Photography by Alan Bailward Photography – http://bailwardphotography.com

So a few weeks back I stopped at a long abandoned gas station that’s in the border of Maple Ridge and Mission.  It used to be the spot where people would go to get the cheap gas – it was right outside the GVRD border where the gas dropped because transit taxes stopped (or something like that).

About 10-15 years ago the GVRD border changed and moved a kilometre or 2 further east to Silverdale, leaving this gas station at the $0.15/litre higher price than it’s new friends just down the road.  Unsurprisingly it went out of business.

Photography by Alan Bailward Photography – http://bailwardphotography.com

The shell of it has been sitting there and just getting overgrown.  I thought it might be a good subject for the little X100 to try to give me the right “feel” of the camera, so I stopped there on the way back from the dog park and took some photos.

Not sure they qualify as anything, but a couple are ok and I don’t write here enough, so there you go…

Photography by Alan Bailward Photography – http://bailwardphotography.com

These girls and guys are the ones that spend 10s or hundreds of hours (or more… or less) to create costumes that are homages to their favourite characters. Some of these I had no idea who they were, but I also saw about 15 Spider-Men walking around. This is the sort of place where you and the other 5 people who are huge fans of that obscure, only published once, Japanese comic character can meet up and compare costumes and fandom.

It’s an incredibly accepting place. I saw nothing but friendliness and admiration between people, for example someone in a 13 foot Bumblebee costume absolutely making the day of some special needs kids sitting around a table in the main area.

Or this amazing example.

All amidst the middle of this were long tables and tons of different booths with everything from comics to samurai swords.

There was “Star Wars alley”, where all the Star Wars cosplayers congregated, including a very impressive march (an Imperial march no less).

And the march itself.

Artists were there art-ing.

The main thing that I went to see were the cosplayers, of which there there were lots and there were awesome costumes there.

Last but not least, the wacky photographers that were there!

The Photo Equipment

For this shoot I used my trusty Pentax K-1 with the FA 24-70/2.8 and Sigma 85/1.4. A few close up shots I did with the FA 100/2.8 as well. I had a bag full of flashes and modifiers, but… well just keep on reading to see why I don’t bother listing them here. Last but not least a simple black paper background on a stand.

Lighting

This is where it gets tricky. When I first was contacted about this shoot I agreed but didn’t think too much about the lighting. The model (the amazing Cassia) said she had lights when she asked me about the shoot and I didn’t think much more about it until a couple of days before when I started doing some looking around about how does one actually do a UV paint shoot.

First of all, I immediately went into know-it-all-photographer mode and said that the 20W bulbs she had would never provide enough light, even if they look like they do, the camera just won’t pick it up the same. I’d bring my flashes like the professional I am.

Then a bit more digging into what others have done turns out that there seems to be three ways to light up UV body paint:

1. Modify your flash itself – costs about $500
2. Buy UV filters from AliExpress – takes about 60 days
3. Make a DIY filter for a couple of dollars which does the same thing.

Obviously I chose option #3.

I bought a shelf of clear transparent sheets ($19) and a pack of magic markers ($9.99). Then the two nights before the shoot I spent doing arts and crafts and following the DIY instructions to create a series of filters both for my flashes but also for a heavy duty work light I borrowed from my wife. This isn’t hard to do, just a bit tedious.

The Shoot

Getting to the shoot I set up my gear while the make up artist, Milana Bryan was finishing up the makeup. This was the first shoot of this type either of us had done, so it was going to be a learning experience for everyone.

First of all, remember how I said I spent two nights doing arts and crafts to make my own filters? First thing I figured out after I set up a couple of soft boxes in front of a black background was the filters don’t work.

Well, they kinda work. They do make the paint fluoresce, but they also turn the skin a blue/purple colour, which makes perfect sense as the light is coming through a blue and purple filter. Unfortunately the look you get from a black light is very different. As you can see below, the black light makes just the paint fluoresce, and doesn’t light up the skin at all.

Left: DIY filter on speed lights at 1/16th power Right: 20W Black light in a desk lamp – both straight out of camera

You can see how the black light makes the paint colours pop way more and doesn’t light up anything but the skin, while the DIY filter creates less pop from the put a blue light on everything.

