Chris Gardiner Photography & Art

Broadcasting Myself with YouTube

2011-11-04T04:13:00.002-07:00

There are so many different media at the fingertips of creatives, and many of which have been incredibly simplified. So I have recently started taking an interest in video work again. Not to mention, having a mega-processing beast of a mac allows me to use programs I couldn't before.

Not to mention, I invested in a little pocket hand-camcorder, just to video tape some of my shoots. Sometimes for my own info ; how did I set up my lights for that shoot, and sometimes, so I can create little videos to advertise my work like I have been posting to youtube.

Hit the link below to see a campsite time-lapse from Fintry Provincial Park just last month.

I have got a few more time lapses, more videos up and loads more on the way, so check out The Chris Gardiner Photography Channel on YouTube now!

I am actually really looking for music artists who wish to have their music featured, and of course clearly credited in some videos. Most importantly, I will be looking for music to place with snowboarding footage from the last, and coming seasons. So if you are an artist, and like the idea of having your music played to some video footage, drop me a line!

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New to the Blackberry World!

2011-10-17T08:07:00.001-07:00

Do you BBM? Here I am!

Well this post is about two weeks overdue, but maybe that's because I've been ~~trying to figure out~~ having a great time using my new blackberry!

Maybe it's not designed to play games like apple devices are, but I have already felt the benefits of its task-managing and organizational abilities. Not to mention, the idea of BBM, or free messaging to other people on blackberry's is pretty cool. Apparently that feature along with text and email hasn't been working for some lately - as I'm sure everyone saw on Facebook by now. My phone worked seamlessly throughout this apparent 'catastrophe' it was made out to be.

My question is - did we not all check our emails on computers in the first place, maybe in the 'stone ages' now? When did everything become so ridiculously rushed that you need your email beamed from space to a piece of metal on your hip, instantly as you receive it, all day long?

Which brings me to my next point - I have an iPod touch, and now a Blackberry, so my new, mobile friendly, and flash-disabled version of Chris Gardiner Photography is undergoing rigorous testing with both platforms. From a design perspective, I had a much easier time creating something that was going to work and react on a blackberry the way I wanted it to. Apple's iOS was going to require some javascripting, which was more than I wanted my site to require. Its a photography site, designed for a mobile device. Best practices would say keep the file sizes minimum so it runs fast. Expect to hear from me when it has been finalized.

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Sneak Peak: Adobe Unblur Filter

2011-10-16T08:02:00.008-07:00

Do you or someone you know take pretty rough pictures - pretty often? Well in our future of modern technology, there may be a solution for you! I stumbled upon a post today about Adobe's "MAX 2011" convention where they showed a potential filter which may one day be in future versions of their Photoshop program.

There is a youtube video accompanying this post, from user Peter Elst's Channel. Click the 'read more' link.

We have all done it if we take pictures. I know myself, I rarely intend to take a shaken-blurry photo and when I do, I usually won't display it. That can all change with these photoshop filters demonstrated in the video. Taking a motion blurred photograph and then computing a vector that the camera moved on during the course of the capture... and then reversing that motion, to form a unblurred image, seemingly photographed with a steady hand. Crazy.

And then the restoration of a lo-res, blurred, internet display image to clarity? This would translate into some sort of ultra-crispifier, for your large resolution photos. I think it stops being a 'sharpen' process once you start 'creating' and interpolating the detail which should be there. Like taking wilted lettuce and making it crisp.

Just listen to how excited all these Adobe spectators got. Can you imagine how excited you'll be when the shots from your vacation that didn't turn out are good again! Does that mean we should all stop deleting the photo's we'd normally consider garbage? I still will - since a) who knows when it comes out b) i can't afford photoshop, even the guy on youtube with 1million views can't afford photoshop. c) I'm a photographer, and I like to be hone my skills at using a camera in the traditional style. To allow yourself to be alright with shooting would-be failures of images, only to correct them afterwards seems counter-productitve, and possibly outside the realm of photography. As many things are being questioned to be these days.

Proactive > reactive.

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Ontario Bound!

2011-10-14T10:33:00.001-07:00

Christmas is coming around, and with it - a special offer from me!

From December 21st, 2011 until January 3rd, 2011 I will be available for select portrait sessions in the Southern Ontario Region. Obviously, some days will be out of the question, like Christmas eve and Day, and New Years Eve and Day, but other than that, I will do my best to accommodate at a few clients.

Update: Spots are actually filling up quite quickly and may have only one or two more.

What's the offer - why is it filling up so fast? Well, I'm not often in Ontario, so those who recognize that fact are possibly jumping on the opportunity. And even if I did live in ontario, it would still be a great deal.
When was the last time a photographer offered to photograph you in your neighbourhood, or even inside you home, and then give you the proofs for the entire shoot to redeem your print credits on, any way you please?
That's what I am doing - Only two hundred dollars will get my undivided attention on you and your family or partner for two hours, and $75 in print credits! You can redeem print credits for any combination of digital files and photographic prints directly from my studio!
Check out my family gallery with flash enabled for more examples of the photos I can provide for you. Or if you are browsing from a mobile device, my newly launched (and still beta testing) mobile friendly website with family galleries! (Which will definitely not display properly on a desktop or laptop computer)

Facebook Event Link

Hit the link below for more info about what print credits can get you.

Print Credit Amounts

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Overhaul the Pricing Scheme!

2011-10-09T23:01:00.004-07:00

Well here it is; after much deliberation since I got my printer in July, I figured out how to best incorporate my new abilities into a pricing scheme. Two months later, I'm finally rolling it out, and in time for the Christmas Portrait season. This is the post you will want to check out if you have any questions about receiving your finished products from a photoshoot.

What does it all mean? Well, simply put - when I am lining up a photoshoot, instead of listing of x,y, and z amounts of web resolution, prints and high resolution photos that will be transferred to my client after a photoshoot - I will simply include a set amount of print credits which would get you a similar amount of finished products, but in this form - you can spend your print credits as you choose. Some on e-mail resolutions, some printed, and maybe a few favourites in high resolution to print again and give to friends for years to come.
Some other convenient features of the new system include;

All art prints (that is prints you would like to hang in your home/office, but are not of you or a photoshoot you commissioned) sized larger than 8x10 will include a signed Certificate of Authenticity.
File sizes are measured for prints at 300dpi. For each shoot ordering files for printing, you will also receive a digital 'permission slip' which you should also request to have printed @ 4"x6" at your local Black's, Shoppers, or Wal-Mart photo lab. It should take care of any concerns that photo labs may have, preventing you from receiving your prints.
Whatever you don't order with your shoot will still be available to order later, whenever you are ready, whether you want to add on more prints or more files.
Prints are from a professional quality epson printer at 300dpi on acid free archival paper with Epson Claria Hi Definition Ink, which is smudge and water resistant.

The conversion rate for CAD to Credits will be $1CAD : 1Cr. Although the benefit of credits over dollars is that you can buy credits and hold on to them when they may be periodically 'on sale' and then decide on what you want to print later, while still taking advantage of the 'credit sale value'.

Print @ 4"x6" : 4Cr.
Print @ 5"x7" : 7Cr.
Print @ 8"x10" : 14Cr.
Print @ 8.5"x11" : 15Cr.
Print @ 13"x19" : 40Cr.
File Web/Display Res : 5Cr.
File 8.5"x11" : 25Cr
File 13"x19" or Larger : 50Cr

In order to purchase print credits they should be paid with paypal or through interac email transfer if your bank supports it. Look for updates around the Chris Gardiner Photography Website rolling out the new purchasing system.

It says Read More >> still? what else could there be.......

For the first two weeks ; until October 23, 2011 credits will be available for only $.80 each! Means a 20% discount right off the hop! So even if you don't know which print you want yet, get the credits now at a great rate and then take you time choosing the perfect print for that bare wall in your home.

A photo from my blackberry of the printer in action.

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Myra Canyon Trestles

2011-09-30T12:35:00.000-07:00

Old Train Tunnel through the mountainside

I recently had family visiting Kelowna for their first time. When you are playing tour guide around town it's the perfect excuse to hit up some locations I haven't for a while. One of the trips we made this week was to Myra Canyon and the Kettle Valley Railway Trestles. A location I hadn't been to since May 2010, within my first month of living in Kelowna.

Hit the link below for some more photos

The Kettle Valley Railway comprises a portion of the Trans Canada Trail

Burn out area

Restored train bridge turned pedestrian walkway

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4 Things You Shouldn't Do

2011-09-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Four things you shouldn't do when getting your picture taken. Everyone is going to get their picture taken professionally at least a few times throughout their life. Some sessions will allow your photographer to work on a more direct and personal level. Like during a shoot at your home you may hire a freelancer who will come to photograph you and only you, opposed to some sort of school, workplace or team 'picture day' where one photog will shoot many many people throughout the day.
The points I'll go over are more specifically aimed to get the most out of your shoot.

Don't cover your eyes. The viewer of a picture, in this case - your portraits will connect via the eyes first. There is a whole connection lost without it. Keep hair, hats and sunglasses from blocking your eyes.
Don't stress out. You're not a professional model, so don't worry about a little nervousness you may have in front of the camera. A good photographer will always anticipate your nervousness and do their best to keep you comfortable, but it's never a good reason to cancel a shoot just because you are 'not sure'.
Don't be afraid to be honest with your photog. They may be a complete stranger initially, but a good photographer will have you comfortable and relaxed in no time. Tell them anything you have to, that would pertain to how much you will like these pictures of yourself - and it's often those things you would rarely tell a stranger. Things like "my nose looks too big in photos"or "can you see the bags under my eyes" - because there is always a better way to up or down play any number of human features opposed to plans for 'photoshopping it'. You will have to say something before they start though, or photoshop will be the only option.
Don't focus too much on your 'apparel' like some magazines would have you think is the only crucial factor to good photos. Pick something genuinely you (and clean if nothing else). Portraits are about capturing the essence of your character. Although a portion may come show through in your attire, the lions share will come from your expression, pose and connection to the photographer.

Are these the most important four things to remember for a photoshoot? Nope. The most important things usually become common sense after a while, and why write about common sense. I tried to choose four points that may not be so commonly sensical since they are more likely to help.

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Local Restaurant Food Photography

2011-09-15T10:48:00.004-07:00

Hungry? Well if you weren't - you will be after this post.

I had the opportunity to do some food and beverage photography this week, which for me is always a treat. Coming from a restaurant background, 'foodography' is what happens when my two professional worlds collide.

Does it give me an added bonus? I like to think so. Not only do I know what needs to be done as a photographer to have the food look its best, but I also know from the chef's standpoint, what should be represented, the focal point, and even how to get it styled on the plate. Hit the link to see the goods.

I'll keep this post short and sweet so you can focus on finding your next meal after you've checked the pics out. One thing I do have to say is for anyone about to make a jump into 'foodography';

Treat the dish in front of you like it was a person who's portrait you are shooting. The benefits of this model is they sit still, although, food expires much faster than people. To get it looking it's best, shoot it quickly. Otherwise, you'll get sweating, congelation, and drying edges just to name a few. Oh and ps. All the food I shoot is always the real deal - 100% edible, and it will taste like the dish it is advertising.

Big mussels.

Light food like it was a person, show off leading edges and curvaceous bodies, light it for texture and contrast to create a mood with which you would associate the food. There will be more images on the way, so find my Flickr Page or Facebook Page to see them when they show up.

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Peachland Lake Recreation Site,

2011-09-13T09:54:00.002-07:00

Star Trails at Peachland Lake

The summer of 2011 has been incredibly productive by way of camping trips. With more than six individual trips, that's about twice a month. This weekend we went looking for Brenda Lake, but wound up at Peachland Lake. Not sure what Brenda is like, but I can't ask for much more than what Peachland has to offer - so why move. Especially when we arrived to a setting sun on Saturday night. To be honest, with the weather, location and scenery so far, it may the best trip this season for many reasons. Here are a few more of the initial teasers from the weekend.

Running out of zoom on this scene
has me wanting a 400mm lens now.
(I top out at 200mm with my gear)

It was the perfect weekend for camping, weather was in our favour, if even still a little bit warm for my blood - no trouble - we were gaining some elevation on Kelowna which is always a good thing for temperatures. We would leave late Saturday afternoon, with jobs and places of employment to be at in for the morning. One important thing would be do not follow google map's directions to get to Brenda Lake if it takes you up to the 97C Coquihalla Connector, because well... you need access to the private, Brenda Mine located between the freeway and the destination lakes. So we drove there via the 97C and then turned around when we realized it wasn't happening, though a little frustrated we decided just to push on even though arrival was looking like it was going to be timed perfectly with sunset.

We were greeted by loon calls, a nearly empty campground, a super still lake, and loads of dragonflies. The only time I managed to catch a dragonfly in a frame was during my 2005 trip to Vancouver, in Stanley Park and that was with a fixed lens camera with some mild manual capabilities. This weekend I managed to catch about thirty or so! I'd say they are as challenging or more so than hummingbirds. Wildlife was plentiful, including loons and osprey all day long, a few frogs, spotted a deer or two, and believe it or not, cows, free ranging beef in action, actually seemed to dominate the area. I must say it's the first time I woke up to hear a ~~'cow call'~~ 'moooooo' in my life.

Our Campfire Seats

Photographers don't need to dream at night when there is a cloudless sky with a bright full moon, wide open views and a super reflective lake just feet from my fireside seat. As it turns out it was the 'Harvest Moon'. Harvest moon or not, I remember thinking at the time, that full moon light is my new favourite light to shoot just about any low light scenic I can spend a night in. I could go on about the reasons I think it's awesome, but this post isn't for that.

Reflective Properties of the Lake

There you have it, Peachland Lake in a nutshell. Well worth a visit for even just a single night of camping - only 40 minutes outside of Kelowna. There is loads of ATV and MTB trails in the area, so if you have either, bring 'em! Remember to consider the people who want to enjoy the recreation site after you and pack your garbage out. Trust me, no one wants to do that more than you do.

Sunset on the first night

A handful of the shots in this post, and some that aren't have already made it to print-on-demand status at Zazzle. The prices will vary based on the size you order, but basically they start around $20 and will be shipped to your door! Thanks again.

Peachland Lake Panorama

Campfire and Seat on the Lake

Fire and the Stars

Glowing Sunset

Campsite and Setting Sun

Campsite and Fire

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My "Photoshooting" Process

2011-09-10T15:44:00.000-07:00

This post is intended as an insight to my process of doing a photoshoot for you, my client, but can also apply to amateur photographers who wish to conduct business more effectively, professionally, or just more like me - for whatever reason that may be.

So, it will all start with maybe a phone call, email, or even a Facebook message. You, my potential client, will be searching for a photographer for the shoot you have in mind. Maybe at the point of our conversation you are still shopping around, and not sold on any particular photog to work with yet.

My first order of business will be asking the right questions to figure out exactly what your photo shoot will entail. People may be a little reluctant to communicate with you as much as you like, before they get a price from you. This is a delicate dance, since I don't like to give a cost to shoot, without knowing exactly what is going to be involved.

Intelligent questions for your potential client will include;

How much travel is involved, where would you like to shoot?
What is the final usage of the photo, their desired medium, and the amounts of which you need? Do you want selected prints in hardcopy, do you want digital files for use and re-use within your business.
How many subjects (people/objects) will I be required to photograph?
Do you have any preconceived ideas/styles/themes which you would like for me to achieve with our photos?

After I have been given answers to all, or ~~some~~ enough of my questions, I will proceed to draw up a quote form. In my case, I use my invoice template which I created, and then fill in the charges that would be associated with said shoot. Print it to file or in hardcopy, send it to your potential client, and call it your quote form.

If you want some advice, or info about invoices, and mine in particular, check out this post from a few months back. You may play the waiting game at this point. Your client will be weighing the pros and cons of paying you for your services over the next guy. I try to avoid contacting them, or otherwise pestering the potential client. If they decide on my services, they will let me know.

When you next get word from your client, its them saying "Yes! I love it! Shoot me and make me look awesome like you do for everyone else you photograph!!" Okay maybe it doesn't go exactly like that, but you get the idea. Now, choose your date to shoot, and proceed to tell your client that you will be forwarding them your contract for services.

You want your contract for services, signed and completed, before you shoot your first photo. If you client is on the ball, maybe they have it signed, and emailed back to you in a matter of hours/or days. Tardiness ain't cool, but you can't really say that to a client. Just hope that they get it to you soon, and if not, always show up to your shoot with a couple blank hardcopies.

Now - arrive at your shoot. This is where you do your thing, with your style, and your gear. I have no pointers for you here - except - SHOW UP ON TIME, you are a professional and are representing yourself and only yourself. I will always always always confirm with my client the day before the shoot date. Last thing you want is the 30 minute heads-up that your client decided to cancel your shoot. At least if you check in the day before, if they are planning to cancel the shoot, they will tell you then.

Shoot done, your client had a blast, because you made them feel comfortable in the shoot, listened to their ideas, and were all around cooperative. It's not over yet. In fact, if a client decides to hire you again for a second job, it will be almost entirely based on your conduct with them from this point on, in addition to the quality of the work you do.

So, I get home from my shoot. Load pictures onto the computer immediately. Imagine doing a whole shoot, and then not transferring your pictures over immediately and they accidentally get deleted? How do you tell your client all the photos are gone without seeming like a complete dummy? Trick question - you can't.

