Back from Spain

Back from our trip to Spain last month and it was amazing. From the delicious tapas and sangria in Madrid, to the bullring and Cathedral of Seville, to the breathtaking Sagrada Familia Cathedral and other works of art and architecture by famous Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona. It was a great two weeks. It's taken awhile to sort through the more than a thousand individual photos that I took during the trip so here are just a few to start things off.

Getting Married

The big date is coming up and I'll be getting married this coming weekend. That's why you may have noticed no updates to my blog recently. We will be going to Spain for our honeymoon and I for sure will have plenty of pictures from the trip for this blog. Stay tuned!

Abbotsford Airshow 2009

The annual Abbotsford Airshow was held this year from August 7th to 9th. I went on the Saturday and what is usually a sweltering August weekend for the show turned out to be an overcast and almost chilly day. This was probably better because I would have never lasted the five plus hours that we spent there in the blazing sun. The only downside to an overcast day and shooting airplanes flying in the sky is that everything throws your metering way off and your pictures turn out looking like you shot the planes against a pure white background. They had some static displays on the ground of fighter planes such as the A-10 Thunderbolts, CF-18 Hornets and F-15E Strike Eagles to name a few. Also on display were some huge military cargo planes. For the actual aerial show there were displays of CF-18 Hornets, F-16 Fighting Falcons, F/A-18F Super Hornets and some special highlights were the Heritage flight that had the P-51 Mustang "Impatient Virgin" and CF-18 Hornet together and also the show finale with the CAF Snowbirds. Here are some shots from the airshow.

Amazing Colors

Traditionally at this time of year we have our annual fireworks competition which draws enormous crowds out to English Bay and the Kitsilano area to watch. On the evening of July 25th however clouds started to roll in and what was supposed to be a nice sunny evening soon turned into showers. This of course drove a lot of the usual crowds away. But as the night went on it was soon to become one of the most impressive lightning storms I think this city has ever seen. If you ask me I think Mother Nature's light show is way better than any fireworks display. Also just as the sun was setting there was this amazingly vibrant color to the sky that I've never seen before so I rushed out and amidst the downpour I took a few quick pictures and composed this panorama of the view from Kitsilano looking towards English Bay and downtown Vancouver. No color correction or any Photoshop was used to post process any of these pictures. It really was that beautiful that night. Vancouver has not had a night like we had last night for a long time. Here are some more.

Stepping Outside - Photo Shoot with Flo

I did a photo shoot recently that stretched the comfort zone again for me and allowed me to challenge myself. The shoot was done outdoors and it was a chance to try some key shifting or at least to balance the ambient light with the single flash that I was using. One catch though, the infrared wireless trigger that I was used to using in the studio was not really working as well in wide open spaces and it was really critical that there was line of sight to the flash from the camera. Luckily I had an off camera flash cord so instead I shot with the camera connected to the flash that was mounted on a tripod with a softbox. I would later on place my wireless trigger on the end of the off shoe cord and have it aimed at the flash and this worked really well except that I always needed an extra pair of hands. For this session I got to work with Flo again whom I have shot before and this time she brought along makeup artist and stylist Sharley. We had about four different outfit changes and started late in the day when the sun was already going down but this session below is the one we finished with after the sun had completely gone down. I'll have some of the other shots as well in future posts. The location for this series was completely improvised. I think the backdrop and the colors from her dress work really well along with the hair and makeup. My favorite set from the entire shoot.

Three Months to the Day

Today is exactly three months till our wedding day and I have to say that it is really going to get exciting from this point on. I've been counting down the days with a desktop widget application and it hit home last week when the days went from triple digits to double digits. To be honest we really have a lot of the big items already taken care of and now it's down to all the small details and logistics. I often joked to my fiancee that if I could shoot my own wedding I would but for the actual day we are going to leave it to our professional photographer, Alana Couch. Although I have thought about rigging up a few flashes along with a camera on a tripod and triggering everything from a Pocket Wizard while I say my vows during the ceremony. Somehow I don't think that would go over very well though. Here's a fun moment from our engagement shoot a few months ago.

HDR - MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory

If you've ever been to Vancouver you know that one of the tourist destinations on almost every travel book is Queen Elizabeth Park and at the top of the park you will find the famous geodesic dome known as the MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory. This structure is now forty years old but somehow the strange shapes on the dome makes me think it's something from a science fiction movie set in the distant future. I'm sure everyone who visits this place ends up taking pictures in front of it but I wanted to get more of an abstract look and focus on the shapes. On this particular day the sun was starting to set and so I decided to experiment with some high dynamic range imagery. Below are some of my results.