Needless to say, my “I know best” ego deflated and I packed up all my lights. The rest of the shoot was done with a 20W black light from Amazon in a desk lamp moved around by the makeup artist.

The Photos

Because of the way that black light moves around, the traditional portrait lighting goes straight out the window (at least as far as I could tell), because you don’t have traditional light and shadow. The photos are more about the patterns of paint on the model and the model’s positions under them.

This is not the case all the time. In Ben Von Wong’s UV Photoshoot it looked like he was using more lights as well as far more props (headdresses, big flowing dresses, etc). Ben’s budget is a bit higher than mine though, I just had a model and a makeup artist.

Because I didn’t have to worry about soft light vs hard light, I basically moved the light around to emphasize one side of her face or body more than the other, and draw attention to specific areas (ie: the splattered paint in her hair).

Because the light wasn’t that bright, and because it couldn’t go too close to the model and show up in frame, I had to bump my ISO to 1250-2500 depending on the lens (the 85/1.4 was at 1250 and shot wide open or slightly stopped down, the 24-70 and 100mm macro were mostly at ISO 2000-2500).

One thing that we tried and (mostly) failed at is taking photos of the paint being washed off. I thought it would be great to have the model in the shower with her back in the water and showing the water washing the paint away. Unfortunately because water doesn’t show up in black light at all the effect just didn’t show up. Because the body paint was already fairly “organic” looking you couldn’t really tell it was being washed off, and the photos just seem to show the body paint slowly disappearing. I’m not sure if this is something better done with water laced with UV paint or not… maybe next time!

Post Processing

Honestly not a lot of post processing was done on these images. You can see from this comparison that essentially it was a bit of punch to the colours, contrast and clarity, and dropping the blacks to make sure that the blacks stayed black – and that’s about it.

I did find that moving the whites slider gave a bit more brightness to the paint, but most of the

Take Aways

After this shoot I have a few take-aways that people doing shoots like this in the future might take advantage of.

• DIY filters don’t work. Or at least not the same as a black light does. Get a real black light bulb (or three in a constant light setup), or a proper UV filter for your flash.
• It’s not about the light modifiers, it’s about the model’s posing.
• I never got to play with light modifiers so the above might be completely wrong.
• Because non-painted skin doesn’t show up at all, make sure that when the makeup is put on your model’s arms and hands as well, so that they can be posed and not show up as black bars.
• A black background isn’t strictly needed as black light doesn’t bounce around like white light does, but it’s probably a better idea to have. You don’t have to worry about the model’s distance to the background though as the black light won’t bounce off it and lighten up your model like with white light.
• Make sure that the paint is water soluble for easy clean up! It can get everywhere (floors, walls, fingers and gear) so make sure it’s easy to get off.

Hopefully this helps you a little bit for your future shoots.  If you do do a black light shoot I’d love to see your results!  Share it and tag @bailwardphotography on Instagram or Facebook.

Credits

• Model: Cassia Kitagawa
• Makeup Artist: Milana Bryan
• Photography: Alan Bailward

Daily Self Portrait Projects

On a recent episode of OTP Bill and Jeffery talked about Karl Baden who is known for shooting a daily photo of himself for thirty years. This is insane to most people, but I’ve actually done this myself for the last seven, and I thought it might be interesting to help people do this themselves.

I started my Everyday self portrait “project” in April of 2011, coincidentally when an app called Everyday (don’t buy it yet though, keep on reading) was released.

Make It A Routine

The most important part is to integrate this into your routine. Just like anything if you don’t get in the habit of doing it, it won’t become… well… a habit.

My routine is I get to work, make myself a tea, and while it’s steeping go into one of the meeting rooms, turn off the overhead lights, stand in front of the window (got to get that nice natural light), take the photo, and then go back and finish making my tea. Just like checking email when I get to the office it’s now just what happens. Sometimes I forget if things get busy, but for the most part I’ve taken a photo a day for 99% of the days out of the last 2,468.

Apps

While Karl Baden did his project with a real camera, I prefer to use the one that’s with me most often, in this case, my iPhone.