Normally I will 'sit on' the photos for a day. That is - try not to look at them, think about them, or visualize them in my head even. When I go back to working on the photos, I want to take as objective of a point of view as I can. Operate like a binary processor - 1s and 0s, Good and Bad, although it may be more like "Awesome!" and "Mediocre"since "bad" photos would be deleted in the field.

-IF-

If you are not responsible for choosing the photos your clients get; for instance, if you give them the option to digitally proof every image from the shoot, you can skip the paragraph above. Because, well, my opinion no longer matters on the photos. The client will have full reign, to choose the photos they like, and forget about the ones they don't. I do this by preparing a proof sheet (check out this post), and then sending to the client for their review.

Now, more waiting game. More often than not, I have noticed that when you give a regular client the opportunity to choose from 200+ photos, they will have a very very very hard time choosing. Clients have not trained themselves to look at a photo objectively the way a photog does, nor do they have the specialized software that would aid most photographer's in the sorting and categorizing. So if you are allowing your client's to proof, expect at least a week of time to go by while they choose.

Your client has chosen, and sent their request to you. This is the latest I will allow a client to pay. Ideally, you should be able to collect your fees maybe at the shoot, but when that doesn't work out, for whatever reason, never ever deliver your final products without final payment. Now you prepare the photos, with a twist in the processing that is uniquely your own of course. Export them, burn or print - and the finished products can be on their merry way. I try to have them sent off, in whatever form, within 3 days of receiving the client's final requests.

Let your client know that you would like them to contact you when they have arrived safely at their door, and that you would greatly appreciate them leaving some sort of review or testimonial on your website, Facebook page, or other webspace you may operate. When it's all said and done, you can expect everything to take about a month, from initial contact with your potential client, to receipt of the finished product.

There you have it. Essentially, that is how I operate, although everything I do, I strive to do better, so like my photographic style, I am sure this process of mine will evolve in time as well. Do you have any hints, tips, or anything else you would like to share regarding the photo-shooting process?

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Dedication

2011-09-09T13:17:00.001-07:00

I'd like to share a story with you about Sam Abell, a National Geographic photographer who in this case, embodies passion, and dedication to his art. Although not all of us work for National Geographic, we can all take something from what he says. Before I go on, here is the video:

I found this video just this morning from Chase Jarvis' blog, which is one I check out more consistently than others.

THE NUMBERS:
Twenty-five thousand for eight. That is 0.032% of the images he shot for the story actually made it to print. Typically, in the modern world, a photographer walking out of a shoot with only 100 photos will pick his absolute best 3, or 3% and that is being pretty selective by modern standards. Sam Abell had one hundredth of that make it to the magazine.

THE ERA:
He was shooting on film remember, and like he said, no digital backs to see your photos as you catch them. Could that have helped him from needing a return trip half a year later? Maybe. Is it something we might take for granted now? Maybe. I wonder if he had autofocus?

FOR THE REST OF US:
Quality over Quantity. Plain and simple. As much as Sam Abell talks about the dedication, hardship and travels involved with shooting that one story during his extensive career, I think the other message is quality quality quality.

As a little quiz for some budding photographers out there, similar to myself -- take your last big shoot, how many photos did you capture? Now divide that into how many photos you may have posted, displayed, or delivered to the client. Multiply by 100 for the percent value.
As a client of a photographer you can do the same thing, Did you get more than 50% of the images shot? You may have even felt like your not as impressed as you would have been with the pro-photog who is charging more but giving less?

IMPACT:
Why wouldn't they be impressed? That is what it all boils down to, you group 70 decent photos of 150 together, and they'll look alright, there may be a couple that stand out, but you'll just 'thumb' through most of them anyways. Instead, take your best 6 from that seventy, and I bet you can spend a full minute staring at each one, from the same person who was just thumbing through at first.

So before I steer too far away from Chase's and Sam Abell's message, focus on quality and be dedicated to what you do, make your photographs, don't take them.

Ps. Check out Chase Jarvis' blog; here's the link again.

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Kelowna Area Photo Op: Chute Lake

2011-09-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

I love camping for many reasons. One of them being the spots you find, and the pictures you'll capture at these spots. After a roadtrip to Osoyoos for an engagement shoot (more on that soon!) we took the road less traveled back to Kelowna, and made camp at Chute Lake.

Here is the current link to the BC Recreation Site about Chute Lake.

We arrived from the south, through Naramata, following the winding Chute Lake Rd until we reached the campsite and lake. It was the weekend, and a little busier than I was expecting. We arrived to a pretty much setting sun, and no available campsites. We ended up pitching our tent in a small clearing with a rock fire pit already in place.

Dusk at Chute Lake

Chute lake has a couple hundred meters of elevation on Kelowna, so you can expect it to be a good bit cooler there than in town for the summertime! Hint: remember this place for next summer.
Did I mention it's free?

Chute Lake by Night

The campsite was decent, lake was nice, got a couple photos, but I had no idea how cool the view would be on the drive home. Sure its a view overlooking town, sort of like what you'd get on Knox mountain, but new vantage points mean angles I have shot before, and therefore photos I don't have yet.

View of Kelowna from the South

Have you ever been to any of the forestry recreation sites found throughout BC? Which is your favourite?

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It's Here!

2011-09-02T00:20:00.001-07:00

My new baby.

I had a box of awesome arrive at my door on Tuesday. That would be the custom configured Mac Pro I ordered from the Apple Store online.

This is my mac pro! There are many like it, but this one is mine. It even came in a "full metal jacket"!

What does it mean? Well I like to think I made a pretty good workflow and used every ounce of juice my geezer of a laptop had, but with more than triple the RAM, multiple cores of processing, and multiple terabytes in scratch disks - I may have just found my pandora's box.

So, just letting you know to keep your eyes open because things are probably going to get a lot more awesome around here.

Remember; like anything, its not the equipment - its who is using it.

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Kelowna Thunderstorms!

2011-08-11T13:53:00.000-07:00

Aug2010 Storm

It was almost a year ago to the day I caught my first couple lightning photos here in Kelowna during a thunderstorm.

Last night's thunderstorm did however come with significantly more damage to the area. Roadways have been damaged, flash floods started, lightning triggered wildfires, marine rescues were required and who knows what people in their vehicles had to deal with.

But every cloud has it's silver lining, and actually the clouds last night had several!

This 'silver lining' was particularly loud!

So maybe to experience the benefits of last night's storm you had to be a photographer... I returned to the same spot - being my balcony - as I shot from a year ago. This time with a few new tricks, and a few different challenges.
Firstly, the storm started before dusk, meaning the sky was dark for daytime - sure, but still pretty bright for a long exposure photo whose purpose is to capture lightning.

This year I caught them with slightly more wide angle coverage, to give the lightning some juxtaposition. But, with wide angle lenses usually a wider dynamic range is required to keep your exposure in check. So I had the additional help of a graduated neutral density filter. The storm lasted hours and I encountered a variety of different ambient lighting situations, and so I had my graduated filter sometimes darkening the sky and sometimes darkening the apartments in foreground, once the night crept in.

Ideally, by the storm next august (I'm better than the farmer's almanac), I will be living in an apartment with a more sweeping view, and hopefully something including the lake. If you go out shooting in a thunder storm, remember your tripod is made of metal, and your camera is electronic. Seek a safe, sheltered location, and let the frames go. One more tip: I like my lightning around f/5.6 @ ISO200 so you can try that as a starting point.

Click here for a link to the post from last year about lightning.

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Center of Gravity in Kelowna! Part 2

2011-08-11T13:33:00.001-07:00

With the festivities over, I was left with no shortage of processing to do. Luckily, I like to keep it pretty simple in the way of processing, if the picture didn't start off good in the first place, I won't ever waste my time trying to 'make it good'.
The sporting events ranged from freestyle motocross to volleyball, which translated into no shortage of non-stop action to be photographed especially at 7fps.

Sports Covered:

Classified

Freestyle Motocross
Freestyle Flatland Tricking on sport bikes
Freestyle Mountain Biking Competition
Break Dancing
BMX'ing
Skateboarding
Basketball
Beach Volleyball
Wakeboarding and Wakeskating
Mountain Bike Lake Jump

Musical Performances Covered:


Lake Launch Sequence

Classified
Smalltown DJs
Dev and the Cataracts
Sweet Thing

I have posted a decently large collection of my photos from that day, in this album on facebook.. The gallery is 148 photos, and that equals to less than 5% of the photos I took that weekend... You do the math and tell me how many photos I snapped.


Tailwhip in progress..

My gear bag consisted of:

Canon 580exII
2x Pocket Wizards
E-TTL Cord
Canon 50D
Canon XTi
EF70-200f/4L
EF28mm f/2.8
EF50mm f/1.8
EFS10-22f/3.5-5.6
Multiple Circular Polarizers
Loads of water

Does this trick have a name even?

I need to give a big thanks to my girlfriend and best photography assistant in the world, Steph! She was always ready with the lenses that needed changing, or batteries replacing, and just about everything else I couldn't focus on.

Big thanks to the Center of Gravity, WetApe, DPI Media, musical guests, volunteers, and of course all the great athletes! Hope to be back next year.

Don't forget to check out the album with 100x more from CoG2011 than what's in this post: its in here.

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Center of Gravity in Kelowna!

2011-07-30T22:07:00.001-07:00

Well if you remember my post from wayyy earlier this year about Kelowna and the Center of Gravity, the time has finally come. So what has happened after the second night of musical performances, and one full day of sporting events? So much, about 1,800 frames actually. Luckily, I dropped down to JPEG only for the weekend's events, otherwise I'd have a serious storage issue on my hands (as of about 6 hours ago).

Covering a massive, multi-sport, multi-day event with musical performances to boot; is unlike anything I have ever done before. I only just got home, slightly toasted and a little dried out from a long day running around in the hot Okanagan sun. I'd love to share some photos already, but with 1800 already, its a little tough to do a number of the steps involved with posting photos from any given shoot. Not to mention, with my media pass, I am required to post them with the COG logo, which will also slow down my habitual workflow.

So, what to expect from me? Well, I've seen both of Classified's performances, Dev and the Cataracts, Small Town DJs, and that is just the musical performances. Sports photos from today cover everything from wakeboard winch jams, beach volleyball, bmx'ing, break dancing, skateboarding, freestyle mountain biking, freestyle motocross (sick air!!), and some crazy flatland tricks on motorbikes too.

Just a quick post to keep you in the loop, and let you know there is lots more on the way. Time to get a couple photos online before the end of the night.

Till tomorrow, when I'll fill you in on the final day's events.

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Friendly Link Sharing #3: Eric Frigon

2011-07-29T15:43:00.003-07:00

With Eric's launch of his first webpage this week, it's time to share his link and hopefully get him some exposure. Eric Frigon is an old room mate of mine from Lake Louise, still rockin' it out, unlike myself. Luckily I can still maintain a connection to the area through Eric's photos.

One thing is for sure, in Lake Louise you get about 8 months of winter, and you can find snow just about all year round in the area, especially if you are an avid mountaineer like Mr. Skigon, we call him. It's not easy to compose an awesome frame in blistering cold.

It was the same way I got heavy into the photography; making these great journeys in the beautiful protected wilderness of the National Park, And the only way to convey the energy you get from these excursions to others is by capturing the magnitude of your environment in a photo. Although, there was a joke I remember during my time in Lake Louise, where if you claimed to have bagged a peak, but had no photo at the summit to show, how would anyone believe you?

If you read the other post about my new printer, this would be the man who convinced me to make that brilliant purchase. So needless to say, if you ever made a visit to Banff or Lake Louise, but failed to leave with that shot to print for your home, use Eric's convenient print order form and select from his entire portfolio.

You can find his page here: Visual Art from the Canadian Rockies by Eric Frigon.

Best of Luck Eric!

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In-House Printing!

2011-07-29T13:50:00.000-07:00

among the first couple prints to be made!

Exciting new addition to the already super-small and super-cramped Gardiner Photo office -- A hulking beast of an Epson Professional Photo Printer! I miss having the desk space, but I love being able to print on a whim. I let my friend talk me into buying this printer, after I heard his rave reviews about it for nearly a year now. So what does it mean now that I have a pro photo printer at my disposal?

Prints for everyone! Just about every shoot I will book from here on out, will have archival quality prints included in the package, with a variety of sizes and options to suit your needs. You can even create your own free-form packages. Sizes top out at 13"x19", but I will print at any (standard or non-standard) size smaller than that. Please check the Printing Page on my website for more details regarding package pricing.

I've also began filling up my hardcopy portfolios, which have sat empty for nearly a year now since I realized how much they would cost to fill, even while printing at somewhere like Wal-Mart (yuk!). Eric Frigon, the same friend who convinced me into buying this printer said it best, but it went something like this; "whats the point of being a photographer, if only to see your pictures on a 13" screen all the time?" And he was right - I love to see my prints in a tangible form.

We are so accustomed to seeing CG graphics on screens, and ultra realistic digital renderings, etc, that a solid photo can easily blend into a crowd when its only viewed on a lcd screen. Try printing that same photo to 13"x19" or even larger, and that same photo will get some serious stopping power.

Having received my shipment of three backups for all six cartridges, I really can let the ink flow like wine. Which by the way, depending on your ink, is ounce for ounce more expensive than Dom Perignon.

In closing, photographers who don't already - start printing your work! (be careful though, its addictive)

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NEWS: RE: Website

2011-07-14T15:01:00.000-07:00

Well, been a busy bee over here lately. Not all of it fun stuff either. Got a little website updating finished, and some much needed paperwork completed.

Wanna see whats new?

Well, paperwork was the not-so-fun stuff I was talking about. Among some of my own office organization and filing of paperwork, I also created a few new forms to aid in conducting work and my professionalism.

Contracts - Starting August 2011, any new jobs will require a signed contract before any work is started.
Privacy Statement - Every website needs a privacy statement. Mine was pretty easy, since no e-commerce, or personal data is really collected through www.cgardiner.ca Although it was my first time writing one, so it may need some updates. Rest assured everyone - I will protect your privacy!
Pricing Schedule - How can people price your work, and make an accurate decision whether or not to hire you, if they don't know what you cost? Well I have made a pricing schedule available in my website's paperwork and documents section which will help you to accurately price my services. But don't forget to find out about any deals or discounts I may be offering for that month!

The other updating was mainly aesthetics, or operational flaws I found, in things like link colors not being consistent, cutting down on the verbiage - there's a lot on my site, I mean, just look how much I write here!

I always appreciate any and all comments regarding my work, website, or anything else. So, till the next update.......

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Lake Louise and Banff Trip 2011 Part 1

2011-07-14T14:49:00.001-07:00

Well just this passed June I took a three day trip to my old home of five years, Lake Louise, in banff national park. In those three days I was graced with perfect June weather, which rivals September weather in the rockies (in my opinion). This trip was one of the greatest Ive taken, for the simple reason that I captured in three days, nearly all of the 'iconic' Banff scenes that I failed to capture in my time as a resident.

With over 1000 photos to process though, I have enough processing to do for months on end. For that reason, I am in no rush to process them all. There are so many, and each has so much potential but I need to give it the attention it deserves. Of course, there were a few from the 1000 that I was in a rush to process when I returned to Kelowna. There were ones that just stood out vividly in my mind for the entire trip, with a quiet pondering inside... "i cant wait to see what that one is going to look like"

I have to give Mr. Skigon, Eric Frigon, a big thanks for having a spare bedroom and the use of his tripod. Whats the smallest thing you really CAN'T forget for landscape photography? ya thats what I forgot. The baseplate to my camera that locks it to my tripod. So without him, a lot of my shots wouldn't have been possible. Stay tuned for more about Skigon. He is a landscape photographer who is just getting his website together, and when its online, I'll surely be sharing some links.

I shot lots of wide-angle and lots of telephoto. Since the 70-200f/4L I have has never been in Banff before, I had a great time creating compositions new to me, from my some favorite shooting spots. As for the 10-22, I always had it, and loved using it in banff, but there were a few new tricks I was doing with it. Including polarizers, grad NDs and off camera flash, all for landscapes, and sometimes all at once.

I should always make more panoramas, but like figuring out how to walk in a new set of legs, the loaner tripod was foreign to me. I would rather have no panorama at all, than one that will cause headaches to put together - at least those are my thoughts in the field. Luckily I did do a few, like moraine lake and lake louise, but in retrospect there are always things I should have done differently. Meaning - I gotta go back and do it a second time. :)

Also, there were loads of HDR frames shot during my trip, and sometimes those HDRs were combined with panoramas to make behemoth 32-bit images, and 30+ megapixel images. Try figuring out the file size on one of those, i dare you. Lots of exciting photos on the way, which will slowly trickle onto the world wide web eventually. Stay tuned for them!

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Fan Giveaway

2011-07-02T13:58:00.002-07:00

Download Me!

Well, I made it to 700 fans before the end of June, and for that I have decided to make an image of Lake Louise available for everyone to download and print as a way of saying thank you!

This composition is from July 2007 and is likely one of my first with my (then) new Rebel XTi.
Shot: ISO 100 f/10 @ 1.3seconds

Download the image above and bring the file or send online to your local photolab and enjoy it in your own home. I do ask that you respect my work like any other artists, and print it without cropping my name, or any other part of the image.

