Canada Games Athletes-Kayaker Sean Wells

Today's Canada Games Athlete is kayaker Sean Wells, who was motivated to make the team to make his late father proud. Since there was a bit more emotion to the story, I wanted to come up with shots that could convey that kind of mood.

Canada Games Athletes-Runner Barry Britt

Today's athlete shoot is of runner Barry Britt. I've photographed Barry more than a few times, mainly during actual races, and man, can this guy run. He always seems to be leaps and bounds ahead of his fellow racers coming into the finish line.

Canada Games Athletes-Diver Christian Zehmer and Kirsten MacDonald

Today's portraits are of divers Christian Zehmer and Kirsten MacDonald, taken at the Canada Games Aquatic Centre in Saint John. Again, a two person shoot made me have to think about to come up with some good compositions. I started off with each of them standing on a diving board.

Canada Games Athletes-Cyclist Justin Theriault

Today's athlete is cyclist Justin Theriault, who I photographed outside the Telegraph-Journal office in Saint John.

Canada Games Athletes-Soccer's Cassian Ferlatte and Marisa Duguay

This was the second shoot done for this series, this time it is soccer players Cassian Ferlatte and Marisa Duguay.
As previously mentioned, the first day of shooting was an overcast day. Which is good in that the light is lower and makes for better flash control, but the skies tend to be gray and boring. When I started this whole series, I took the time to find out who I was shooting and tried to come up with ideas beforehand. 

Canada Games Athletes-Softball player Sam DeBortoli

Today's athlete shoot is of softball player Sam DeBortoli.
This was the second baseball/softball related shoot that I did, so I started up with something different.

Canada Games Athletes-Golfer Jennifer Armstrong

Today's Canada Games Athlete portrait is of golfer Jennifer Armstrong. This was actually the first shoot done for this series. I shot her at the Riverside Golf and Country Club where she is a member.

Canada Games Athletes-Basketball player Laura McCaffrey

Today's New Brunswick Canada Games team member is basketball player Laura McCaffrey. Being indoors gives you total control over the light, as you can use the flashes at higher power levels to overpower the ambient light, or turn the lights down or off indoors!

Canada Games Athletes-Sailors Alex Black and Kelvin Gilliland

The second portrait in the series is of Team New Brunswick sailors Alex Black(l) and Kelvin Gilliland, one of the few multi-person shoots. They can be a bit of a challenge as you are trying to get both people into the composition along with the equipment/background, etc that tells their story.

1st Canada Games Portraits-Nicole Barry and Marlene Vaughan

The New Brunswick Canada Games athlete articles have started, so I can now start posting some pix from the shoots. The first story is about Nicole Barry, who is playing on the women's softball team for this year's games in Prince Edward Island, and her grandmother Marlene Vaughan, who competed in softball in 1969.

The idea for this series was to do really cool portraits, which meant being able to take the time to do it right. Even before the shoot I tried to think up ideas for each athlete that would be better than the normal shots we take. This meant using flash, poses, and backgrounds in a more creative way.

Coming soon...Canada Games Athlete Portraits

Over the past two weeks or so I've been fortunate to be working on a special project for the Telegraph-Journal, shooting cool portraits of athletes that will be heading to PEI next month for the Canada Games. I'm really psyched and can't wait!

I can't show you any photos yet, but they will begin running in the paper on July 24th, and as soon as the shots of each athlete run I will be posting the shots(including others that don't run) and hope to be doing a blog post about each one talking about how the shots were done. Big thanks to my assistant, Tanner Cheeseman(the gentleman on the left of the photo who is ensuring that $2000 of canon flashes don't fall into the Kennebecasis...already did that with a $2000 lens, thank you...), for all his help!

So, stay tuned!

Some recent work put up, take a gander!

I've put up some more recent work on my gallery page. Everything from firefighting to former Prime Ministers to children with water guns...lots of silhouettes too of course!

Take a gander here

Some links for your viewing pleasure...

Thought I'd put up some photography related links that may be of interest to you all!

Classic Photographs in LEGO!
A hilarious take on some of the most famous images in history, redone using LEGO by Balakov! He also includes links to the real photos, plus a photograph of the set up to take the shot. Take time to browse his whole photo stream, lots of neat stuff there

Light-Test.com
This site contains images used to test lighting set ups for shoots, uploaded by photographers. Sort of a behind the scenes image, usually containing an assistant. Kinda neat!

Russian Past and Present Combined
A really neat project(all in Russian text though) that combined historical photographs of Russian streets during the WWII era with current images. Really interesting to see the past and the present merged into one.

Photoshop Disasters.com
This website is all about showing off terrible photoshop work on images in magazines, advertisements, etc. Note that it may show a bit of nudity, so as they say, NSFW(NOT SAFE FOR WORK!)

Also I wanted to mention work being done by two of my students:

Custom Camera Straps by Randi Gallant
One of my students, Randi Gallant, along with being a talented photographer(website), also creates custom camera straps!

Fountaingraphicsink.ca
Another of my students, Sonja MacAskill, has a business restoring retouching photographs. Check out some of the great work she does, and if you have an old photo that needs fixin, contact her!

And as always, if you want to see some great images taken by my students, check out the STUDENT GALLERY!
If you have any good links to share, send me an email, with LINKS in the title!

Fun with Camera RAW

Hello all...been a while since something useful was put up here, my apologies! So here, let's have some fun with CAMERA RAW

One of the cool things you can do with CAMERA RAW from CS3 on is open ANY image in RAW.
On a MAC, when you go FILE->OPEN, click on the FORMAT box and select CAMERA RAW. On a PC, you have to choose OPEN AS.
This will bring up the RAW box.

One big advantage to shooting RAW is the ability to switch the WHITE BALANCE at any time. This is especially handy when you use the wrong balance...for example DAYLIGHT when the light is TUNGSTEN...which equals YELLOW....
If you had shot RAW, no big deal, just switch the WB...but if you only had a JPEG, or were working from a scan of daylight film shot under tungsten, you are S.O.L right?


Nope, open it in RAW, and then you can adjust the WHITE BALANCE!
Now, it's not the same as if you had shot RAW, you don't have all the presets- DAYLIGHT/TUNGSTEN, etc...but you can adjust the color by moving the TEMPERATURE and TINT sliders. Moving to the yellow adds more yellow, moving to the magenta adds more magenta, etc.
You can also adjust the exposure, recovery, fill light,clarity, vibrance, and saturation sliders.


Now, the CORRECTED image still looks a bit green, but if I went any further with the magenta, parts of the kids face's would have been big pink blotches! Still better than if I had of tried to correct it just in photoshop!

IMAGE TONING

Something else fun to do is to take a black and white image and tone it!
1. Open the image in photoshop, and convert it to black and white however you like.
2. Convert it back to RGB by selecting IMAGE->MODE->RGB COLOR
3. Save and close the image.
4. Reopen the image in CAMERA RAW using the method above.


Now, once you have it in raw, you can adjust the TEMPERATURE and TINT sliders to tone the image whatever color you like. Play with the VIBRANCE and SATURATION sliders to adjust how bright or subtle the colors will be. Here are just some of the examples I came up with quickly:


If you come up with some great images with these techniques, why not post some to the Photoshop album on my student's gallery HERE