Everyday (iPhone)

Everyday App Main Screen

When I first became interested in this the app I used was Everyday. This was in the days of the iPhone 3G so, while the front facing camera wasn’t great, it worked well enough. At the time, the Everyday app worked very well, and was easy to use. It has gridlines that you can use to line your face up with a line for your eyes, mouth, and a centre line to make sure you don’t drift to one side or the other.

Grid Lines Help Line you up

For $3.99 and getting close to 7 years of use out of it, that’s a pretty good deal!

Unfortunately the app is abandonware now. The last tweet from @everydayapp was close to 1,000 days ago (mid-2015) and the last software update was in May of 2015. This does still run perfectly well on an iPhone X with the latest software update, but it’s very conceivable that a future iOS update will render it unusable, and I doubt that it’ll be updated again.

Options Screen

Because of this I won’t get too far into the options, but a few quick points:

• Paid app at $3.99 (Canadian)
• Daily reminder notification
• All photos are contained inside the app
• Ability to sync all photos to your camera roll
• Able to create a movie from the images at a variety of speeds and export it to the camera roll

Close-Up

The second app I use is Close-up, which does a lot of the same things, with a few differences. The big difference is that it is maintained, and, as of January 2018 the last update was only a few days ago, and the developer is responsive on twitter and is rolling out bug fixes and adding new features.

The app is very different looking than Everyday. I feel like it doesn’t feel as much like an iOS app as Everyday with it’s black and white interface (even though Everyday hasn’t been updated to the latest design conventions). There’s nothing wrong with that of course, it’s just personal preference.

The Photo interface of Close-up

Here’s a hit-list of the main features of Close-up:

• Free app
• Photos can use Dropbox for file storage
• Daily reminder notifications
• You can create a video or gif from your photos (one time in app purchase)
• Various image options for saving high or low resolution, using the new HEIC, and converting existing images to the new HEIC format
• Downside: No grid lines Update – the latest version of the app has added grid lines.

Options Screen

What I Do

If I were to choose an app to start with, the obvious answer is Close-up. Currently though I use both.

Why both Alan? That makes you sound like a crazy person!

Mostly because I’m stubborn, and started with Everyday so I’m keeping on using it, but now that Close-up is here I wanted to use that. When I moved over to Close-up about six months ago it took a fair amount of work to get the photos out of Everyday (exporting them to the camera roll, saving them to my computer) and then converting them to let Close-up read them (modifying their filename to match up the naming convention that Close-up uses, which is based on a UNIX timestamp as the filename). But that’s a blog post for another time

The only downside I’ve personally found from Close-up is the lack of grid lines. I’ve asked the developer about this and it doesn’t seem like that’s something he wants to do. The way that Close-up helps you align your face is to overlay the last photo you took semi-opaquely to let you match up your face. The potential for downside I see here is “drift” in some way, whereas with Everyday’s grid lines you always have a way to re-center yourself.

The latest version of Close Up has a grid lines option added, making this point moot.

Other Notes

I really like that Close-up uses Dropbox to sync photos. Because of the challenges with getting photos out of Everyday, having a way to get photos in or out or modify them without having to “in” the app is great.

I also like the payment model. You can do everything but export the movies without paying for the app. Which you should of course!

How To Get Started

The most important thing to do is to forget about the end goal. It sucks at first because you want that cool photo of your hair and face changing over the years, but in the first few days or even months there’s almost nothing to look at. Just forget about that end video and just keep taking photos. Suddenly it’ll be a year (or seven) later and you’ll have something really cool to share.

Here’s a few seconds from the middle of my Everyday video showing my amazing beard appearing and disappearing over two years.

Most of these photos are taken with one of the the “three amigos” the trio of amazing Pentax lenses, either the 31mm, 43mm or 77mm.  Fantastic lenses that are far too under-used in my arsenal.

SaveSave

SaveSave

Capture Clip v3 on Pro Pad

I have a confession to make. I’ve been a backer of Peak Design starting with the original Capture Clip back in 2012 when they had their first Kickstarter. I got the Capture Clip version 2 when they updated it in 2013. And now in 2017 I backed them again for version 3.