Thanks again!

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NEWS: Posters and Prints

2011-06-28T21:15:00.001-07:00

Get this print (without all the wording of course)

New word in the Poster and print world of Chris Gardiner Photography.

Firstly, for a limited time only, I got a sale going for prints on demand! Definitely check them out! Of course there is always new photos being added to the collection too. Not to mention ~~almost~~ anything you have ever seen of mine, can be made available for printing on demand, with shipping to your doorstep!

Also, a massive overhaul I did to 90% of the photos available on demand was remove the original watermarking on there. For the plain text style, it was a little more prominent than it should have been, and so have placed much smaller signatures on everything, or completely removed any watermarking at all!

Get this print without the text!

Please check out the print on demand gallery!

Regarding photoshoots and people local to Kelowna, no more need to outsource prints. I have a professional quality Epson printer on the way that should massively increase my offerings! More about that soon!

C Gardiner Photography | Promote Your Page Too

Wedding Shooting With Willow

2011-06-28T21:00:00.001-07:00

Corsage and flask.

Well if you remember my post from April about Friendly Link Sharing with Willow, I finally have some photos from the Wedding I worked as her second shooter for.

What did I do? Well Willow and I had communicated pretty well before hand what I would be doing at certain points of the day. With that proper communication, Willow ensured that at no point were we shooting two similar images at any one time.

How? Well there were a few ways. Take for instance, we didn't start off our photo coverage in the same place.   I would be working with the groomsmen during their preparations until the ceremony, while Willow would spend the morning with the bridal party.

Also, just in the way of framing and compositional basics - if I saw she was shooting long, I would do my best to shoot wide without being in her frame of course. Or vice versa.   During the ceremony we stayed in complete different locations. She was working from close, while I was in a raised balcony above shooting long. And when it came time to do some formals, one crucial step is telling the group whose lens to look at.

After a while we branched out, as the bride and groom would regularly get some of themselves alone. During that time, I got to hang out with the rest of the party and get creative with some group posing. Which I feel is always a challenge for me and usually gets me a bit nervous even.

I'm not sure, but it may have been Willow's first time with a second shooter, and it was definitely my first time as the second shooter. I am certain we both felt the positive effects of collaboration. Like I already mentioned, Willow got more angles, which means more choice for the bride.

And for me, I got to shoot a wedding for my portfolio, paid for my days work, and did no leg work in the organization or locking down a large wedding deal like this one. Not to mention, any of the final editing in the photos that would be seen by the newlyweds. Cuts the workload in half really. I got paid hourly for my photo work, which normally some photogs may look at you with a funny face for doing. My reasoning: I wouldn't even be there and shooting, if it wasn't for another photographer setting it up and locking it down, and deciding to hire me.

So, check out my album from the day on my facebook page or straight through this link.

Check out Willow here: http://www.willowchristine.com/

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Tweeting?

2011-06-24T23:13:00.001-07:00

Well, I still don't fully understand it, but I've become a part of it. One of the many social networking crazes - twitter.

I am still a little lost myself as to how I can use it to promote my photography work. Like everything it will be a learning experience. Find me @CGardinerPhoto

One thing I do know, I probably could have used it during my recent visit to Banff and Lake Louise to tell everyone how awesome the weather I was getting at all of my scenic destinations.

There are already some photos up on facebook of the trip, and a blog post or two detailing some of the trip is also in the works.

Take care, and see you on twitter maybe?

C Gardiner Photography | Promote Your Page Too

Ever been to the top of a mountain?

2011-04-18T14:23:00.002-07:00

A great view from Mount Fairview

Ever been to the top of a mountain before? Well if you said no, don't worry - I can help you get there from wherever you are, regardless of your climbing abilities - using virtual reality!
I fooled around once with 'images' but sorta more like 'videos' of this style before. They were nothing worth sharing with my valued fans of course. Following is something actually half decent, and one of the only full 360 degree sets of images I have taken. It comes from the top of a place called Mount Fairview. A largest mountain that is closest to the shores of scenic Lake Louise.

I am still working out how to adjust the aspect ratio / display properties for my QTVR files. I also plan to post more on the process, but first, the goods:
By clicking down inside the image area and dragging, you will be able to choose what you are looking at. This is around 8pm in July 2005. The images came from my point and shoot camera at the time, so it just goes to show, its not what you got but how you use it.

One thing is for sure, now that I have a solid workflow I can use to approach these, you can expect to see a lot more from me. Whether they be composed from images in the archive, or shot from this point on, with the technique in mind.

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Friendly Linksharing #2: Willow Christine Photography

2011-04-18T00:48:00.002-07:00


Photo: Willow Christine Photography

I am getting excited for a special opportunity this spring. Working as a second shooter at a wedding this May. I will be shooting for the amazing Willow Christine Photography.
She is an available light photographer who seems to have no short supply of weddings to shoot! I can see why too. She has a classic and timeless style to her images with a distinct modern flair to it.

I have already had the pleasure of working with Willow earlier this year, shooting some Okanagan scenics together. Judging by her style, and the ideals she holds in photography, I can tell working for her at this wedding will be rich in experience alone. After all, wedding photography is what she does. Hopefully, I'll get to pick up a few of her useful little tricks along the way.
It's too bad this may be our first and only wedding working together since Willow is moving into Vancouver to pursue more job opportunities, if your lucky, you might be one of those job opportunities! Contact her for your Van City area wedding today.

So check out the link posted above for Willow's website, where you can also get to her blog and facebook fan page.

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Another Tool for the Trade

2011-04-18T00:23:00.002-07:00

In an older post I talked about getting photos to your clients via CD and DVD copies. Although this may still be the choice for large projects involving gigabytes of information, today's racing technology has some great new tools to save time, and money!

To me this is like a breakthrough. One thing I've had trouble with is waiting for people to finally come and collect their photos. Which can be challenging in itself when we may have two conflicting schedules. The good folks over at dropbox have a very user friendly approach to sharing files.

Straight from my desktop, I can drag and drop files that my client has requested, to a specific folder. Share that folder with my client via an email invitation. And when they have logged into our shared dropbox folder, they can download the files. presto. done. No stops by the post office, requesting mailing addresses, or resending lost CDs. The files on the dropbox server will be available until they are removed, so even if they lose their first downloaded copy, there is another master copy waiting.

You start off with something like 2.5gb free space, but every time you share a folder with a brand new dropbox user, you get another free 250mb of space! There you have it. Short and sweet. Check out dropbox, it will definitely save some headaches when it comes to delivering the product you worked so hard on. I should thank Eric Neff over at the Shine a Light Photography Blog for pointing out this great tool to me.

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Art Print Giveaway Raffle

2011-04-17T21:20:00.000-07:00

There it is! April 17, 2011 I announced the winner of my first facebook fan appreciation giveaway!

Alex S. is the lucky winner of a 22"x12" print of Kelowna Silhouettes by Sunset, shot from Knox Mountain.

I have many more ideas for giveaways and promotions to come in the following months. Make sure to follow my facebook page to stay current with them.
Thanks to all the participants!

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Photography Fees - Breaking down an Invoice

2011-03-20T19:40:00.000-07:00

Well, if you have worked with me in the recent months, you will have seen one of my invoices! They will serve many purposes - namely - standardizing my rates. Now, if you are reading this because you have been seeking clarification about your invoice - this is the post for you.

The Breakdown:

Sitting Fee - to show up that day and have the photographer keep a slot open in his schedule for you and just to turn his camera on would usually cover the sitting fee. Are usually charged per person in the shoot, in my case, to a threshold where it may get a group fee to save the client in final costs. Some photographers may request something in this amount as a deposit that would go towards the final charge.

Hourly Rate - what is that photographer's time worth based on their raw skill, and possibly hourly wages of their assistants.

Capture Fee - should represent an estimated cost per image captured. but all you do is press a button? wrong. For each time I open the shutter, a flash may fire, batteries will drain, data will be written, then transferred, viewed, judged, and possibly stored for extended periods of time or dealt with accordingly for those not making the cut.
After a long day of shooting (5hr+) it can become increasingly difficult to manage large amounts (8-12GB+) of data in the field. As the logistics of dealing with this data become more complicated, the capture fee may also increase, reflecting the increased complexity of handling the data.

Processing Fee - can only accurately be measured by hour. I represent it by an average of minutes per image or just mirroring the shooting time - whichever is less. As a general rule I have noticed for myself - every hour shooting is equal to at least another hour in post processing. This would include a basic white balance correction and curve adjustment, to all photos from the shoot before I will even consider them ready for proofing. Depending on the application or destination of the final product - more or less work may need to be done, so taking more time for those individual, polished and finished images.

Event, Group, or Location Fees - Cover having a photographer in the field, where his equipment is it's most vulnerable. Almost every time I shoot at an outdoor location, one piece, big or small, will break. Especially if lighting is involved or assistants are required. Groups can pose extra challenges whenever it involves organizing many people at once. Or making sure to capture everyone in attendance at the event.

Hardgoods or Outside Services like CDs, Shipping and Transportation - sorry - can't change the price of gas, or air travel, Canada Post or UPS and the cost of CDs. I just can't do it. A nice photographer will charge to only cover the cost - as I do.

Finally the price for the final product depending on its intended usage needs to be factored in. Likely subject to your discretion and probably the most 'grey area' of all the charges. Simply put - Someone who wants a couple family portraits for display on a social networking site shouldn't pay as much for images as a corporate establishment who wishes to use the photos in printed advertising.

For the Photographers:

By organizing rates in this fashion you can become very efficient and structured with your pricing. As with all other industries - consistency is a virtue - you should have some too. It may take a while of playing with the numbers in an excel spreadsheet and making 'mock invoices' to figure out where your appropriate rates will lie.

====== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto =====

Art Sales Coming to Kelowna

2011-03-05T19:27:00.000-08:00

The sale of my scenic and artistic prints is something I have been trying to do for a long time. Although selling intermittently, it is nothing to support myself on.

It started with flipping through the archives and stumbling upon my forgotten beauties, like those from trips in Banff, Yoho, Revelstoke, Ontario and other locations across Canada. There have been loads of them hitting the storefront lately. Which is now available on my facebook business page, directly underneath my profile photo under the title "Prints and Posters".

Guaranteed sales on this guy already.

Only thing is, people don't often plan to buy prints. As you would do if you were ordering off the internet. It is something that you need to see 'in the flesh' and if it strikes you a certain way, you feel the need to purchase it.

There are currently six poster prints on the way, ordered from zazzle.com, ranging in size from 24"x12" to 38"x25". Four different images since some have been guaranteed sales even before ordering, hence a couple of 'doubles' arriving.

If all goes according to plan - I should be able to sell off all of these, and be able to reinvest in several more prints, and repeat the process.

So if you have the luxury of being able to connect with me in person, in the Kelowna area - please speak to me about some prints for home or office. All of the images featured in this post are among the ones arriving soon in printed form.

=========== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto ========

Detailed Demographics

2011-03-03T00:00:00.002-08:00


Demographics of Active Users

Lets talk about some demographics I have been paying attention to, whilst trying to figure out what appeals to my facebook fans. A definite bonus to facebook is the ability to grab detailed demographics based on each individual profile who connects with your page. Since everyone who uses it is signed in, you can get more detailed info on a per person basis, than regular website analytics.

Take for instance demographics for my C Gardiner Photography page. A little surprising to me is that nearly 60% of my viewers are female and 51% of the total are women aged 18-35.

What else do I see? Well I am most popular in Canada, and then a very distant second is Australia. nearly tied with the USA. Top cities all make sense to me, as I have lived in, or very close to all of them over the last 4 years alone.

Activity and Post Views by Day

What other data do you get from facebook insights? Well I can see which days my page got more attention than others. Take for instance in the second figure. I can see that whatever I ended up posting on February 12th got a bunch of comments and 'likes' on images or other posts.

If you go back to my last post of 2010, the Year in Review. You will see how facebook insights differ from Google's Analytics version of 'insights'.

Active Users Chronologically

Where else does the data come in handy? Well lets look at the third and final figure. Maybe most disturbing fact for me. It says that over the last month, I have had nearly 1,800 active visitors to my facebook page. And for the pages lifetime I have only 646 fans. That means (and assuming all 646 fans visited during the month - and so can be subtracted from the 1,800) that means that nearly 1,100 visitors checked out my page , yet didn't find it necessary to become a fan. You will never win them all of course, but 1,100 visitors is actually a very big amount of people for me to be missing the support from.

How will I use it? Well the way I read the data it says 'not there yet - keep tryin harder' so that's what I'll do. If you want to help me in this quest of mine, use the discussion boards on my facebook page and reply in any of the threads I have posted there.

So if you are a small business owner using a personal page for your business on facebook - definitely make the switch to a proper business page and reap the benefits of knowing who is actively taking an interest in what you have to say.

===== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto====

Land of Opportunity!

2011-03-02T00:26:00.002-08:00


CoG - 2010 - Exquisite Photography

I'd call Kelowna the land of opportunity for me so far. You gotta reach out and grab it when you see it! I am going to have a great opportunity to work with the Center of Gravity tour in Kelowna this year doing mainly the action photos at some of sports events - I am hoping.
I started working towards my media pass this year as early as anyone could have started to be honest. I can remember getting the e-mail ball rolling within a week of them posting the date for this year's tour.


CoG - 2010 - Sky High Photography

Without pestering, I just provided a solid, logical and fact based reason why I should be there this year in every e-mail I sent, and media pass - check! I chose to shoot mainly the sports events. The one's that I could easily work out the usage of a wireless flash, and sports not regularly available to my for shooting on a just about any other occasion.

CoG - 2010 - Andrew Lipsett Photo.

The event is not only sports, some top musical performances will certainly be hitting the stage. Sure you could meet celebrities shooting performances. I've not shot enough musical performances So my shooting time at something like that would be far less productive than shooting time for something I know how to shoot - well... oh and then there is the bikini competition - but who wants to photograph things like that anyway? ;)

What do I know about sport photography? Check out this post from December and decide for yourself.

It was so important to get the pass for me this year since I applied too late last year and got rejected. Without a media pass you can't bring a camera through gates to the event. Just the thought of watching live sports to me, without a camera is almost unbearable so I barely attended the event in 2010. Check out the official video from last year's event, and get to the Center of Gravity on facebook.

Hope to see you there, and for all readers outside Kelowna, I'll be sure to get some solid viewing material up for you!

========== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto =========

False Colorization and Photo Restoration

2011-03-01T05:08:00.001-08:00

Well I saw some family members of mine who posted some seriously vintage photos on facebook. Feeling a little creative, coupled with some boredom, I ripped an image off facebook and took it to the image editing.

Similar to my graphical drawings, I worked with many layers, and some appropriate blend modes. This was a relatively fast (30 minutes) composition. Again, big shout out to the use of a graphic tablet. Really lets you feel the brush in your hand, and use it on the computer as it was paper.

Fear not, no long paragraphs lie ahead, nor is there many of them.

All this entailed was choosing my own colors which I thought would be true to the image, then painting the colors over the appropriate areas. So why not make this another service offering. To my understanding this was popular for people to have done at one point, and very well still could be popular today.

I can offer this photo-restoration and false colorization service at a per photo flat rate. Flat rate guaranteed regardless of its subject matter, since I am not 'recreating' details as in the graphical illustrations from my last post. Just colorizing detail already there. Rates at $15 per image. Get in contact with me to try your's out today.


The Original

=========== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto ============

NEW: Service offering!

2011-03-01T04:48:00.003-08:00

This is exciting. A service I can offer to anyone, anywhere. If you can read this, and send an e-mail with attachments, from anywhere across the globe, I can turn a photo of you into an illustrated replica of your photo similar in style to some pictured in this post.
All have been done by hand with a graphics tablet. I have become increasingly comfortable with these powerful little computer accessories. Especially with the amounts of layer masking done by hand at 200% view, thanks to my photo editing work as of late.

Read more below for details to the process

Pictured at left is one from several months back now that is a self portrait and the original file can be found on the initial welcome screen at www.cgardiner.ca for the currently inoperable, Culinary section of the website.

How are they made? Well starting with a reasonable resolution of image. Ideally at least 1000pixels on its longest edge is a good base point.
Then I create a layer for each of the major colors in the image. Painting those colors over their appropriate areas. After coloring is done, I group those layers and make temporarily invisible.

Then detail lines are drawn with a fine point brush, and slightly burred after.
Then one layer painted in white, and with a "screen" or "lighten" blend mode applied, is used to paint over all parts of the image needing highlights from its base neutral tone. I blur this layer. And may repeat this process several times to layer the lighting to get appropriate appearance of depth in the image.
To apply shadows to the base tones, I will make a new layer, painting in black with a "multiply" or "darken" blend mode and paint over the shadows. Blurring, and layering as necessary.

Compare this process to commissioning a hand painted portrait of yourself, or a street illustrators cartoon version of yourself . It takes time, a skilled hand and a trained eye. For only $50 I will offer you a finished file at a printable resolution, within a week of receiving the file or paypal payment (whichever comes last).

Initial fee will cover first two faces in an image. Each additional face is $15. Why faces? Well majority of the work involved in making someone look like themselves goes into replicating their facial structure.

