May 31, 2008

A Field Trip to the Public Gardens

Digital original
As I was photographing with students in the gardens, moving from lovely flower to lovely flower, this tortured tulip caught my eye...I wish I could have simplified the background more, but short of cutting down other flowers (a real no-no in the gardens), this was the best I could do.
Digital original
Once I finished working with the red distressed flower, I couldn't stop seeing them, and made image after image of beautiful imperfection.
Digital original
I think for a moment, while making this image, I could really understand why some people really enjoy photographing wild-life (though in this case it was pretty tame wild-life). There was such pleasure in making an image like this, especially of such a cute duckling.

May 29, 2008

Andree on a Sunny Day

Digital infrared original
Early spring in Nova Scotia can be a challenging time to work in woodlands; with only sporadic leaf coverage, direct sunlight can still be challenging to deal with, but it is a small price to pay for the lack of bugs, which will prevent working in the forests over the height of Nova Scotian summers.
Digital original, 8 frame stitch
Trees are actually quite hard to pose a model with, especially thin, spindly ones like this. Fortunately, we were able to find a pair of trunks that spread out from the same base, permitting Andree to pose between them, I then used an ultra-wide f/1.2 aperture to separate her from the cluttered and confusing background.
Digital infrared original
Created at the end of a session, this portrait took advantage of the shade in the rock quarry we’d found - the direction of the light on Andree’s face came from working with the rock face behind her. I would have loved to have been able to make an image like this in the forest, with a softer, more luminous background, but there just wasn't enough leaf cover to create the soft directional light so crucial in this portrait.

A Morning of Tulip Photos

Digital original
I spent this morning working with a student on macro photography, in a garden full of nothing but tulips. After working with macro so much indoors lately, I found it refreshing to be outdoors with a macro lens for a change.
Digital original


The simple beauty of two flowers is hard to beat, especially when the colours are so pure. The greatest challenge of this session was keeping the focus where it should be - with the tulips moving softly in the wind, it was really easy for them to suddenly move out of the focus zone.
Digital original
I tend to find more pleasure in shallow depth of field, as opposed to images where everything is in focus; with flowers, this is often a little more challenging, as the entire scene usually call for attention, but in this case, using the taller tulips to frame the side and top of the image, I think I keep the focus on the lower front flower.

May 25, 2008

A Tall Ship at Night

Digital original
I have slowly been developing a fascination with night-photography, so when I saw the light-lined tall ship in Halifax harbour one night, I immediately planned to be at the water front the next evening, and spent almost two hours slowly exploring the possibilities of the ship against the every darkening sky.

May 24, 2008

A Waterfront Field Trip

Digital original



As field trips go, this one was unusual; the students and I spent much of the morning exploring a visiting tall ship. One of the first things to catch my eye was a white-on-white composition, with a lovely soft shadow falling across it.
Digital original
As I was walking around the tall ship, I caught a momentary glimpse of the sun reflected off the surface of the harbour, below one a ship's boat. I changed my camera's lens to a wide angle, and then tried to find the exact sport that caught my eye. The result was stronger than the momentary glimpse, as just as I was preparing to make it, the sun went behind a cloud and the reflection in the water became much softer.

Digital original
The contrast between the rusty anchor and the boat behind it is at the heart of this image, but the trio of circles that flow under the contrast are what really hold this photograph together in my mind.

May 23, 2008

Iris in Ice

Digital original
As soon as the block of ice came out of the freezer, I could see the potential; two of the four sides of the ice were crystal clear (though there were loads of air bubbles, seemingly emerging from the flower and stems.
Digital original, 8 frame stitch
It was quite challenging finding an angle where the entire group of Iris plants were visible; one entire side of the ice block was obscured by air bubbles, while from other sides, the petals of the flower were emerging from the ice (where the petals turn from blue to a more purple colour). The above image was the best I could do, and at least indicates some of the potential of this approach.
Digital original
The lovely contrast in colours the Iris provided was a treat to work with - many of the flowers I worked with had a single colour to work with, but with the blue and yellow complementary colours, this was just perfect to photograph.

May 15, 2008

Andree Models in an Old Saw Mill

Digital infrared original, 12 frame stitch 
Andree and I worked with this wheel for a good ten minutes, exploring the options, and finally realizing this image. I couldn't get any higher with my tripod, so including any more of the foreground was impossible, but it was the only composition that showed the entire space, and as such, was the strongest of the series.
Digital infrared original, 18 frame stitch 
There are days when the weather plays a major role in images, and while it may not be apparent in the images, this was one of them. Though the sky was overcast, the day was unseasonably warm (for mid-May), and there was a brisk wind off the land - which in the above image whipped Andree's hair across her face at just the right moment. A further exploration of this image is presented in this post.
Digital infrared original, 13 frame stitch 
It took Andree some effort to get into position for this image; the concrete portion of the old mill we were working with was a good three meters high, and I had to assist her in climbing up. Once she was in place, the potential of the location really came into view, with the window in the concrete framing her body as she moved into position on the other side of the wall. After exploring a number of pose possibilities, we hit upon this one at the very end, contrasting the smooth lines of Andree’s hips and waist against the teeth of the wheel beside her.