Capture Clip v3

And tonight, as of this writing, late December, 2017, is the very first time I’ve ever used it.

Ever.

Kinda sad huh?

What Is It?

I guess the first thing I should do is explain quickly what the Capture is. Or let the guys at Peak Design do it for me:

Capture keeps your camera rigidly stable while hiking, biking, or moving around the studio. Unlike a camera bag, Capture keeps your camera instantly accessible with the click of a button. Includes 2 components: a metal clip that clamps to any backpack strap, belt, or bag, and an Arca tripod-compatible plate that screws into the bottom of your camera. Your camera locks into the clip, where it is held rigidly and securely. Press the lockable quick-release button to remove.

Capture is a clip that, when paired with a metal plate that attaches to the bottom of your camera, will let you quickly slide your camera to it, and have it held securely, releasing the camera only when the button in the Capture is held down. The two main examples of this are attaching it to a backpack strap and looped around a belt, letting you carry your camera hands and strap-free.

The second thing I’ll get out of the way quickly here is to say that the hardware is absolutely beautiful. Well designed, solid feeling, sleek, and as professional as you will find. The guys at Peak Design have iterated on their process over the years and it shows. Capture v3 is the best Capture Clip yet.

Capture v3 with the Dual Plate

Previous Attempts

Every other time I’ve put the Pro Pad on my belt and clipped the Capture Clip in it and… well it just didn’t work somehow. Not in function, it did exactly what it was supposed to do, but it didn’t work for me. Anyway, I’d immediately go back to my camera strap (currently using their new Slide, that is something I’ve used from the second it showed up on my door) and think I’d always get back to the Capture Clip, but never did.

Capture v3 with the Dual Plate

Part of the issue is that as a more… “rotund” gentlemen, there are a couple of issues that I just never bothered to try to work around or deal with. More on those in a minute. The issues themselves haven’t been fixed in the Capture Clip v3, but they seem to have been minimized a bit, or maybe I’m just giving it a longer shot and getting used to it more.

My Issues With Capture

So, the issues with previous Capture plus Pro Pad combinations:

• The top of the Pro Pad, which loops around my belt, sticks up high enough that a bit of a belly gets poked by the top of my camera and the Pro Pad.
• Retrieving the camera can be awkward. If it’s sitting wrong it feels like it takes more than one hand to take the camera out (more on that later) and it can be really awkward. If I’m getting the camera out with your right hand I have to reach around my body with your left hand (assuming I have the camera hanging on my right hand side) and help get the camera out. In fact it’s awkward enough that it feels more of a risk to drop your camera!
• Last but not least when I pull the camera out of the Capture it seems to invariably pull the Capture and Pro Pad combination up above the top of my belt, causing the aforementioned rubbing of Pro Pad on belly to happen even more. And if I have the Capture on my right and my camera in my right hand I’d end up swapping the camera to my left hand to push the Pro Pad down to my belt line, causing another potentially risky hand to hand camera juggle (especially with no camera strap for safety

Capture Clip v3 with Camera attached on Pro Pad

It was a combination of all of these that had me basically give up on the Capture Clip immediately

Capture v3

I wish I could write and say that the Capture v3 fixed all these problems. That none of these were a concern anymore. Or that if lost 50 pounds and the Capture was as easy to use for me as the svelte models in their commercials.

Sadly this isn’t true.

What has changed it that I’m finally giving the Capture Clip a fair try, for more than a few minutes. Tonight I’m shooting a hip hop show for Where It’s At Entertainment in my hometown of Maple Ridge and I brought the newest Capture along.

You know what? It’s not that bad. In fact, it’s kinda good, bordering on great.

Perfect?

No.

Dual Plate, Capture v3, Pro Pad

I see the Capture as an alternative to a camera strap for certain situations. Because of the configuration you’re still lugging a camera around at waist level or just below, and depending on the size of your camera it could widen your profile by 4-6 inches. Not a big deal hiking, but in a crowded venue a sling strap can sometimes be a better alternative, as it gives you the ability to quickly change where the camera is positioned on your body and relative to incoming obstacles (or drunken carousers).