Please get in touch with me via email
chris at cgardiner dot ca
or
request an online quote through my website, on the services page,
or
message me personally on facebook/gardinerphoto

Thank you for reading

=========== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto ============

Portfolio Shoots and Trading

2011-02-28T19:43:00.006-08:00

Well the start of 2011 has taken me in a direction I didn't expect - 11 model portfolio shoots since January 9th. That's more than I did all of 2010! Not to mention - it's keeping me busy! I'm not so sure its going to stop any time soon either.

Two individual professionals (sometimes agency represented) working together - so who pays who in this case? Well oftentimes, shoots of this sort are done on a TF (or time for print/file) basis. As in trading. How does it work?

read on to find out - but be warned, it's a long one....
----

Well everyone has costs to cover. Lets go over the costs to the photographer and the costs to the model, specifically related to TF shoots.

Models; generally arrive to a shoot with a large wardrobe selection, and for fashionable clothing - that usually doesn't come cheap. Albeit - everyone needs to wear clothes. Period. So in some cases they will have had that clothing in the first place. Regardless - this is the first price point to consider.

Most often, unless you are part of a large collaboration with stylists MUAs models and photographers, the model will be covering their own hair and makeup out of her pocket. Whether she does that herself, or has it professionally done is usually up to the model . Both cost money - and vary in quality like the quality of your lenses and/or lighting modifiers. So, price point number two.

Anyone who values their own time as money should value someone else's time as money similarly. Being a good model is certainly a skill. You pay a model for her time because they follow pose directions more adeptly than your average person, and they will likely have their own unique repertoire of poses and facial expressions. Not to mention the fact that models are so often in front of cameras, that they don't usually get the awkwardness you'll associate with shooting anyone else you pick off the street.

In the same hour and same location - a photographer shooting a regular person may net only 10% of captured images as usable. With a quality model you may boost this percentage up to 30% 60% or who knows what. In turn that can drive up the value of the shoot to the photographer. Time is price point number three.

Finally there is transportation - since especially for studio shooting, it is the model who goes to the photographer. And everyone knows about the price of gas these days, so need I say more? It's not always studio shooting though, so you could consider that the transport for both model and photographer will negate eachother. With that we will lead off into costs to the photographer.

Photographer; Why don't I have a Canon EOS 1DsMkIII? To be blunt, because it costs to f***ing much. When you get your first DSLR, that is only your first step through the doorway to a branded gear collection. Proper use of quality equipment definitely shows in the finished product.

For an average location shoot (which involves less equipment than a studio shoot) I will break down the value of gear in use. So camera, usually only one when shooting outdoors. 50D = ~$1000. Lenses - The three that come to every portrait shoot with me are; 28f/2.8, 50f/1.8, and 70-200f/4L. Total of those - ~$1100, I may bring the 10-22mm which tosses the value up to ~$1800. Lenses and camera covered. How about two memory cards and two camera batteries. Total about ~$300 there. So In order for me to shoot pictures of the optical quality I am accustomed to, for an average period of time being 2 hrs - runs about ~$3000.

Now what about lighting? I've known some models these days make guesses to the outcome of their shoot based on the amount of lighting being used in the set. This can be particularly offensive to the available light photographers who can really see the ambient light differently than your average person and make beautiful things happen with it. Regardless of that, I will often show up for a shoot with my own lighting because I enjoy controlling the light. So without going into much detail, just that I will have accessories: one or two sturdy lightstands, super-clamp, an E-TTL cord, umbrella mounts, small softbox, small umbrella, about 16 rechargeable AA's, and a round reflector. Total that somewhere around ~$400 that's being relatively conservative on the prices.
Finally the lights themselves and their triggers, being pocket wizards - another ~$1100 right there (pocket wizards are ~$200 a piece!).
For a basic selection of gear at an outdoor or location shoot I can easily approach $5000 in gear. That is a big price point numero uno and for the sake of this post, won't even include the costs of housing and maintaining huge amounts of data. These amounts will vary for each photographer and by the shoot of course. Since it took so long to cover, I will 'crop' the others a little.

What's next? How about time for the photographer? Like the model's repertoire of poses and expressions, the photographer has a repertoire of lighting setups, angles and their own throw on posing. These all come from experience and education, neither of which come free or easy. What is different about the photographer's time involved in a shoot. Well unlike the model's, it isn't over when the shoot is.

For every hour of shooting, the photographer has at least another one hour waiting for him in the post processing side of the shoot. From the organization and flagging of good-bad-neutral photos, to the polishing touch on the favorite five. So time is a big price point number two for the photographers out there.

We covered transportation above with the models so we can leave it at these two main points for the photographer.

Making it work out; So back to the trading time for print or file - like any trade, they work best when balanced. No one side should be losing out by doing a TF shoot. The photographer may have more cost involved with the photo, but the model is also the one captured at that moment in time, displayed to all humanity for indefinite amounts of time with the birth of digital files and the internet.

In the end, the photographer should try to always maintain the protection of their digital negatives from the internet. I aim to have everything that is available online, watermarked. And so aim to get a good selection on a popular social networking site for use on the internet between model, photographer and stylists, etc.
Consider offering one or two files for the model to print at the appropriate resolution, from each shoot. Or print for the model and give them up at no charge, what "TFP" really stands for, or at the bare cost of printing from outside sources.

So that's about it. I wrote this with the intent of being as objective and non-biased to any side, as possible. I am not a model and so I don't know much more of the extra consideration that may go into a shoot. Just aimed to cover the bases as I did for the photographer. Now for the only opinionated part of this post (leave here if you want):

I think any model charging me to take her picture better be pretty spectacular, very much in demand, well experienced with some industry professionals and have some solid exposure in one form or another to a cross section of the public I wouldn't normally have access to, just to have me consider it at this point. Being unemployed is also a pretty good excuse right now too ;)

====== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto======

Tracking the Stars

2011-02-23T03:24:00.001-08:00

    I have been writing a fair bit about astrophotography and have neglected to mention a particular favorite tool I have. Best of all this tool is available to all, free to use, and has limitless foresight. Sounds like a pretty smart idea huh?

      Its actually a website. Thank you internet for having absolutely everything available that anyone could ever possibly need. In this case, I have found a website that will show what you can see in the sky, from any direction at your exact location.
     Its taking the star charts to the next level. The website is created and maintained by John Walker, and can be found at www.fourmilab.ch/yoursky/ I find the Horizon View most useful. Simply check out a google map and get your latitude and longitude. With that, plug the coordinates in on John Walker's website, and then choose your azimuth - or the direction you are facing. In my case, the balcony looks south, so anything in that direction I can enjoy from the comfort of my own home.
You will find lots of adjustments you can make to the display. Mainly I like the view angle a little larger, (like 80 degrees) a larger image, (around 900 pixels) and turning off some of the unnecessary names depending on what I am looking for that night.   You can also view the sky for a future date, for instance, and see if Jupiter will still be visible by the time you finish working that night.
      Just a quick post for anyone who has picked up an astronomy bug from reading the few posts I have here on the subject. Hope Mr. Walker's website serves you well.

Killer Landscape Tips

2011-02-20T17:19:00.000-08:00

Landscapes and scenic photos. Usually all you would expect you need for that is the killer landscape in front of you. Well it certainly helps, but there is a lot you can do to really step up those landscape photos. I will cover some of the most popular tricks briefly here. Including the ones about getting your photos to look like this one, straight out of the camera.

FILTERS

There are many types of filters, some useful in landscape photography, others not so much. The first filter you should ever buy, (even before that useless UV one) is definitely a circular polarizer. The next most useful ones for landscape and scenic photography are neutral density filters, with and without gradients.

CIR-POL: Usually expensive, but well worth it. I have a 77mm thread on my EF-S 10-22mm and that filter was an easy hundred bucks. Worth it? Definitely. Has it broke yet? yes, several times. I wont go into depth about why they work, but I will tell you what they do. Picture a sunny day, lots of foliage by a body of water. Take a picture without your polarizer. You likely notice some glare on the water, and the leaves dont have that much color.
With the polarizer, you can choose for the water to have reflective or see through properties. In the image at left, the polarizer was set to see through the water. This was put together using HDR techniques, so the polarizer alone will not bring everything into balance for you.

ND Filters: standing for neutral density, they come solid, or with a gradient. When you are composing landscapes, you will find that the dynamic range can be very high. In essence, a graduated ND filter will make half the frame one stop (two or three stops) darker than the other half. They come in soft gradients and hard (sharp) gradients. How does this help? Put the darker half on the top of your frame, and the setting sun instantly becomes darker to your camera. Thus compressing the dynamic range you camera needs to capture in order to have an evenly exposed image. In the mountainous sunset example, aiming to keep color in the sunset would mean losing the vital detail in the rocky + snowy foreground. Stick the dark side of ND gradient filter to cover the sunset and you get a gradual fade from sunset to the foreground.

Choosing ND filters over HDR processing can save hours in post processing, and it is always better to get it done right in the camera. Where does the gradient ND fail? Well lets say for instance there is a tree in the foreground spanning the entire height of your frame - With your gradient, it will still darken the upper portion of the tree, and not the lower portion. So the tree itself will gradually fade to shade. This is offputting in an image.

TAKING THE PICTURE

So we have some of the filters necessary for your camera to 'see the scene properly' but what else can you do to maximize your landscapes? Well, take the picture right.

Hyperfocal Distance: sounds like it was stolen from a Star Wars movie, but it is very real. There is a single hyperfocal distance for every lens, at every focal length, at every aperture. The hyperfocal distance essentially represents the maximum distance away from your sensor that your camera can create a focused image through.
To understand this, you first need an understanding of what aperture does. As your aperture value numbers get larger, the 'hole' your camera sees through becomes smaller. This widens your depth of field.
Hyperfocal distance is no regular depth of field - it is the point your camera must focus on to be sharp to infinity, as well as extending as close to the camera as possible. So tighter apertures extend your depth of field, making it easier to fit more distance into.
How does this affect me? Well on my average scenic shoot, I probably won't touch my camera's focus after the setting it, and keeping it on manual - because I know it is already focused to be sharp at infinity, and whatever else I get sharp in the foreground is icing on the cake.
Diffraction: makes an appearance at very small apertures. When you are pushing the envelope with your hyperfocal distance, you may ask, why not hit f/32 and capture the distance from the dust on my lens to the mountains in the distance? In short, once you exceed a threshold somewhere in the neighborhood of f/16, everything may appear to be sharp, but viewed at 100% nothing will be 'tack sharp'. There is a long explanation for this involving the mechanics of light, and glass that I will not get into. Just remember, f/11 is usually just peachy for landscapes.

Tripod: If you are shooting at f/11 at ISO400 or lower, especially with filters, chances are your exposure times will be in the area of 1/4sec to 4 seconds. Needless to say - you can't shoot like this without a tripod. End of discussion.

Triggers: Anytime you shoot on a tripod you still introduce shake when you hit the shutter with your finger. To counter this, purchase a wired, or infrared remote trigger for your camera. The slightest bit of shake really does hurt. If you cannot afford a trigger at the moment, start using your camera's timer function. Maybe you have to wait 10 seconds between each photo, but it will show in the results.

Exposure: I like to bring everything I shoot right to the threshold of exposure. Shooting in manual, and keeping 'highlight alerts' on will help here. I aim to see just the slightest bit of flashing black in my previews. It means you have the exposure as bright as possible, without losing information, and so will have as much detail available straight through into the shades as possible.

In almost all of the photos in this post, you will see one small fraction of the image appears to be borderlining on pure white. That is essentially the spot I take my exposure reading from.

There you have it, a little insight into the considerations I have for every single frame I make at a scenic location.

================== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto ==============

Protect Your Industry

2011-02-19T22:44:00.001-08:00

Consider photography like any other industry. Although unlike most other industries, it is founded upon the many individual operators rather than the industries with massive workforces at any given workplace.   With this, it lacks structure and standardization that are certainly commonplace in other industries. Not to mention that with improving technology, it is easier and easier for people to assimilate themselves into the industry, with or without any background education.

Where am I going here? Well consider a grocery store analogy; what happens if everyone thinks they can go to their local grocer, and say 'Hey, lemme get these steaks for free today, and I promise I will tell everyone how good your butcher is!" or similarly going to a hairdresser's for a cut and requesting highlights too at no extra cost. It just doesn't work like that elsewhere and cannot continue to work like that in the graphic design industry.

The problem stems from the fact that the value of graphic work will depreciate as more and more people give it away for free. Simply because in time, people will come to expect it for free. To argue this point, some photographer's would say that they need to work for free for the exposure. So be it, everyone has been in that position. But make sure those you are collaborating with understand the actual market value of the work you have done, even if you don't charge.

An effective way to do this can be attaching invoices with every shoot. Even if it has been agreed upon that no money will be exchanged, let your clients know how much your services should have cost them with an actual dollar value.

I should really not even get started on the point of 'all the photographer does is hit the button' deal.   Time is money. If that phrase applies to the client, the client better understand it applies to the photographer. Its not even over when the shooting is finished - chances are for every hour of shooting, there is 2+ to do in post processing. How about equipment costs? Why doesn't everyone have a Canon EOS1DsMkIII? It costs too much. Photographer's have to pay for their camera too, now add on the wealth of lenses, flashes, modifiers, filters, tripods, lightstands, etc. Again, that is just equipment used at the shoot, what about equipment used in post? Computers, software, hard drives, DVDs, internet bandwidth, again - all extra costs that may not be apparent to your client. Not to mention, none of those come cheap. Last but not least, how about all the time invested in learning and honing your craft to the point where it is today? Experience shows in photography.

I am not saying that no one should do anything for free anymore, or just crank your prices. Just that you should be mindful of exactly what you are doing.

Remember, there is a difference between cost and value. So protect your industry. Whatever you do with your costs is up to you but, make sure people still understand your photography's actual value.   Appologies if this post comes across 'angered', but it is a hot topic in the industry right now with lots of conflicting arguments, my goal was to share those arguments with my readers.

Something about owning your landscapes is coming up next..

================== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto --------

Flexing the 'Photoshop' Muscle

2011-02-19T04:01:00.003-08:00

Anyone who has seen my work on facebook lately will notice I've been ~~'doctoring'~~ surgically removing most of their original being and replacing with transplanted organs of my other photos to form something completely different.

You may also have noticed that in general this doesn't fit with what I generally produce. Well, someone said something not so long ago and it got me a little 'spooked'.

Read on to be transported to more 'unreal' compositions and the real deal explanation on why all the heavy editing...

Firstly; what I read that got me spooked was on a photography forum I frequent (as I mentioned in my post "Great Photography Reads"), and someone raised the topic that photographer's will find it increasingly difficult to get by on just taking great photos. As the quality of camera goes up, so does the overall quality of everyone's images and 'When everyone is a pro, there will be no more pros' Regardless of the validity of these statements, it was enough of a reason to test my manipulation skills, or flex my 'photoshopping' muscle if you will. Since apparently, your skills here will truly set you apart from the rest, or your blend in with the crowd (using a large feathered brush). Remember, for most manipulations, all it requires is the software's ability to make layers with different blending modes.

Of course, like food, start with a sh**ty product and you're going to have a sh**ty meal. Manipulation cannot be an excuse to take poor photos with intent to fix them up - start with the absolute best product you can, and take it further. I will never lose my original philosophy of 'getting it right in the camera' and neither should you.

When you get into this realm of photography, you will notice that you can draw upon photos from eons ago. Take for instance the lime one above. I shot Johanna just this week, but the other photos in the composite - the lime, and water droplets came from last August and November 2008. The lime is actually an orange, and was shot during my slow days at work in the kitchens of the Chateau Lake Louise. The water droplets came from high speed shutter frames of the water fountain in Downtown Kelowna. Unlikely candidates at the time of shooting for an application like this. So remember - shoot everything, you never know when you will use it.

Another useful tidbit to remember - "proper planning prevents poor performance". Photos that go start to finish with little more than a curve adjustment can handle being taken with a whimsical approach, but in order to make effective manipulations you need to envision all the way through. Matching lighting intensities, lighting directions, white balances, all help to achieving a more realistic composite in something that is totally 'unreal'.

Composites can also make particularly compelling images when done as scenics. Fairytale like landscapes can be constructed, although this realm is beyond my reach. A better place to start is somewhere like replacing blown out skies or adding more dramatic shorelines in the foreground of waterscapes. The example below exhibits steps to replacing a semi-drab sky, and correction. The other exhibits a base image (the dock, water and mountain's silhouttes), with a new sky and rocky shoreline foreground added.

Well, that should be enough talk. If you want to see more, there have been a lot more uploaded here.

Next post in the works about maximizing your landscape photography potential! So stay tuned.

Happy shooting!

=============== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto ===============

Its About Food!

2011-01-20T02:11:00.001-08:00

I originally started this blog off with the intent to
write about anything pertaining to my interests in art, culinary arts included. Two Thousand and Eleven has seen the birth of a new idea among me and a good friend of mine, Jon Cote.

We had worked together for many years in the Food and Beverage outlets of the Chateau Lake Louise, and again in Kelowna at Chop Restaurant. Now, having quit that job, me and Jon will continue to work together on our new project, with its maiden post today! Check out Eat It Up! Kelowna. Hit the link for a little description of our mission, and our values! You wont want to miss something like this!

