slow shutter speed shots.

Behind the scenes from Location Lighting Workshop

Here are some behind the scenes look at how we did some of the shoots from the Location Lighting Workshop in my previous post. As you can see in the last photo it actually was starting to rain by the end of our shoot and the strobe is actually picking up the rain drops in the picture.

Location Lighting Workshop

Today was the Location Lighting Workshop at Vancouver Photo Workshops and it turned out that my instructor was Syx Langemann. We covered a lot about the different types of flashes used from the on camera flashes to the ones in the studio and on location. We also learned about key-lighting which I found to be really interesting whereby the flash becomes the main light in a outdoor environment. This is where you can vary your aperture to alter the ambient light and let the main flash over power it and create some really cool effects like a sunny day on an otherwise cloudy day like we had today. We also set up some pretty creative lighting setups in the studio with gels to add colour and depth to our shots. At one point we even had a strobe outside that was shooting into the studio through the window to simulate sunlight and cast an interesting shadow from the iron gating outside onto the wall. We had two models to shoot in the afternoon and they were excellent to work with. Here are some shots from today and I will start with some that were taken with just the on camera flash so you can see the difference. I used a Canon 430EX with a Stofen Omni Bounce.




Next up we have some shots using a strobe bounced of an umbrella.







Then we have some shots using a strobe bounced off an umbrella and another strobe with a blue gel bouncing off a wall behind the models.





We had a strobe outside of the studio shooting in through the window for these following shots and there is also a softbox inside the studio warm up the left side of the model as well.





For these shots we had strobe to camera left with a red gel on it and to camera right we had a softbox with a CTO gel on it.






And finally we took a single strobe and a battery pack outside into the overcast day and did some key-shifting. By using different white balances and exposure settings you can achieve some interesting effects.