In Real Life Use

Setting it up right

After I got the Capture seated fairly low on the Pro Pad it got a lot more comfortable. Before I had left it a bit higher and closer to my delicate side flesh, but with the Capture a bit lower it let the camera sit lower and made everything more comfortable.

Catch and Release

For the most part it was easy to pull up and out by grabbing the camera and simply hitting the release button. Ironically the only issues I had with releasing my camera from the Capture was when the cable on the anchor holding my Peak Design Clutch hand strap would snag on the release mechanism. Sometimes it would lay over the button in such a way that it either wouldn’t release properly or stopped me from pulling the camera up and out. This mostly went away as I got used to the “push button, pull up” motion as the night went on.

Putting the camera into the Capture is still something I need to get used to. It slides in and locks gorgeously, but with an expensive camera and lens on my hip I always give a little jiggle left right and up to make sure it’s actually in the slot and the mechanism has locked properly.

Capture Clip v3

It’s not perfect. If I twist it in the wrong way the plate attached at the bottom of the camera can twist and leave you with a loose or twisted bottom plate.

The Pro Pad

Peak Design Pro Pad

Not much to say about it. It’s smaller and thinner than the previous version, fits well and is padded enough to protect my leg from a heavy FA 24-70/2.8 banging against it. For now I’m just leaving the Pro Pad and Capture attached to each other as I don’t see using the Capture not on my belt for the foreseeable future. I already have the Capture v2 attached to my Peak Design Messenger bag, and, because Peak Design is awesome, the current (v3) Dual and Standard plates fit in the Capture v2.

The only downside here is that it feels like if you wear the Capture too low on the pad, the tail that goes over your belt could slip out. Now this hasn’t happened to me and I’ve never heard of it happening to anyone, but it’s the one thing that made me a bit nervous walking around with a couple of thousand dollars in camera hanging off it on my hip.

The simple solution though is to make sure the Capture isn’t sitting at the extreme bottom of the Pro Pad and make sure the screws are cinched down nice and tight.

Who Is Capture For?

The biggest question you and I have is “who exactly is the Capture Clip for?” More specifically is it for me? Sure it’s a great price of kit, but why would you want one when you have a neck or sling strap for your camera already?

Well, my first thought is backpackers and the like attaching it to shoulder straps. I haven’t used it like this but I definitely would if I i was into backpacking.

Honestly it’s about a different way to carry your gear. If you have a smaller camera, micro 4/3 or similar, the big issues of a heavy camera hanging off a bit of metal and off your belt go away. I did my testing with the Pentax K-1 and the FA 24-70/2.8 and I can tell you it’s not light even on a sling strap with lots of padding. Having 3.9 pounds hanging off my hip was different than off my shoulder wasn’t “better”, just different. It’s still a heavy camera, so there’s only so much you can expect it to do.

I think that for some people they might prefer the clip as a way of carrying gear over a strap for events or landscape photography. At least having it as an option gives you a different way to do it if your shoulders just can’t take it anymore

Capture Clip v3 on Pro Pad

Conclusion

The third version of Peak Design’s Capture Clip is really good. It’s smaller, lighter and sexier than it’s predecessor, with small tooling and materials tweaks that make it a delight. Even just that it’s xxxx molded instead of painted metal xxx makes sure it will wear better.

While it definitely doesn’t solve all my issues, but the overwhelming guilt of having spent hundreds of dollars on Peak Design gear and never using it finally got me to give it a shot, and I think I’ve really found a place for it in my physical workflow.

You can buy the Capture Clip, Sling, Clutch, and everything else from Peak Design through my link here. If you spend more than $65 you get a special gift included in your order.

Camera on Capture v3 on Pro Pad

Note: You probably won’t be surprised to hear that no gear was provided by Peak Design, I had to buy it all myself. Some links on this page are affiliate links to Amazon and the like, so you can support me a tiny bit by clicking through using them!

SaveSave

It seems the best way that others have suggested is to simply copy the folders between computers, which works ok, but as soon as you make any changes on one or the other you’ll need to deal with re-synchronizing the folders again.

Not a great solution. Luckily there’s a great bit of software that will synchronize folders between computers and does it really, really well. It’s Dropbox.