Eat it Up! is what we're saying. What are we doing? Well how often do you see a review for a restaurant that just sounds like a non-diner had a bad experience and needs to vent? Too often. How can you fix it? Take two industry professionals and have them create a website based on restaurant reviews from a professional point of view!

Between us, there is about twenty years of work in the food and beverage industry, in anything from small privately owned restaurants, to large scale boutique hotels. All the while, having filled just about every position found in a restaurant, or food service establishment.

We don't want to tell you how loud the music was, or how our server spilled coffee on our table, or that the music was too loud. What we want to tell you is things that Chefs and Service Professionals notice. Reporting strictly facts, and no endorsements.

Did their wine list compliment the menu? Was it Friday night and the restaurant still dead? How passionate is the chef? What is his mission? Can I find locally sourced produce on the menu?

Then the photography comes in - we want to show you what the meals look like. Every image you see in a post about a restaurant will be an image of food we ate there. None of this nonsense about food that looks good but not safe for human consumption! All to give you the information necessary to chose your next perfect meal.

We made our inaugural post earlier today, on our first location - RauDZ Regional Table. Check it out here.

So by the summertime, if you are planning a dinner and can't figure out where to go - check out Eat It Up! and we can tell you where to go!

================== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto --------

Model Shoot: Kaylynn

2011-01-20T01:51:00.000-08:00

I just had a shoot with a lovely, young, local model, Kaylynn. We themed our shoot around popular "Lange Girl" Advertisements. So I found it is a good opportunity to share some of my lighting that I used for these photos.

Portraits demand careful attention to the lighting, and studio portraits demand further attention to the lighting as you are responsible for controlling it all. No ambient to balance for, just flash powers.

So with that said, a lot rests on the photographer's shoulders, as your lighting can make or break your shoot. When you control all the light it is always best to shoot in full manual.


Lighting Diagram

Initially, I set my camera the same for every shoot. Usually ISO400 f/8 and 1/200sec. Start firing some test shots now. Obviously there is no right or wrong way to light a person. There are things that work, and things that don't however. So you will just have to fiddle with the lights until it looks right.

Consider there to be two types of light. Soft and Hard. Hard light appears to come from small light sources - your on camera flash is a hard light, any speedlights without modifiers are hard lights. Hard light 'sculpts' so to speak. It can work well on portraits when you have strong lines to define, like muscles, and usually make for strong contrast and strong shadow lines. I had one hard light in this shoot: the rim light that is at camera right, and behind the model pointed towards her and the camera.

Soft lighting is just that - soft. Spread out, like what happens to the sun when it is diffused through an overcast sky. Do something similar to a speedlight for a similar effect. I used two umbrellas as my soft lighting in this shoot. One large, kept up high and camera right as the key light - or main light. And a second smaller umbrella moving occasionally, but usually below or left of camera pointed towards the model. This second one acted as fill. If you want to showcase beauty in your subject, usually soft light will be the choice you want to make.

As far as the power levels; the rim light was at the highest power of the three flashes. This gives a bright rim on the right hand edges of the model, and especially on a white background, really helps to separate her from it. The large umbrella key was the next highest in power, providing most of the light on the front of her body. This was in as close to the model as possible without interrupting the frame. Lastly the fill light umbrella was just there to fill in the shadows created by the key light, and so was kept a stop lower than the key.

At no point did I have a light dedicated to the background. This is slightly unusual for me when shooting on white especially, but I needed my three lights on the model. Luckily there was enough light bouncing around the room to keep the white background looking half decent. That is where the bonus to shooting on black is, and due to that, I feel the shots from this shoot on black are much more engaging than those on white.

So there you have it,

Not much to this post, just sharing some of my techniques from my most recent shoot. If you would like to see more from this shoot, they can be found here. There is only six now, but you can expect several more in the coming days. It has been a very productive week around here.

================== Find more photos @ www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto --------

Product Photography

2011-01-16T03:04:00.000-08:00

Nixon Super Rover SS

Product Photography - likely to remain a niche market of photography for as long as companies have products they want to make appealing in advertisement for sale - in my opinion of course. Why? Read to find out.

I am not saying I know much on the subject, and I am definitely saying there are many better sources to go to. What do I bring to the table? I have a quick lighting example for black and white isolations with a model friend of mine that has been with me since the beginning. Some clear tips on setting up your own makeshift product studio with nothing but a tripod and a camera, and a few regular household items, after the link...

Product photography will be around forever, or at least until people stop buying things. Companies will always feel the need to advertise what they sell. Good product photography can get pretty in depth, as you will see in this video, leading me to believe that its safe to say there will be photography jobs in product work for a long time. Take a look at the effort going into this shoot of the iPhone for a Macworld cover by Peter Belanger.

Cover creation from Peter Belanger on Vimeo.

I remember first seeing this at the Strobist blog, here. It was inspirational when I saw it, and spent much time searching for this video to share in this post. David Hobby's blog has been a crucial tool in my learning the application of this lighting style..

-----------

Black BG & Reflection

Similar to some other wild west shooters, I can remember using pop cans for practice on my coffee table in Lake Louise. Starting back when I got my first speedlight with the E-TTL cord, that would be in 2007. So you could say my lighting style has been in a constant evolution since then. I just shot these for the purpose of this post. Cylinders (as in popcans ) are good because you can really see how the light wraps around a subject. Following is visual and verbal information on recreating my popcan shots; a perfect in camera isolation on white, or a reflection onto black.

"SOOTC" Image and Curve Adjusted Image with setup shown below

Lighting Diagram fig.1

White and black backgrounds, are at the two extremes of light, with a gray somewhere in the middle. Much like grilling beef - how would you like your background cooked? In order to control studio shoots you need to look at the subject and the background as two very seperate things like oil and vinegar.
In order to control them each independently you need to minimize the amount of light they share by increasing the distance between them(fig1:#1). As in - dont back your product against a wall/corner. (although sometimes this works, but for seamless backgrounds - no).
Next, the distance between camera to subject is the second priority (fig1:#2). Take your lens, start out anywhere from 50-200mm if you can, but longer the better. Here's why - the wider your shot the larger the background needs to be in order to fill the frame. And consequently, the more light you will need to keep it lit evenly, more batteries drained per shoot, shoots take less time, you get less photos, and you see where I'm going. Also, with wider angles comes greater distortion, and may limit the photos usefulness.

With black backgrounds you need to keep as much light OFF of the background as possible, so control all spill directed at the subject from hitting the background behind it if possible, and this is where distance really helps. Keeping it dark, and when your shooting at f/8 1/200th and ISO 400, your incandescent light in the room to help focusing isn't going to throw your black background off. \
With white backgrounds, you need to have the background lit brighter than the subject. You will know your background is too bright if you start creating halos, chromatic abberation and other anomalies around your subject's edges. Try increasing the distance to background or dialing the power down on your background light source. Or increasing the aperture and moving the key light in closer. There is always a solution to every problem, just think creatively but always logically to find it.

Setup Shot for White BG Photo Above

Now here is a shot of my setup, with all settings the same on camera as the white background shot above, but a much slower shutter to allow ambient light to show through as well.
Two Flashes lighting the background. One of which is gridded to prevent spill. And then a small softbox above lighting the front of popcan, dialed down quite low. I'd be shooting from where the black CD case is. I shot on a piece of plexiglass because i didn't want any shadows from my can to appear on any side of it. As you can see in the "straight out of the camera shot" above, it was successful in doing that. It is also responsible for the mirrored image in the first Red Bull can on black.

Doing this with a point and shoot camera? Any place there is a flash, you can easily replace it with a gooseneck office light - but you cant mix continuous lighting and speedlights unfortunately. Keep your on camera flash turned off completely. And have your camera on a tripod is certainly most imperative for a sharp image. Set it to a whitebalance for incandescent or tungsten lighting otherwise you may get yellow/green colour casts. Now shoot away! Lighting meters can do silly things in these situations. Try using "snow" settings for white backgrounds, if you have no control over exposure .

So, that is the small step into product photography. Grasping these principles on a small scale can be upsized to doing the same thing with people on a larger scale. Although I haven't put people on a massive transparent floor in a giant studio yet.. I will let you know when I do! Generally the more square foot of area you have to light, the more exponentially expensive your studio will become. So start here with the small stuff! Next in product photography, I will have to demonstrate the principles behind creating natural reflections into the foreground like the shot on black above, marble, steel, water, etc.

Hope this helps however you choose to apply it

Friendly Link Sharing #1

2011-01-15T02:17:00.001-08:00

During my research into some Self-promotion practices, I read about the importance of connecting with others in your field. "The competition" you might be thinking - right, but mostly wrong.

There are a few photographers I have connected with recently, and would like to 'spread the wealth' (wealth being internet traffic) and point you towards their web locales.


Photo: Eric Neff

My friend Eric Neff, and at one point room mate for several years in Lake Louise has found himself in a similar photography path as I am in now. I remember the interest he always showed in photography and I'm happy to see it has fully developed to the point he would return to school for it! If you knew him, you'd know how far flung that idea may have been just a couple years ago. He has just began maintaining his own blog here! If your ever closer to Victoria than you are to Kelowna and you need a photographer, this would be the man to call.


Photo: Eric Neff

As with any photographer, it is always a treat watching their progression. Particularly in its earliest phases and Eric has been no different. He flew through a steep learning curve on a snowboard, and I have a feeling people will be saying the same thing about his photography very soon.

Stay tuned for more posts, titled just like this one. Like this one, focused on other photographers I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from.

Look! I'm on TV!

2011-01-13T02:47:00.001-08:00

January 11, 2011. I had my first image make it onto a popular Canadian Network TV show, broadcasted around the country. It must have a piece of work exhibiting my keen artistic talent, showing signs of great skill, blah blah blah, right?

hahaha.. you will have to hit the jump if you want to know whats going on here.

photo from Wikipedia

Rick Mercer, maybe some of you have heard of him? I first remember watching him on "This Hour Has 22 Minutes". For the last several years however, he has had his own show - "The Rick Mercer Report". I would consider it like a Colbert Report for Canadian Politics. Although he is out and about far more often than he is indoors and sitting down. Regardless - very funny show. Anyone who is familiar with it may know about the photo challenges they have every month.

I've seen the products of these "Photo Challenges" before. I had a basic idea in mind, but certainly didn't think it out too far ahead, other than "this guys face is goin on a funny lookin' body". Click here to go to the RMR Archives from this year. You can see mine, and many many more like it.

Although I never put something like this together, I knew the techniques I would need to know, and was familiar with them from use in other types of photos. Following is the technique I used to create an image like this one.

Left: My Finished Product Right: The RMR Challenge Photo

THE HOW-TO PART
There are a few things to consider when merging visual aspects from two different photos in an attempt to make a seamless hybrid. In many ways you could compare the considerations you must make, to those for a stitched panorama shot.

Match size first. the RMR photo was of a much higher resolution than my suspect with the dog (the host photo we will call it). So to avoid losing image quality, always downsize the larger piece to match the smaller piece. (instead of upsizing the smaller one). To get an approximate size match, I made Baird's head a seperate layer on my host image. Drop the opacity to 50% and have the eyes overlap. Get them to a similar size.

Next, orient this Baird's head to match our host's head.. In this particular case, it involved a horizontal flip so instead of facing left off of the computer screen, he faces right. Then I did a little rotation to have as clean an overlap on the outer cheek area as possible. Not a necessary step, just a personal preference.

Now, for the semi-complicated part. Color Matching. Which actually involves matching each channel of the image (usually red green and blue in a standard RGB JPEG image). This is not easily explained through words alone. I'm not one to back down from a challenge, so here goes the Cole's Notes version. Basic understanding of a semi-pro image processor is necessary here.
Starting with red channel, on Baird's head layer, I will do a level's adjustment using only the center slider. My image should appear to be in greyscale only. All I want is to move the "Level's Adjustment" center-slider so that the gray of Baird's head matches the gray of his host. Do this again, once each in the green channel and the blue channel after you've finished the red channel. Go back to the full color, RGB view, and the skin color of your host and Mr. Baird's head should form a seamless relationship.

Of course, you will likely still see some solid lines where one image layer lies on top of another. The finishing touches involves a little painting, or moreso - erasing. With a soft (as in not very hard edged) eraser, get rid of the excess image data around Mr. Baird's head. Aside from the forehead wrinkles in my image, I would think that it is very hard to pick out where the layers are blended together. You should be able to achieve this effect.

and that's about all there is to it! Just make sure you pick an appropriate host image. Look especially at the orientation of the face. If its a head on portrait, you can't very well place that on a semi-profile'd portrait. The human eye will notice instantly that something is off there. I will be sure to post any more that I submit for the Mercer Report in the future!

Have fun! Just don't incriminate anyone for doing something or being somewhere they definitely weren't!!

Two Thousand and Ten

2010-12-19T01:28:00.001-08:00

Well, its nearly the end of twenty-ten! Be hopeful of what the next year will bring, and appreciative of what the passed year brought. I had a great year. Like many of the others, there were lots of challenges, adventures, traveling, and most importantly - progression.

Warning: Long post ahead for the year in review!

THE DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

The start of this year also saw the start of my blogging. At the start, it was to nobody. I knew that, and understood, but still felt like writing. My idea was writing about topics people ask me about frequently so I can point them over this way. Now its a little different of a story, take a look at the geographical data of where my visitors come from. Unfortunately, I can only guess if they are actually reading the stuff I write.


Blog Visitor Spread 2010

Cities with most frequent visitors the GTA and K/W of Ontario and the Okanagan in British Columbia. All of which have been my home in 2010. For 2011 I would love to be able to show a similar graph with an even wider spread across the globe! Note that one dot represents one city, not one visitor.


Website Visitor Spread 2010

I did a similar display for my website, www.cgardiner.ca
A little different spread but generally very similar. Just scaled up - it has about three times as many visits as my blog did for 2010.

A small milestone in the online presence was reaching 500 ~~fans~~ likes on my facebook page at www.facebook.com/cgardinerphoto. One thousand will be the next marker for me, and hopefully one made before the summer ends. Its really a great idea to go ahead and like that page if you are at all interested to see what I am trying next. If you do follow (by any stretch of the word) both here and there you already know that the things I am posting and playing with are being described here not long after.

THE FIELD WORK!
There's no point to having fans or visitors if I don't ever have something new to show for myself. So I am always hunting photo shoots for just about anything. Looking on previous years' photos when you have enough of them together, you can always see a progression and trending. Sometimes mine seems to resemble a 'ouija board' moving with its own apparent free will wherever it pleases.

So in what styles was most of my shooting time spent? Well I can say it broke down into a few major categories. Those being; Portraiture, Landscape, Food, and Sport. Possibly in that order of most to least.

Starting with sports and action related photography, I probably shot the least of. Unless you count shooting from a fast-moving car as action photography, which I did a surprising amount of. Luckily the winter season has just started, and so have the sports photo opportunities for me! I am looking forward to a great winter at the Okanagan's Ski Resorts and the summertime at the various outdoor sport locations around town, and especially the Center of Gravity tour.

Food is another favored style of photography for me, likely because I see so much of it as part of my full-time job in kitchens. I love to capture the beauty in a dish that I see as a chef, from my photographer's point of view. Although I have just taken a hiatus from kitchens, I don't intend to stop having great food around to photograph in the coming year.

Now, for my most frequent genre of photography this year, nature & landscapes. I like to try and keep people and portrait work at the top of the list, but that's not the case this year. I moved to my beautiful new home of Kelowna in the Okanagan and had so much exploring to do. Naturally, all of which was done with camera(s) by my side. From camping in Osoyoos, Fintry, Christina Lake and some others, on top of loads of day trips to beautiful spots like Kalamalka Lake, there certainly is no shortage of beautiful landscapes here. I personally feel a huge amount of progression here having taken a liking to HDR photography. Occasionally I feel a need to give my regular ol' 8bit landscapes an extra 16bits just to feel like I did the scene justice. I don't mind giving into those needs either. I never intend to overdo the process as some HDRs can appear, simply capture as my eyes do.

Lastly, but certainly not least, and hopefully never least in the future of my career - - photographing People! I was just starting to get semi-crammed with shoots shortly before I left Ontario and everything was grand. Little did I know, that eight months later, I still wouldn't have that ball rolling as fast as I did then. But thats alright. The shoots I had were still great, and are excellent tools in getting my name around. On a side note, I actually thought that shoots like this were done for the year being Christmas season and all - but with less than 24hrs notice, I found myself shooting a local member of Legislative Assembly this morning. (more on that in a later post) Great way to send the year out, and I'm pushing for full steam ahead in the new year.

So to all the models I worked with this year; Michy & Sarah, Lindsay, Cathy, Chi, Cara, Angie, Dani & Janine, Tracy & John, Cohen, Steph & Krystal, Mycal & Chantal, George Abbott, the Marvel College Makeup Class, Guys at work, and all the other little shoots here and there -- Thanks for what was a great shoot I am sure, and the valuable experience.

So that as they say is that. Happy New Year!!

I didn't even write this in ~~one~~ two sittings, kudos to those of you who read it in only one! haha

Focus Stacking

2010-12-17T23:33:00.001-08:00

I feel like it is pretty self explanatory. If it isn't, well this post is for you. Its an explanation and some of my first examples.
So focus stacking, is as it sounds. Multiple images stacked, or merged, to form one with a greater range of focus than any individual image's range of focus. It is similar to HDR in the way that it compensates for limitations in equipment to show something that is not normally possible.