May 12, 2008

Shells in Ice

Digital original
After a year of working with the frozen flowers, I tried to work with shells; it was a little harder to position them in the frozen water, but the looked quite lovely. Unfortunately, they lacked the transparency of flowers, so I decided after a couple of experiments to return to the flowers as a subject.
Digital original, 9 image stitch

May 09, 2008

Andree Poses in an Old Fort

Digital infrared original, 4 frame stitch

On of the real advantages of working with digital imaging is all the possibilities it opens up, in terms of image corrections; in this case my camera position was high - it had to be so, in order to see Andree’s feet over an intervening piece of concrete. Usually, this would have lead to some serious distortion to the shape of the doorway, but with careful correction in post-processing, I was able to keep all the lines parallel, keeping the perspective normal looking, and removing the distraction such a strong distortion would have presented.
Digital infrared original, 18 frame sitting
After we finished working with the doors, we focused on the concrete footings that once held the engines in this old military buildings; the light in the room came through a number of small windows, which provided some beautiful direction to the highlights on Andree's body, without giving the overall image too much contrast.
Digital infrared original, 10 frame stitch, 3 frame image blend
Andree and I finished the session off with some more complex stitched images - blending not only multiple frames to increase the image resolution, but blending two or more poses in the same setting (we actually made an image in the engine room at the beginning of the session which four separate poses in the same image). This obviously is simple to do with multiple models, but in a world with digital imaging, and multi-frame photography, it is almost as easy to do with one model as two.

May 08, 2008

An Indoor Session with a New Model

Digital original
Many times when working with a model for the first time, the session focused on portraits, and this one was no exception. We were working in her apartment, which had some lovely large windows which provided perfect light to photograph by.
Digital infrared original, 2 frame stitch
As the model had lovely dark hair and a very fair complexion, I decided as soon as we met that we'd work with the white sheets. The the strong contrast between her hair and skin frequently became the focus of the images we made together.
Digital infrared original, 2 frame stitch
As the session proceeded, the model's comfort and confidence grew, leading to a dramatic increase in the success of the images, and her presence within the compositions. One of the last images of the session, this uses the wonderful sharpness and contrast of digital infrared to make a wonderful portrait of a stunning young woman.

May 05, 2008

More Flowers in Ice

Digital original
I'd come home yesterday with a small bunch of flowers from a Christmas Cactus; the result of freezing them was quite surprising, with the white petals becoming transparent, and some of the colour from the bright pink flowers running into the ice.
Digital original, 18 frame stitch
This image was one of the most pleasing I have made in this series; the plant in the ice was very small, so I decided to freeze it in a pill container (about 2.5 cm in diameter); while the centre of the resulting ice-block was clouded with bubbles, the entire outside edge was clear - so I photographed it while slowly turning it - creating an infinite image, which I could print to any length, as it repeated!
Digital original, 2 frame stitch
The last set of images were made of the delicate flowers in the ice, drawn as much to the translucent quality of the flower as to the brilliance of the frozen setting.

May 04, 2008

Frozen White & Purple

Digital original, 2 frame focus blend
With the introduction of focus blending, it is becoming easier to create images that clearly show what draws me in to the frozen flowers - the rich colours and energetic motion of the bubbles is at the heart of many of the successes I have to date.
Digital original
I keep vacillating between super close-ups of the flowers, and more distant compositions where you can more clearly identify their "flowerness"; with this image, I am not certain reads as a flower, but am equally uncertain that that matters.
Digital original
The last flower of this session was a challenging one - the green petals showed far better than the yellow flower that I'd intended to focus upon...it isn't displeasing, but certainly have resulted in a different look from what I'd expected when I was preparing the flower to freeze.

May 03, 2008

A Dartmouth Field Trip

Digital original
The main focus of this field trip was to give students a chance to experiment with shutter speeds; I came equipped with a full set of neutral density filters - ranging from 3 stops to 10'stops...which in turn can permit shutter speeds up to 30 seconds in length in full sunlight.
Digital original
While students were working away, I moved past thinking about long shutter speed, and just went image hunting; a bright blue slide caught my eye. After working with it some with a long lens, I moved much closer with an ultra-wide and found it much more interesting. The idea of a full frame of blue, with just the sky and scuff marks providing little points of interest.
Digital original
As I was wrapping up and heading back to the car, I caught sight of a fallen tulip (perhaps picked by some errant child) - it seemed lonely, so I decided to focus on it for an image or two. Using an ultra-wide lens, I got down close and used a panoramic approach to make the last image of the day.

More Flowers in Ice

Digital original

Digital original