Unfortunately, Dropbox synchronizes the “Dropbox” folder in your home directory, and your Lightroom presets are in (on a Mac) your “Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/“ folder. Here:

So the goal is to store all the folders of preset information that I wanted to sync on dropbox, but make sure that Lightroom could still access it where it expected it to.

To do this I used symbolic links (or ‘symlinks’) using a shell script. As you of course know, the Mac operating system is built on top of a Unix core, which lets particularly geeky folks like myself write scripts to do things under the hood.

DISCLAIMER

I take no responsibility for this. It’s possible it will completely blow up for you and destroy your computer and your life’s work, so make backups and take precautions before doing ANYTHING like simply copying and pasting this script and running it.

Additionally, this is for the Mac, not Windows. I don’t have a windows system easily available, but I’m sure something like this is possible using Windows (not Mac and Unix) technology, but I don’t know what it is. Also, the files are stored somewhere else, so even if you could run this script on windows it wouldn’t work, but the principals (storing things in Dropbox and then faking it out so that Lightroom finds them anyway) should still work.

How I Did It

Some, But Not All

I wanted to back up some of the folders, but not all. For me the metadata presets, location presets, brush and local development presets, and a couple of others were what I found necessary on my various computers, but others I either didn’t use or didn’t really work to sync. For example the “Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Preferences/” folder contains a file that has recently opened catalogs. I wanted that to be local to each computer.

This meant I couldn’t just put the entire “Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/” on Dropbox, but only certain folders in it.

This whole thing is a two stage affair. First step is to get the data on Dropbox, then to link any other computers’ folders to it.

Step 0 – BACK UP!

Back up your Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/” folder. Seriously, just go to it by going into Lightroom, going to Preferences -> Presets and click the “Show Lightroom Presets folder”.

Then hit cmd-c and cmd-v to just copy the entire folder to a backup.

Backing up is fun!

See, you feel better already!

Step 1 – List Folders To Copy

I made a list of the folders

• Develop Presets
• Export Presets
• Filename Templates
• Import Presets
• Local Adjustment Presets
• Locations
• Metadata Presets
• Watermarks
• Web Templates
• sFTP

Step 2 – Copy Folders To Dropbox

After shutting down Lightroom I moved this list of folders (populated with all the presets I use) to a folder in Dropbox called “AppSync/Lightroom”.

Note that this is in the Dropbox folder

(Note: there are a few others in there as well, but I started with the list I mentioned)

Now you have a central storage location for your selected presets and templates. Now to get Lightroom to recognize them again!

Step 3 – Link Local Folders To Dropbox

Now I needed to symlink this list to the Application Support folder. This would be done on all computers that you want to have your presets synced to. For this I wrote a little bash script.

#!/bin/bash
echo “don’t you dare run this without looking”
exit

cd ~/Library/"Application Support"/Adobe/Lightroom/

declare -a FOLDERS=(
        "Develop Presets"
        "Export Presets"
        "Filename Templates"
        "Import Presets"
        "Local Adjustment Presets"
        "Locations"
        "Metadata Presets"
        "Watermarks"
        "Web Templates"
        "sFTP"
)

for i in "${FOLDERS[@]}"
do
        mv -i "${i}" "${i}".orig
        ln -s ~/Dropbox/AppSync/Lightroom/"${i}"/ .
done

You can copy the code above, modify it as needed, and then save it to your computer with a name like “link-lightroom-folders.sh” and then run it. Experience with bash scripting and unix permissions is required however.

This script simply does the following:

• Declares a list of the folders you want (quoted because they contain spaces)
• Loops through those folders and for each folder:
• Renames the folder from <folder> to <folder>.orig
• Creates a symlink from the folder in Dropbox to the folder in your “Library/Application Support” folder.

Note: it’s possible you’ll get errors here. If you don’t have all these folders (for example on my new computer I didn’t have an “sFTP” folder), or they already exist, the renaming from <folder> to <folder>.orig will give an error. Additionally, if you’ve run this script already (this is why you should backup first, see Step 0) the <folder>.orig will already exist, and you’ll be prompted to overwrite it or not.