In between the time of starting writing this post, and this point here, I endeavored to make a quick visual example of what focus stacking can do. Though not the best example, it will certainly give you an idea. And as in almost all my photos, the most important steps lie is how you take your initial shots. Keep that in mind.

So in these three images, there are actually five component images. All made while camera was completely motionless on a tripod, fired with a cable release trigger. On my Canon 50D with a 50mm prime. First image; as marked at f/1.8 focus on 'ultrasonic' for the 70-200f/4L's cap. Second image; focus on same location as first, but with aperture stepped up to 4.5 Still not an aperture that will get you a lot of depth. Third image; the combined product of three other images shot at f/9 with focus points lying in a different spot for all three. Then taking only the best (aka sharpest) part of each photo to make the final composite.

Granted, with this particular image, its very possible I could have cranked the aperture up to f/22 or f/18 gone 'hyperfocal'. That is beside the point. Now for a basic 'how-to' breakdown and a couple more examples.

focus stack image of my new brochures

When looking through an optical viewfinder and changing your lenses focus, it is apparent that as a subject moves from in focus to out of focus, its size will vary and distort. I cannot go into detail about why that happens. It affects your 'focus stacked' image because although camera remains stationary, your objects will not sit flush on eachother indefinitely. This means some layer blending, opacity changing, and layer freeform distortion are necessary. The amount of distortion you get can vary widely based on the amount of depth in your scene/subject and your focal plane's orientation to it.

In a stack of three images, I use the 'center focus' image as the base image. Use either one of the remaining two next. start with a 50% opacity and ensure that the most flush overlaps of the image lie between the center (or base) focal point and the one your working on now. Here is where you would apply a very slight, and precise distortion to line up your object's lines even better. After, apply a layer mask to this layer and make anything that is not more in-focus than the layer below it, invisible. Set the opacity back up to 100% Consider this layer finished. Lock it if you can. Now repeat this paragraph for your third and final image.

Homemade Fruit Preserves

So where does this apply best? Mostly to macro photography and still life's. Basically anywhere you deal with long focal lengths, or are experiencing limits in your depth of field. Also the process certainly doesn't lend itself to anything outside of tabletop photography very well. The first time I saw any focus stacked imaged was of a tarantula, and was so sharp, to a point that no ordinary lens, or processing could produce. This inspired me to learn more about it. The images in here were all made today and my first attempts at applying focus stacking techniques.

My next application of this process I hope to do with a deep macro on either food or an insect. Considering its winter and insects are scarce, its likely going to be some food. All three photos in this post were done with a 50mm so a pretty average depth of field at that focal length, I will certainly be trying next in the 200mm area where the effects will be even more pronounced.

Enjoy

and I think hyperfocal distance is a good cousin of focus stacking to cover in a future post! look out for it

Ideals in Food Photography

2010-12-15T13:33:00.002-08:00

I feel lucky to be a part of the Restaurant/Food Service Industry. You meet a lot of very interesting people, get to work in fast paced environments, and in some places, feel like your going into battle for a busy Friday night.

I recently left my ~~day~~ night job to pursue photography this winter. But that's no reason to stay out of the kitchen! I have a couple good friends from my days of Lake Louise, operating the Bohemian Cafe and Catering Company in downtown Kelowna. So I took the morning to get in there and shoot some food, and the dining room. What a great spot, they are obviously doing something right there because every time I have been in there, its been busy as...

Take today for instance, I am no stranger to restaurants and figured a Wednesday lunch wouldn't get too off the hook, making it a pretty safe day to be another obstacle in the kitchen. No dice! I showed up around 1130 after Jon (my friend, and the chef) texted me saying perfect timing, and its slow! Great news for photos! However, by 1215 I was letting myself out the door since the whole place filled right up and the staff went into worker-bee mode. Great news for the restaurant's revenue! Bad news for photos... I went back at 145 and the crowds were starting to dissipate at last.

One thing a lot of people think about food photography is the horror stories of this delicious appearing, yet inedible food, possibly even made of plastic. I would like to take a moment to point out that in no case is any of my food photography done in that fashion. Take my Arnold's Sports Bar photo shoot of last February. Photos were for their menu, but no special attention there. Everything I photographed was presented and cooked exactly as a guest would receive it. Here is their menu available online.


French Toast at Home

The best thing about leaving a job in professional kitchens, is that you start to feel like cooking at home again. (Ask some Chef's this, they can probably give you an insight to what I mean) So I am excited to be taking more images like these, with the new home studio set up, in the coming months.

Great food photography can be done in the comfort of your own home. Make appropriate use of big bright windows, fill flash (yes even on a P+S camera) and a reflecting surface or two, and you can very easily get some tantalizing food photos like they do in Bon Apetit!


BBQ Pork Ribs and Stuffed Baker Potato

Happy shooting!

Great Photography Reads

2010-12-15T13:10:00.001-08:00

I often times have people surprised to hear that I never went through any photography classes or courses. Not only did I experiment relentlessly with my camera, but I also read a whole lot. From books to blogs, and everything in between, I would like to share with you some of my favorite reading material..

BOOKS:

The Moment it Clicks – Joe McNally

A great read from one of the greats, Joe McNally himself. Full of anecdotes, and loads of his photos. All with little bits of information on how he did it, what he was thinking about, and the circumstances he was under in those situations for just about every photo in the book. Almost all of which were made with Nikon Speedlights, very similar to the type of lighting I use.

The Photoshop Book for Digital Photographers – Scott Kelby

Since this edition there are several more available, for each new upgrade of photoshop. I haven't used any other editions, but I know this one was full of relevant information with full color photographs and step by step information. He even provided the same images he works on in the book, online so you can really follow along step by step.

Lighting and the Dramatic Portrait – Michael Grecco

I think this may have been my first book on portraiture. It really helps newbies to see just how calculated a 'good photo' gets. Also with loads of ideas for lighting, including diagrams and case studies.

The Digital Photography Book 1, 2 & 3 – Scott Kelby

Three editions are available at this time, and I purchased them as they were released. I definitely found the first one to be most informative, concise and valuable. I already recommend it to many photographers asking me questions that this book can very easily answer.

Hot Shoe Diaries – Joe McNally

Another good'er from Mr. McNally. Released a couple years after "The Moment it Clicks. Along similar lines, this one is a step by step journey to understanding light. How it affects your photos, how to mimic certain types of light (make your own sunset portraits on cloudy days!) and which situations call for which styles of lighting. Starting with understanding your camera, to loads of popular accessories and then moving onto using one, two, and three or more, lighting setups.

Photographing People like a Pro – Rod Edwards
Photographing people can get a little tricky. This book helps break it down, from the feel you get at different focal lengths, ideals behind posing models, and finishing off with step by step photo-processing tips specific to making your portraits all that they can be.

Landscape Photography – John Shaw
The thing with landscape photography is, like the old saying goes, 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. Getting in the right place at the right time is paramount to landscapes, but so is knowing what to do when you get there. Get this book, especially if the term 'hyperfocal distance' means nothing to you.

WEBSITES:

There is a select couple websites I visit time and time again. David Hobby writes www.strobist.com , the epitome of those sites for me. Since I heard a friend mention it, whose style I looked up to at the time, I began to read it religiously. It is filled with a million tidbits of information that you could only get from years of practice. Though its certainly not a starting point for an amateur photographer as it deals strictly with the laws and nature of controlling your lighting (usually speedlights).

Another favored site for me is a great information tool of the digital age; online forums. Connect with thousands similar to yourself, many with similar questions, and even more with varying answers. http://photography-on-the.net/forum/ Is specific to Canon users and provides information, reading material and the opportunity to critique, be critiqued and help your fellow photographer.

My book collection certainly doesn't stop there, but if I had to choose some worth mentioning over the others, I would certainly choose these reading materials here. I hope that they can help you as they did me.

Sport Photography

2010-12-02T10:29:00.002-08:00

Its full-on winter here in Kelowna and so that has me thinking about Snowboarding. Snowboarding gets me thinking about capturing some great images. So if you plan to try out some photos this winter with your SLR, here are a few things to consider when shooting.

Aperture: I usually keep it shallow, ensures highest possible shutter speed, and the athlete has the prime focus in the image. Wide angles used with lots of depth (or smaller apertures) can be popular because they show the athlete, and then their beautiful location, like beautiful vistas.

Aperture: Focus on Skier, but detail still lies in the famous background.

Communication: You need good communication between athlete and photographer. Without it, you don't know where to be, or when to shoot. Line of sight is important to keep. Last thing you want is your subject surprising you over the lip of that jump, and you catching the shot half-way through. Short range FRS radios are a great help particularly in winter time, when distances between photographer and subject can become very large. Alternatively, keep a middle man who can see both photog and athlete and communicate through them when line of sight is broken.

Distance: Wide Angle, we are both bracing for impact!

Distance: generally sports happen fast! To get a good feel of whats going on, sometimes you need to get your shot in closer than what you would normally have. Use telephoto lenses from afar or get in real close with a wide angle for distorted views

Distance: Telephoto from afar

Location: where is the action going to happen, this is where knowing the sport your photographing really helps. For instance; shooting park riders at your ski resort, you know that they will be doing their 'trick' or other photo-worthy maneuver either on that rail, or just passed the lip of that jump. Compose your shot before they physically occupy that space. Generally, I will go so far as to pre-focus and lock it. This can avoid problems where your camera focuses on something behind your athlete, leaving them a blurry mess.

Tricky exposure situations.

Exposure: Snow can cause some strange responses in your camera when dealing with exposure. It frequently has your camera underexpose the rest of the image to make the snow a neutral gray (or even exposure) when it should be approaching a nuclear white. A way to counter this is expose for the snow. How? Look at some snow through your viewfinder, that is similarly lit to the snow that will be in your sport frame. Set to manual exposure and make the EV reading +1 1/3. Now compose your shot, without changing your exposure and you should have a relatively well exposed winter image. This does not suit all conditions, but if you are having trouble, its a great help. Just remember, snow is not grey, so keep it from looking that way in your photos.

Fast Speed; All movement frozen

Speed: high shutter speed freezes action, shutter speed low can blur the athlete. Alternatively pan with the athlete to show their movement across the background. Usually to freeze action, you want your shutter speed to be three times the reciprocal of your focal length. (Math warning)That means you shoot at 70mm focal length on cropped canon body @ 1.6 = 112mm = 112/1 = reciprocal 1/112 x 3 = 1/336", round that off to the nearest stop and you can use 1/320 or 1/400. Dont forget crop factors for your body, because your 70-200 on an XTi or 50D is not the same as a 70-200 on a 5DMkII. Also there are no rules set in stone. The factor that affect the blurriness of your athlete most is their speed/velocity relative to their size in the camera frame.

SlowShut. Panning with Athlete

SlowShut. Camera was still

Prints for your Home

2010-11-30T04:17:00.003-08:00

I would just like to take this post to tell you about a storefront I have set up online. Zazzle provides visitors from all over the world with design possibilities and the ability to open their own storefronts to sell anything from postcards, promotional flyers, printed ties, mugs and bumper stickers.

Follow this link to my storefront to see what is currently available. So far I have only made designs for a couple poster size art prints, to a few ball caps and t-shirts. So far there are about six poster size art prints available. At their largest size, nearly thirty inches on the long edge, they start at $35 in price. Zazzle prints and ships almost immediately and frequently have deals and sales on increasing their already high value.

As much as I would like to have all my images display elsewhere, available immediately on my Zazzle storefront - It is just not feasible. However, all of my photos on display anywhere most certainly can be made available at your request. If you see a particular image of mine you like, please send me a short message, either via my facebook or email, about which album or gallery it is found in, and its general subject. I would be happy to make it available online to your specifications.

The images in this post are just a couple of those available at my storefront here; Lake Louise Poster, Herbert Lake Poster. Prints are available with customizable frames, and in a variety of custom sizes.

Enjoy Zazzle, and I hope you find something you like at my storefront. Remember, anything you have seen of my work can be made available, at any time!

Look for a personalized gift at Zazzle.

Dreadful!

2010-11-26T02:19:00.000-08:00

Nobody likes when it happens. Sometimes it can be costly, othertimes, not so much! Too bad you will never know when its going to happen.

Breaking your gear. Nobody really likes to talk about it, but I should pay tribute to those wounded in battle, and some still going out for tours of duty. A lot of the time it happens when shooting outdoors. Which when you dont have a consistent studio space to shoot in, tends to be where I take a lot of photos. Mostly lighting gear too.

Umbrellas - I don't think there is any other piece of equipment more suceptible to the elements than an umbrella, surprisingly, since people sometimes use them as protection from the elements. If I had a great photo for every time my umbrella has been knocked over by the wind, I would just keep buying new ones. So I do. Usually inexpensive, pretty much "best case scenario" for equipment breakage.

Pocket Wizards - Unfortunately these lil guys cost $200 each when I was stocking up on them. Only two have broke. Both on the shoe mount at the bottom. One was repaired with a pair of tweezers and a heft dose of super glue. The other is an amputee, its extremities were never located on the battlefield. It serves modified duty as the radio slave to the most busted flash I have.

Vivitar 285HV - again with the hot shoe breaking. seems to be my common trend. This one underwent surgery and resembles frankenstein now. The sync cord is super-glued in place. A cold shoe was super-glued to the flash's partial hotshoe, duct taped completely. and then a standard stud superglued into the cold shoe. It has become my 'combat' flash these days. This flash drops straight into umbrella mounts, but unfortunately will never be seen on top of a camera shoe mount again.

Canon E-TTL Cord - had a 580ex on it, and then in turn was in an umbrella mount. moved my arm holding this umbrella mount / flash / cable system too quickly and it sheared right off.. fortunately it was a clean break and was reattached with a healthy dose of superglue.

I can't quite remember why I started writing this post back in August. I probably broke something that week. I just figured it was about time I finished it. Fact of the matter is; you are always going to break gear. With a little luck, it wont be at an inconvenient time, nor will it be some of your higher priced equipment. So take care of your gear, but don't baby it to the point where you miss the shot for your equipments sake!

Oh, Facebook...

2010-11-26T02:02:00.001-08:00

Truth is, facebook is great. I would never have reached so many people with my photos had I been without the great social networking tool that is facebook. It has gotten to the point where almost every small business has its own facebook business page, and some even pay people to keep them updated.

Recently however, they have diminished their usefulness to a large cross section of the people who use it. Particularly visual artists. Consider a photographer like myself who keeps a steady flow of new images to facebook pages. I like to know what interests people and what they like most, but without being notified of photo comments or likes, I have no idea which images are a hit unless I check them frequently to see if they get noticed. Now take into account that there is already probably a meager 400 photos on my "C Gardiner Photography" page, to check through past work to see what people like or have to say about it, is just too much trouble. That page is just going on a year old, imagine when there are twice that many photos!

On the plus side, facebook has given their business pages a free face-lift. There is a wide variety of data, called 'insights', that will now give the page owner information on its demographics, impressions, and growth trends. Is it worth the trade-off? Well, I don't like to think of it as a trade-off. I am optimistic 'they' will eventually see the importance of this removed feature, and hopefully bring it back.

I will continue to use facebook as always since it works as a reliable image hosting service. Where do you think the digital images from this blog are originally posted? facebook albums! So in closing, I apologize for any comments I appear to ignore on my facebook business page.

There is a group acting as a petition to bring back photo comments. Please visit their link here, and hopefully comments will be returned to facebook one day.

Asking a Favour, For a Good Cause

2010-11-23T02:30:00.002-08:00

As you know, its the month of November. To an increasing amount of the population however, we are beginning to call it "Movember". As a side effect of this, you may notice an alarming amount of mustaches on the guys in your town.

What's it all about?

Well mustaches + november = movember. Why? Well its all for a good cause; to raise awareness for prostate cancer. One can only ponder how mustaches can relate to the issue of prostate cancer. The plan was originally set in motion in 2003 in Melbourne Australia and since then, support each year has only grown. Six years later, a total of $47 million was raised worldwide, and this year is sure to keep with the upward trend.

Here in Kelowna, Chop Steakhouse is donating one dollar from each order of our delicious 'steak bites' sold, to the Movember Canada Foundation. On top of that, all of us (that can grow facial hair) at the restaurant have kept itchy mustaches since day one. So drop in, try out the 'steak bites' and catch a glimpse at some handsome 'staches or donate online to me and the Chop Kelowna team. By doing so, you will be part of a growing movement in need of support.

Thanks for checking this post out, as it is a little different than the usual banter.

Astrophotography Winter Project

2010-11-08T17:14:00.001-08:00

It's October[November by the time i published this post] 2010. Where I lived before(Lake Louise, AB) I would already be calling it Winter. For most of the rest of the Northern Hemisphere however, it is Fall. I have been looking forward to this winter for sometime now. Right around the time I got my new telescope and a rekindled appreciation for astronomy to be exact.

It comes awful early/late these days - 5am in the southern skies - but it will be showing up earlier and earlier as the weeks go by. What am I talking about? The constellation Orion. Truly a beauty. So much to see in such an easy to find and bright constellation.

Orion, the Hunter
Originally my interest in Orion was somewhat unwarranted. I remember in June, reading online somewhere about the likelihood of Betelgeuse - a red supergiant - the left shoulder of Orion, being near the end of its lifespan. This would pave the way for a supernova! This is mostly-valid fact, however the particular website made it sound as though this was bound to happen within only a couple months time. Certainly not the case, but it did get me anxious for winter to get here, so I could at least catch some views on this constellation with red supergiants and massive nebulae.

Last week saw the start of my winter project for Orion. Following in this post will be my proposed plan of action, and I will be sure to keep you up to date as the weeks go on, and the photo gets more detailed.

The Background Info

Noobs to astrophotography should read my older POST on the matter, but basically - stars are very dim, yet contrast brightly to a nearly perfect black sky. To get a brighter and more detailed photo, you need to let more light hit your sensor. So with stars being very dim, exposures can be at 2-3 minutes in length and still too dark. That's IF the stars would sit still for you (or actually if we could sit still to watch the stars). 2-3 minutes at a 50mm focal length will have your stars drawing lines halfway across the sensor. So, we need to keep the stars as bright pinpricks on the black backdrop like we see with our eyes. That is why I take many short exposures totalling a similar amount of exposure time to one single long exposure.

Course of Action

My intent is to produce a photo of sharp clarity, and hopefully bright color depicting the constellation Orion in greater detail than you could see with your eyes at night. To achieve my goals I am unsure of an exact target for exposure time, but I am prepared to go the distance and get at least 5 minutes of exposure.
Three hundred seconds of exposure time is my current goal for the base exposure. So if I am taking two second photos, that is 150 right there, and that's a straight calculation - it doesn't quite work like that. 250 frames is probably more like it.

So far I have photographed Orion on two separate occasions in the last week. I am making careful note of lens, body, ISO, aperture, and exposure times. I currently have my base image at 1m30s exposure approximately. The M42 nebula is starting to show up in the sword hanging from Orion's Belt, and betelgeuse is starting to glow red. Unfortunately, I dont feel my images are ready to show yet, and am not comfortable posting images I didn't create, on my own blog.. So google it, and take a look at what I am trying to achieve. I hope that by the end of the winter, I have a masterpiece image of Orion to share with my readers.

Weddings

2010-10-19T01:34:00.000-07:00

You can get lots of information online about helpful tips for shooting weddings these days, and here is some more. Weddings are still somewhat new to me and I still am in the learning process but it never hurts to share what you know, and tools you have.

Getting the Gig

The first major step. There are a few ways people get wedding photo gigs. As nice as it would be to have waiting lists because you're a super-big time photographer, the rest of us need to rely mostly on word of mouth, and our own concerted efforts at self advertising. Keep in mind, as with anything else, nothing comes easy.

Chances are your first few weddings will be for either friends or family, and rightfully so! Charge only for your actual dollar expenses if you could because the experience is almost more valuable than a monetary payment. This is how you will get your own, high quality wedding photos essential for self promotion. Initially in the form of a wedding-focused portfolio. Eventually you should look into business card exchange, online galleries, social networking business pages, blogs and link exchanges with other websites.

To get people to talk about you, you need to be worth talking about. And you need to be talked about to have people suggest your services to prospective brides.If you are doing the first few steps of self promotion people should start to think of you when they think of photographers. Moving to a new location can sometimes reset this process.

People may be reluctant to hire you, especially these days more than ever. As you know there was the recent 'recession' and the technology juggernaut keeps moving. People are getting more and more complacent with photos from their friends point and shoots and compiling their own albums at Wal-Mart, if not just getting a couple smaller prints. Make sure that whatever you are charging for, you certainly deliver a product better than what they can do themselves. But if that was the case, you wouldn't have people talking about you in the first place.

Lists, Lists, Lists!

Go do something and go do it right, if you want to do it again! Get some lists together. Focus on a shot list. Compile your own list from the multitude of lists you can find on the internet these days. Try and organize it in order of how the wedding day will pan out, keep it small, and on your person all day long.

I have recently compiled a fairly basic one in Excel Spreadsheet. It is very raw and bare bones at the moment, but I do intend to refine, and glam it up, at which point I will make sure to share it with you - my countless faithful readers out there.

I also compiled a packlist. It is hopefully going to avoid me carrying around three lightstands and only two flashes, or another silly combination like three flashes and one pocket wizard. Also use it before you leave each venue to make sure you have everything.

Processing and Workflow

Ah! Wedding day is over. You probably have about 700 photos or thereabouts? Try checking out my very first post ever, all about the medial task of sorting through photos! Remember to take at least a day's break from looking through your photos before you begin the sorting.

Adobe Lightroom is a great tool for amateur and professional photographers alike because you can apply adjustments from one photo in exactly the same way to the one beside it, and the thirty after that. Instead of taking the time to apply adjustments to each photo individually, you can 'sync' your adjustments between many photos and it will really cut down on the time you need to spend on the post-processing.

After you have your photos sorted, you need to get them ready to deliver to the newlywed couple, and this part will change gig to gig based on the agreements between yourself and the client. Make them happy they chose you, over some memory card borrowing from friends with point and shoots. It will do all of us a favour and keep people's faith in hiring photographers for these special events.

So that is a short look at the wedding photography process. I will leave you here, free to take the reins on your own process and practices in wedding photography! Best of luck.

High Dynamic Range

2010-10-18T05:38:00.001-07:00

High Dynamic Range, usually shortened to HDR, sounds like it could apply to anything. Maybe it can, but I'm going over how it can related to digital photography. A few people have asked questions about some of my HDR's and how to get their distinct look.

Try searching HDR tutorials, it only totals about 1 million hits. Is mine gonna be any different?
You bet ya -- this isn't a tutorial at all! No screenshot 'walk-through' here.

What is it about HDR photos? How do I make them? Where do I run into problems?
(Short version is near the bottom)

HDR photos have a distinct look because they can show a scene the way it would have appeared to your eyes. Consider this: your eyes have a wide dynamic range of 'brightness' -- you can stare at a sunset and still see detail in the foregroung close to you. Do this with a camera and you are faced with the choice; expose to have the sky with color and properly exposed while your foreground shows no detail and is a big dark smudge. Or expose for the foreground, but have bright white explosions of nuclear pixels (aka blown highlights) where the beautiful sky should be. This is because cameras cannot record light values in as great of detail as our eyes can process.
That is where HDR comes in.

Unlike our eyes - cameras can have manual control of the exposure. A neutral exposure on camera is aimed to be as close to having everything evenly exposed in your frame. Exposure values are measured in fractions of 1/2 or 2/3's. Negative means darker than the normal even exposure at zero, and positive values indicate overexposure. HDR photos are made (in my case usually) with three photos taken within a second of eachother. With each photo exposed at -2EV (read as: minus two exposure value) 0EV and +2EV. It would be like having one instant where you see a scene with sunglasses on, then off, and then a painfully bright pupil dialation. Like the kind you get at the eye doctor after an exam when you get a soccer ball in the face, and it mishapes your pupils.

There are a variety of tools these days for making 32-bit HDR images with automated software. Try the trial version of Photomatix if you are interested in trying some HDR processing. What else is necessary? Considering the less your camera moves between each exposure (we are talking microns here) the better, bring a tripod. Control your camera in aperture priority mode (why? more on that below), also bring a tripod! Remote controls or shutter releases are great, and set it to manual focus. Most DSLRs are set up to do "auto exposure bracketing". Read your camera's instructions to figure out how to get the desired exposure values (-2EV, 0EV, +2EV) and fire away. Dont forget to bring a tripod, not sure if I was unclear about that.

Why would you shoot in aperture priority mode? Consider the fact that your depth of field, or what is in focus, will grow and shrink with the size of your aperture. So if you have what is in focus constantly changing, what should be sharp in one exposure of that scene, may not be in the other. So if you operate in Aperture priority, it will stay constant, and the shutter speed will vary the exposure.

Where do I run into problems? Well if your camera is moving, even ever so slightly, it will show in the final image. Unless you dont care for the whole 'sharp' or 'in-focus' thing in your scenic photo, this is a big deal. Unfortunately even a still lake usually moves too fast for sharp HDR imaging, if your especially sluggish - clouds can get the best of you. Thats right - sometimes the clouds move too fast for me! Moving objects, water and effects of wind can all affect the final quality of your HDR. So keep that in mind.

In short, HDR has a distinct look because it compresses the dynamic range of a scene, and makes it viewable on a digital screen as an 8bit photo. It does this by taking multiple images, merging them together choosing only the best exposed parts of each, ignoring blown highlights and shadows. In this Herbert Lake Photo (Banff, AB) a regular photo towards the bright sunset would have the dark dark lake bottom totally black and lacking detail. This photo will show you both in detail.

Still interested? Got some photos to get started on? Try wading through google and its one million results for HDR tutorials. Good luck, and I would love to see some of your HDRs especially if this post helped as inspiration or information.

Till next time!

Microstock Photography, Tip of the Iceberg

2010-10-08T05:25:00.000-07:00

I say "Microstock", what comes to your mind? Well if its a blank stare, read on. We are just going to hit the tip of the iceberg for now, on this one.

Anyone involved with microstock falls into one or two groupings of people. "Contributors" "Agencies" "Buyers". Without any one of them, the system would collapse.

Contributors: Are basically the photographers / videographers / or artists. Most of whom could be considered 'freelance'. Basically shooting what they like, some without serious portfolios may be just hobbyist photographers with a few good shots. There are a few well known individuals in the microstock world who can make a comfortable living by uploading to microstock. Yuri Arcurs is most well known of these people.

Agencies: Are the middlemen, they arrange the websites and massive servers which hold 15 million photos for some agencies. They control the commission rates and the dreaded review process. Some popular agencies are alamy, istock, fotolia, shutterstock, and many more.

Buyers: The end user of the photo, for use in design, publication, etc. The buyers are using the photos for anything from school textbooks, to website design, logo design, magazine ads (and front page covers!)

Which agencies do I use? Who Do I Prefer?

Among the ones I use are; Bigstock Photo, iStockPhoto, Shutterstock, Fotolia, and Alamy. Of those, there is one that is worth the time, one that is only 'half-worth' the time, and two that seem mostly useless.
The one with the highest return for me is Shutterstock. At 900+ photos online in my portfolio and a couple thousand files sold, it remains the most consistent. iStock comes in second. 60 files in my portfolio with 200+ files downloaded. iStock is less consistent, with a far more painful review process. However the individual commissions are usually higher on iStock than that of Shutterstock. Fotolia, is only mediocre. Their best benefit is information about the buyer of your photo. With most sites, you have no idea who is using your photos. Big Stock Photo even less consistent than fotolia, but they were just bought by shutterstock. So we'll see if something happens there. As for Alamy, I have signed up for them, and been accepted through review process, however - have only four photos in my portfolio. So it is not enough to judge an agency. I am also a contributor for 'dreamstime' and 'deposit photos' however I have not put enough time into my portfolios there. So I am unable to judge.

What is in the future of microstock?

With the growing numbers of aspiring photographers, the accessibility and price of high quality dslrs, and the ease of use. It is no surprise that some agencies advertise more than 120 thousand contributors. Thats about as big as my hometown of Oakville, Ontario. So microstock is popular - thats great, but the number of contributors directly translates into the amount of competition you have. I don't imagine those numbers will slow their growth anytime soon either.
It is important to find out what YOU shoot well, and enjoy shooting, but at the same time, people are looking for. In other words, your photos need to have a high commercial value. Everyone can take photos of computer mice and cables, keyboards and USB keys on a white background, but can you do something to make your's stand out?

So that is a little bit from my point of view, on microstock photography. If this interests you, please leave me some comments, send an email, or wait for the next post, stepping into the microstock work.

High Speed Water Photography

2010-08-27T04:40:00.002-07:00

70-200mmf/4L @ ISO200 f/16, 1/200"

High Speed Photography, also Stop Motion Photography. It is known by some different names but retains a distinct look. This one shot here amazes me when I think about it. To read a little about the set up involved, some of the math and a couple others like it - read on!

This was made with a Canon 580exII at 1/64 power. Online, the flash duration for this particular unit is listed as 1/30,000" with a variance of +/- 25%. When you have zero ambient light exposing your frame, the flash duration becomes the effective shutter speed. Flashes don't actually have brighter flashes. They actually just light up for longer. So a 1/64 power will be far faster than a flash firing at 1/1 power. Effectively the shutter speed for above photo is 1/30,000".

So that means the real flash duration can be as long as 1/22,000" and as fast as 1/38,000" with the variance calculated.. Either way you cut it - very fast. Now lets say your average water droplet lasts 3/4 second from the last moment before it makes contact, to the point when the water is at rest again. At that is rushing the whole process. That means at the longest possible flash duration of 1/22,000", continuous recording of the entire process will use 15,000+ frames. If you were to play that at regular speed of 30fps you would watch the 3/4" drop last 9 minutes, at the very least! This moment here would likely be within the first 20 seconds of that 9 minute video.

Also worth noting; to see motion blur on an object when it is effectively frozen at 1/30,000" means it is traveling incredibly fast. Unfortunately I have no reference point in these photos where I can measure the magnification. With a measurement of distances inside the photo you could calculate the speed the splash is moving. Something to remember for my next shoot.

So thats all for the weird math stuff I thought about, keep reading for how to set this shot up at home with at least one flash able to move off the camera a tripod, macro capabilities and some other inventive little tools.

HOW TO?

So what is going to make or break your macro shots? Definitely focus. You need to nail the focus in order to have a decent macro photo. Easier said than done, especially with extremely small, fast moving objects. I have been thinking about it for a few days. A reliable 'drop making machine' if you will. And drop making machine I made! Here is how you can make yours!

Tripod. Two of them! Better make it happen somehow, or just finish reading the instructions. Using your own best judgement I am sure you can find a suitable substitute for a second tripod. Water bottle. Flat bottomed. 500mL size works best.

Poke a hole in the bottom of said waterbottle. I used a heated wine bottle corkscrew. Center of the bottle is best. Now - butchers twine, string, rope. Anything small enough to fit through the hole. Pull a length of it through to the spout of the bottle. Tie a knot bigger than the hole you just poked. Pull it back through so it stops at the knot. Trim your string so it hands anywhere between 2 to 4 inches below your bottle. Essentially this is your inverted wick. Fill your bottle up with water, and replace the cap! Important step believe it or not.

I had my water filled bottle sittin on my second, older, more broken tripod with its center section taken out so it was a clear drop to the supporting surfact. This is where my wick went down and as long as it remains still - will continue to put pretty little drops in a consistent location for your photographing pleasure!!

How to do high speed water photography? Well this certainly wasn't my first attempt at skinning this cat. It will take practice to develop your macro photography skills. Basically, tripod is necessary - incredibly steady one. A macro capability on your lens, however you deccide to achieve this. And finally a dark ambient setting using synchronized flashes at extremely fast durations. Would you believe that a flash can actually still leave things blurry? Well if its going to happen - its when your shooting macro.

I will try to get a post up on macro photography soon for those that need more pointers, along with some set-up shots, etc.

Happy shooting!

Lightning!!

2010-08-25T03:46:00.001-07:00

Lightning photography might make you think lightning reflexes right? Well its sort of the opposite, more like infinite patience. The best thing is, even a good portion of digital point and shoots can be made to capture lightning these days.

I rarely have luck with my lightning attempts but this night paid off. More like this after the link, but I think something might be wrong...

It was perfect, the rain coming down, storm blowing in from the south which happened to be the only way I could set my shot up. Having the protection of a covered balcony definitely provided the shoot, but at the same time - limited it.
You will notice in the three lightning photos, there is no juxtaposition. No reference point to give the viewer an idea of the lightning's size. So what are you going to do in your next attempt at lightning photos? Add a compositional element. Maybe silhouette of a treeline, hydro pole, a building lit up, water reflecting your strike, anything to show your lighning in relation to something else. In my own defense, I did choose to remove the foreground elements available at the time.

So how do you actually capture the lightning bolt on the sensor of your camera? I used a relatively low ISO, a shutter speed around 10 seconds and aperture was around f/5.6. There was a reason for each one.

Shutter Speed-10" may be a little lengthy for some point and shoots. Max is usually 8" from the ones I used in the past. Ten second exposures were long enough for my needs, but they recorded and wrote to my card fast enough that I didn't experience any serious lag time between photos. Lag time is bad because its not possible to start a new photo while it is writing the last one. Audible lightning that night was spaced about 30 seconds apart, and the ones visible from my balcony were spaced about one minute apart.

Aperture- 5.6 - this was my choice at the time because I had several things I wanted to balance. I wanted to get a lot of light, but focus is too blurry on this lens at f/2.8. Tighter aperture broadens the depth of field. So more distance is in focus. On a prime lens, your hyperfocal distance chart is very clear. 5.6 is a marked number. Place infinity just slightly before the 5.6 mark. Guaranteed focus on the lightning. So using this aperture improved the lenses optical clarity as well as guaranteed the focus where I needed it. (unless it was my balcony taking the strike - i definitely would have that one out of focus)

ISO - I set ISO last. I knew the settings I wanted to have from aperture and speed values. ISO was shifted on my camera until my given settings gave me an exposure value equal to negative two/thirds.