After it will look something like this:

The terminal window isn’t just for über-geeks anymore.

Folders with the purple are the symlinks showing that they are now pointing to files in the Dropbox folder. Et voilà!

So that’s it. Your own requirements may vary, and there are many different ways to do this, this script is just one of them. In fact while writing out this article I found my previous script for doing it (helpfully called ‘foo.sh’ in a random Dropbox folder) which did it in a completely different way…. If you get this to work in a similar way on Windows using shortcuts or similar, please let me know in the comments!

I’m hoping that in the future this won’t be needed and that the ‘cloud’ part of Creative Cloud will become more cloud like and this will be supported natively as part of the Lightroom app.

The day started way too early, with everyone meeting down at the Vancouver cruise ship terminal. I carpooled down with a few friends who were also doing photography (the local photo community isn’t as big as you might think) and we survived the 5:30am start (with the help of large amounts of caffeine). We joined the group and waited under cover from the cold rain for the ship to arrive.

We soon discovered the meaning of “navy time” as thing didn’t quite run exactly on time, but in the end things all worked out nicely.

The tour started with everyone huddled in the hanger at the back of the ship. We got split up into groups and each of the photographers was assigned to a group to follow around.

 It was really cool to see the girls watching what was going on. Don’t get me wrong, the ship was awesome, but seeing the members of the group, both young and old, looking in awe at the women and men showing them around and talking about what they were doing was amazing.

This is Mr. Roth (I’m not sure what his rank is, so I’ll go with “Mr.” here), the tour group leader for us. Super awesome guy, very friendly, and eager to answer any questions.

We got a tour around the ship, getting to see into the nooks and crannies, with talks from various people in various positions, from the military police to a Chaplin to medical techs.

The bridge was one of the more fun places to be.

Even more fun was watching this lady get to literally drive a navy warship. Not many people can say they did that!

After a short lunch break (I think my group was the last one to get to the cafeteria) we all we up to the top deck to the hanger where we started. They had a few… “toys” out that the girls got to play with.

This one lady with the selfie-stick was having more fun than any other human being has had in the history of the universe. Seriously she was doing this for a good 20 minutes.

About this is when the Sea King showed up to do a little demonstration of what cool stuff could be done with a 50 year old aircraft. A bit of flying around, and then some divers went out in a boat and were picked up and pulled up.

… then pulled back up again.

All the time this was happening the rain was alternating between torrential and drizzle. We did our best to keep both ourselves and our gear dry.

After the helicopter was done it’s thing, we headed back into port. Well, almost. To display the maneuvering capabilities of the warship we were treated to a series of S-turns at high speed, pitching the deck of the ship to thirty degrees each way. It’s truly amazing to be on the back of this huge ship as the deck below you goes leans so far side to side. The photos really don’t show just how extreme it was.

Though Mr. Roth did say this wasn’t the normal way that they travel, he did seem fairly calm, standing up on the pitching deck with a mug of coffee.

Since it’s hard to tell from the still images, maybe a video can help?

At the end of the (long) day we headed back to port and everyone left with smiles on their faces. A very cool day curtesy of a very cool organization doing very cool stuff for young women in the area. Definitely hit up the Achieve Anything Foundation to see when their next event is going to be and sign up it’s free! Also make sure you say hi to Kirsten at @girlsfly_too on twitter.

This time it was dealers choice… she is currently living at a very cool old house (I want to say 1918 is the date she told me it was built) and we did some photos there.

 Makeup was done by the amazing Melissa Rankle!

The shot below here is an extreme crop from a head and shoulders (or more) portrait.  I really like having the full 36 megapixels to crop on the Pentax K-1!

I definitely want to go back and shoot here again.  The house as a setting is great, and I would love to use it more with more time and more setup.  Next time for sure 🙂

Here’s the box in context, with my Cactus V6 II radio trigger to show how big a box it is.

A surprise from Peak Design… what’s in the box????

Opening it up and see a lot of packing material….

Stuffed with wonderful, uhm…. paper

Hmm…. Lots of packing paper, what’s inside?

I swear it’s not just full of hot air

Lets get a closer look down there shall we?

Presents!