This kept the lightning bright (with semi-wide aperture) and at the same time, controlled the continuous ambient light - being the would-be nuclear tungsten lights in the neighborhood. Culprits of the dreaded light-pollution.

The third one has a little bit of the tree but not enough to give the viewer any real idea to the size of the lightning. There were "2 mississippis" between seeing the flash and hearing the thunder though.

What else is important? Tripod! definitely not possible without it. I mention it last because I like to think its the first thing everyone would assume when you have ten second shutter speeds. So yeah, tripod. I also used a wired remote trigger. Locked it down in place so it takes photos continuously until I release it. This keeps vibrations and blur to a minimum. Also - be safe. I had the priviledge of using my sheltered balcony. Standing outside in ~~thunder~~ electrical storms with sturdy metal tripods is not recommended.

Sharing a technique

2010-08-17T03:51:00.000-07:00

I actually just stumbled upon this one myself and figured I would share it. I knew what I was going for, and have seen it before, but I was unsure of how to do it.

Maybe you're not quite sure what it is, or supposed to be, or even how it was made?
If your the slightest big curious, read on for the original photo, a 'middle man' photo and the final one. So you can see how simple (or complex) the transformation could be, and where you will run into problems.

What is it? Well it originated from a photo looking not much differently than this final one does. Its actually from a photo of the Downtown Kelowna Water Fountain.

Essentially, there are three main steps and then a couple little side-steps you can take. The three main ones can be done with most any camera and processing equipment these days.

Fountain, June 2010

First: Line up your shot correctly. Before you can snap that shutter you need to consider the following; Freezing motion requires a lot of speed, to freeze motion when zoomed in up close requires a lot more speed.
Make your frozen water area fill at least a third of your frame. Means get close. When you're close, the depth of field becomes increasingly shallower the closer you get. Increase depth of field by using a tighter aperture.
My settings were 135mm focal length & 1/3200" and f/8 in the original photo @ ISO400. This should read to you (as a photographer) : it was a very bright day, with lots of direct sunlight. The 8am Sun was high enough to be bright and direct, but not high enough to be directly overhead like the un-charismatic light of mid-day.
Make sure there is nothing behind your object but blue sky, and if you can, shoot perpendicular to the sun. If you are pointed in any way towards the sun, your sky is likely to have varying shades of blue - its a no-no to save you processing time later. If you are pointed 90 degrees to either side, the sky should be relatively evenly shaded. And you get nice sidelighting on your airborne water. --Take your photo!--
Second: Processing time begins. It really took you more time to read the first step than the entire second and third steps will take you. With photography its always in how you get it right in camera first. Unless you know how to take monochrome images in your camera with different color filters, you will need to know how to use a basic photo editing program here.
With your color file, use your camera's editing software to make it a black and white. Using the red channel only is a very easy way to have your blue show up as black. Any way you know how to make the blues in your photo show up dark, will work and it varies on the program. Read your camera manual if you want to learn how to apply color filters to monochrome images inside the camera.

Black and white file - check. Now, a quick sidestep or two here. Apply some more contrast, making the darks darker, and the lights lighter. Apply some sharpening. Any way you know how to works, I did a weak 'high pass filter' on a duplicated layer, and then used a 'soft light blending mode'. I added my color at this point. I wanted blue, so I created a new layer and painted the whole thing bright yellow. Change this layer's blending mode to "add" or "multiply". Do this because it will only have a noticeable effect on the lights of the photo, not the darks. So your white water splash is now yellow, and the black is still black.

Third: Invert your image. You can do this in MSPaint found on Windows '95. If you can't find it in any of your programs, I do suggest you use paint. everything that was black will be white, and everything that was yellow becomes blue, and will work for any reciprocating colors.

Nothing too crazy here. Enjoy, and Happy Shooting!

...don't be afraid to let me see some results of your attempts!

Working with the Orbis

2010-08-05T06:06:00.000-07:00

Today was an excellent day to put my new, Orbis Ringflash to the test! I had a photoshoot this morning and couldn't resist bringing some new gear. The "Wimberly Plamps" "HONL Speed Grids" and "Orbis Ringflash" were among the shaping tools I had this day.

The shoot was to be with a model who found me through Model Mayhem, a website designed to help bring models, photographers, makeup-artists, etc, into contact with eachother to collaborate in projects of all sorts.

Hit the jump to see how the Orbis performed,

August 3rd, 2010. Kelowna, BC. 1200h, high noon, and about 90 degrees outside.

I arrive on foot after a speedy ten minute walk from home. Very thin cloud cover, so I immediately think very harsh shadows from sunlight - when I arrive at the location plan "A" is find shade & water combined. The bag was packed from the night before so I could maximize my sleeping time, more than anything. The tools I used: Canon EOS 50D, EF70-200mmf/4L, EF50mmf/1.8, Canon 580EXII, Vivitar 285HV, 3xPocket Wizards, Tripod, Manfrotto Spring Clamp, Flash Mount, HONL Speedgrid 1/4" and about $100 in fresh AA batteries and the Orbis Ring Flash Adapter.
(note: a manfrotto spring clamp holding a speedlight to a tripod is a bazillion times sturdier than a lightstand outdoors!)

So I get there, shade and water, together? HA! No dice there.. figure something else out, fast. In the meantime, I have to introduce myself to this model I'm meeting as I unpack and ready my gear, unsure still of exactly what I am going to be doing with it.

So shooting in direct, harsh sunlight doesn't make for the most flattering of light on people. I will need to be getting my flashes in close and probably cranking the juice. In one hour I changed the batteries of two speedlights, three times.

I can say that today was the closest any of my gear has been used to an open body of water. Luckily I had a tripod and not a lightstand, otherwise it would have never stood up in the very sandy shallow waters. I would also be down the flash and pocket wizard that were connected to it. The tripod never held my camera once.

Short part of the already long story; I was shooting on ISO 100 in order to have a shutter speed at 1/250 with apertures between f/5.6 and f/8. Because 1) Bigger aperture numbers diminish the effective distances of your flashes, 2) Speeds higher than 1/250 do not sync up with speedlights. 3)Higher ISO would increase flash effective range, but also force either faster shutter speed or tighter apertures. Vivitar was attached to a tripod always on the camera right, with sun always camera left, and our model in the middle. My Orbis and Canon 580EX just filled in the blanks. Did a good job of it too, and really helped sharpen the details and soften the shadows overall.

I will be using it again, hopefully in a studio environment where I can fully control all the light around me. Outdoors I felt limited to around 10' distance between my flash and my model in the direct sunlight, with power running at 1/4 on the Canon Speedlight.

Hope that was usefull to some, and you enjoyed the pictures, they are my first outdoor, bikini style shoot. You can find more from the shoot here.

Late Night Online Shopping Extravaganza!

2010-07-29T05:48:00.001-07:00

There comes a time, as a photographer, where you just need some new stuff. I took care of that craving this evening with a little B&H Photo late-night, online purchase! Among the toys on the way, the Orbis Ring Flash Diffuser has me most excited.

More on what else is coming after the jump,

Another new toy that has me curious, are the telescope mounts I need in order to connect my camera to my telescope for crisp photos of the heavens. I am not quite sure how the learning curve will go once I get it all fired up. I would expect more from this sometime near the next full moon (its the easiest object to practice astrophotography on).

A couple new memory cards on their way. They are much needed. When I go out with two camera bodies, I occasionally find myself switching memory cards instead of lenses. Now, I should be able to do both, far less often! Sticking to good quality name brands (Sandisk) with high speeds, but relatively low storage amounts (4GB). These are right for me since I never "fill" a memory card, and make an effort to empty them after every day of shooting.

These are the Wimberly "Plamps". Gooseneck arms with clamps at either end. I expect they will prove most useful when either a) I need to hold a reflector or a gobo in the studio/outdoors or b) in windy situations outside if I need a piece of foliage steadied, or held securely out of the way.

They seem like a good concept - giving photographers extra hands almost. So I am hoping they will pay off. Aside from what is mentioned above, there are two Honl Grids coming for my speedlights. I made a DIY one last year that worked very well, but the glue wasn't right for the job and slowly started falling apart.

I also took the time during my late-night online shopping excursion, to make some wishlists at BHPhoto. For any photographers curious to see what I use to make my photos, and what I plan to purchase in the near future, check these out;
(my gear is not limited to only these products, but not every thing is available on bhphoto unfortunately)
What I Own Now
What I Will Own Soon
90% of my photography gear comes from these guys, except when the exchange is too brutal. Majority of the time, after including the duty fees and ups delivery, shipping in from the states will still work out to be cheaper than finding the same products shipping for FREE from inside Canada at Canadian Prices.

Hoping I get my new toys before the weekend! I paid extra for the 1-2 day shipping and it was ordered late wednesday night, so its a gamble but maybe luck is on my side.

Mega-Panoramas @ 32 MegaPixels

2010-07-06T17:58:00.002-07:00

Panorama software, and the newer cameras these days can make panorama's extremely easy.
I haven't made any in a while, but decided to try something new after I saw this.
With the Paris Example at 26 gigapixels, my 32 megapixels pale in comparison. It was more just dipping my feet in the water of multiple exposure composites.

How did I do it?

Six shots across the scene, and three layers of shots high. With my camera in horizontal, or landscape orientation. I used a Canon70-200 f/4L-USM on my EOS50D body on sRAW1 (or 7megapixel). Focal length at 70mm throughout the images. This image made from eighteen 7MP photos at 70mm, works out to be approximately 32 megapixels in the end and produces an image like a 28mm lens would (by my guess, no calculations here).

What are some important things to consider when you are going to try to make a large panorama?
Your computer may challenge you, as mine did. I only produced a file successfully after my 4th attempt. The quality of your original photos may challenge you, and the scene you are shooting may challenge you.

Computer Troubles: I had made three attempts to produce a file before I came out with one in the end. 4GB of RAM on my 3 year old mac-book was struggling to produce a finished file after the repositioning and blending of layers. My photo-merging program was unable to merge everything properly itself, so I used the interactive layout to help it along. If you have level photos and evenly exposed, you shouldn't have a problem here. Three quarters of the way through the process, file closes, losing all the work with a warning "Start up disk almost full". The final time I needed nearly 10GB of free space on the hard disk. After checking the size of the raw panorama (including layer masks, and positioning) it was about 600MB. No wonder it had trouble saving.

Quality of Photos: It is best to consciously focus on taking proper panorama shots when you are at the location, and is virtual impossible to produce a file without doing a number of things right when the camera is in your hands. Tripod - Must have, your camera needs to sit still in one place, be consistently level all the time, and move smoothly when rotated. If your camera is not level, the horizon will be at different locations across your photos. Exposure - you need to keep an even exposure throughout. Set your camera to manual and choose an appropriate exposure. The darkest shadows of your image should have still a slight detail, and the highlights should not be blown out. If your scene has too large of a dynamic range then you will need to choose to sacrifice some shadows, or some highlights.

The Scene: Clouds, water, and foliage in the wind, will not sit still for you while you take your photos. So you need to act fast. Since you are trying to show one moment in time in an image, it will look very strange if you can identify one object in two or more locations because it was moving in the time of your photos. If you look closely on my panorama you can see not all the waves match up, nor does it 'make sense' for some to be seen where they are.

This was an earlier attempt. Twelve exposures from the top of Knox Mountain in Kelowna. If you divide the picture into 4 pieces lengthwise, I had 3 images of bracketed exposures for each of those pieces. I used a super-wide angle, EF-S10-22mm @ 10mm. The dynamic range in this scene was very high, so by making 4 HDR images, and in turn, stitching those together, all the shadows and highlights appear to be more balanced.

Lunar Photography

2010-06-29T21:39:00.001-07:00

So if you remember my Astrophotography Post from a few weeks back, I finally have a clear product to offer. For photography of the cosmos, the moon makes a relatively easy subject.Extremely large, with lots of sharp, fine details.

Keep reading after the jump for a photo of the partial lunar eclipse from June 26, 2010 as well as information on how I managed to set these shots up.

Firstly, these moon photos were made using my telescope using the least consistent, and cheapest way you can shoot through a telescope. I am awaiting more specialized equipment ordered online soon. Anyone with a telescope and an SLR with Tripod can create a photo like this one.

Set up your telescope where you will have a clear view of the moon.
Remove eyepieces and accessories from your telescope. Remove the lens from your SLR and steady it on a tripod behind your telescope.
Looking directly down the barrel of your telescope. (I was using a refractor) point it at the moon. It will not be sharp or in focus, but it will be very bright. This is a good starting position. Tighten everything on the telescope.
Take a plain card and hold it behind the barrel you were just looking down. Slowly pull it back until the glowing circle that is the moon has sharp edges along the card. This is where your camera's sensor should be positioned.
With your camera on the tripod with the sensor in the locaton the card just was, you can start to look through the viewfinder. You should have a relatively in focus image.
Now fine tune it with little adjustments (very very gently!).
Fire away. You will have no control of aperture. That will depend on your telescope.

I was using ISO400 @ 1/125" on my Rebel XTi Body and a 470mm Bushnell Refractor Telescope with a 60mm diameter up front.Relatively basic in the way of telescopes for astrophotography.

The second photo above was from the partial eclipse of the moon on June 26th, 2010. It was 340am PT when this photo was taken, and the eclipse had just started. Climax of 57% (shadow coverage) was not for another hour. So this was my last photo of the night. There is another eclipse visible in both North and South America coming later this year in December.

Astrophotography

2010-06-14T04:34:00.001-07:00

I was recently given a new telescope for my birthday that just passed. Since then I have rekindled my love for astronomy. My last telescope came as a Christmas Gift when I was about six years old. This new one is certainly a step up from my old one.

Read on for some examples!

I think my first proper attempt at photos through it will be of the moon. Anything else and I would be setting myself up for failure. We have a few days yet until its bright in the night sky again. On the other hand, I did try out my Canon 70-200 f/4L lens on some astrophotography with some other techniques and the follow image is my result.

Canon EOS 50D w/ 70-200 f/4L Lens
ISO 1600 @ f/4 w/ 10 exposures at 4" each.

This is a technique I will be trying again ; stacking exposures. It works well for astrophotography because its very dark outside. Leaving the shutter open too long in one photo will cause the star to draw lines, which can be appealing. Not what I am looking for though. By stacking your exposures you can take each pinprick of light from each star you have, and align them on top of one another to 'compound' their brightness. Eventually after these 10 pinpricks you have enough light to make more than just a speck of light.

The hardest part of astrophotography is nailing your focus. I would call this photo borderlining on "acceptable". When everything is so dark in your viewfinder it makes it very hard to see when something is in sharp focus. Rings displaying focal distance on some lenses can take a little bit of the guessing out, but its still no easy task.

The image above is of the star, "Altair" in the Aquila Constellation. It is the 12th brightest star in our night sky and is at a distance of 16.8 lightyears away from our solar system.

Expect more on Astrophotography soon, especially once I have made a few attempts at 'coupling' my camera to my telescope to get some real deep space views! Maybe even a stacked wide angle view on the Milky Way. The stars have disappeared for this evening, and I am hoping for another clear one tomorrow night..

And now for something completely different,

2010-05-23T19:45:00.001-07:00

So this post is completely different than the regular photo stuff I usually write about, but because its titled "C Gardiner Photos & Art" - what I am about to share with you does fall into art from my point of view.
I will start by saying I made a super hot friend since I have moved to Kelowna. This is how it has changed my life.

Are you curious yet? Read on!

Changed my life? Ok maybe that is exaggerating a bit. Since I have started my job at a brand new restaurant in Kelowna, I have been able to use a very cool piece of equipment, a Montague C45S, a beast among grills, although more specifically it is a broiler. This is the 'friend' I was talking about, although not 'sentient' or human, I do spend a lot of time with it, rely on it, and work with it, to the point where I can call it my friend.

I'll run it down for you; the burners in the pictures heat ceramic radiants (the little cones) to extremely hot temperatures. Above the radiants you see, there is a sear top, like a flat top a breakfast restaurant would use with eggs, but a good 3x hotter (5-700 degrees).

Below the burners is the grill racks, they look like any regular grill except the heat comes from the top. It differs from a regular bottom heating, open grill (like most restaurants have) because a) the grilling rack slides out to add and remove steaks and b) its around 1800 degrees below those little cones. At least twice as hot as some of hottest bottom heating open grills.

Why is this broiler so awesome? Well going to a conventional grill would feel like driving on the autobahn to hitting gridlock traffic. As a demonstration one day, I would like to challenge someone armed with a microwave to cook a steak faster than me, armed with my broiler. As close as that race may be, there certainly would be no contest on which one will taste better.

Is it all good? Well... no not really. It's something I probably shouldn't have to mention, but it definitely gets very hot in the area I work in. I have seen temperatures of around 120F on the meat thermometer on my arm. Thats about the temperature of a mid-rare steak. Why am I not cooking like a 7oz Sirloin? Not sure, but it probably has something to do with the 3L Camelbak I keep on ice, at my station. It will easily be empty after the 3 hours of 6-9pm.

Why did I write about the broiler? Well its something I use a heck of a lot these days (more than my camera sometimes) and I really loves the way it cooks a steak. If there is a steakhouse in your area that uses a Montague - definitely try it out. As far as I know, Chop has the only one in Kelowna.