Seems like a ridiculously big package for what would fit in a standard envelope, but I won’t fault Peak Design for being extra careful with my precious cargo

How this happened is a while back I got an email from Peak Design with some information from their mailing list about how to use their first product, the Capture Clip. I’ve been a supporter of theirs forever and took part in their very first KickStarter and while I’ve had both iterations of their Capture Clip, I’ve never really used it. The last time I tried it simply didn’t seem to work, which was disappointing, so I emailed them and opened up a support ticket, saying that I loved the product but never really used it, and could they help me out.

I got a nice fast reply from Jen saying that she thought that the way that my anchors were setup might be not the right way and pointed me to this document showing how to use the Slide and Clutch (the hand strap and sling strap they make, both highly recommended) together. In this she also mentioned that she saw I was using version 1 of their Anchor Links and she’d like to send me a set of the current (better, stronger) ones. I won’t say no to free stuff, so here we are.

I did have the anchor links on the bottom of my camera for quite a while. You can see the old versus new here how frayed and “soft” they look compared to the new ones with their tighter outside weave. The different material will fray less easily and is made of Dyneema Cord and a new injection moulding system. Or something like that. You can read about it if you want to.  When I took the old ones off I cut through them just so there’s no way that me, or anyone, might be tempted to use them again for some reason.

Here’s the new set of anchors in place, ready to face this season of weddings, portraits, and whatever else is thrown my way!  Big thanks to Jen and Peak Design for having my (and my camera’s) back

I’ve known the beautiful Miss C for a while now, but we only recently were both be in the same city of the same province again and set up to do a very special boudoir photoshoot for her! I finally got the photos all off to her tonight and thought what better way to add another blog entry that had a magician and a rapper as the last two people featured as a sexy boudoir shoot! I’m very happy that she was happy with the photos and gave me permission to share a few with you.

I’ve been talking about converting my basement into a proper studio for ages now, all hinging on

• Moving all my random junk out (and finding a home for it somewhere)
• Repainting the walls from a bright orange to something a bit more monotone and less likely to pick up light in a shoot to give people an orange look.

Despite these two things I’ve done a few shoots now in the as yet un-repainted and un-cleared basement, and they do seem to be going well, this shoot was in the home studio again and I think the results speak for themselves!  Miss C and her best friend were there and it was a great time, transitioning from gales of giggles to soft and sensual.

After it was all over she had to fly back home to the east but I know she’ll be back at some point soon and we can shoot again!

Do you think that you might be interested in doing a boudoir shoot?  People do it for all reasons, sometimes it’s just something special for them to remember a period of their life, or a fitness goal they hit, or they just want to be pampered and get to show off their hot and sexy side.  Others do it for their partner, getting a beautiful folio album (locked so it can be kept private of course) for someone special to show off something steamy.  If you think you might be interested, or have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me, or look through some of the other photoshoots that have been done here in the studio or in the privacy of your own home.

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure to spend a couple of hours with world famous magician Shawn Farquhar at his home.  Somehow I managed to find a hole in both his schedule and mine where we were both in the same geographic area (the man travels a lot) and we spent some time making some (photographic) magic.

I met Shawn for the first time a couple of years ago when I was doing my Portrait-52 project.  I had seen Shawn stump Penn and Teller on Fool Us and had a moment of disbelief seeing he was from Maple Ridge.  No-one is from Maple Ridge… it’s a tiny town an hour outside of Vancouver where I grew up and the concept that a famous magician could come from the same town as me was mind blowing.  So, of course, I emailed him and asked to take a photo for my project.  It went well and this year I thought it’d be time to do some more, and after a lot of juggling of schedules, we finally got something setup.

Of course, I didn’t want to be “that guy” asking for him to show me a trick, but when you’ve got access to someone that good, it’s hard not to.  I consider myself a fairly savvy person and figure that if I were up close to a magician, I would look where they didn’t want me to look and I’d be able to see something because I’m a smart guy…

I’m sure you can guess where this is going.  Shawn did trick after trick and my expert opinion as a self-proclaimed smart and savvy guy…. he’s a f*king wizard.  Seriously.  I picked a card (the two of diamonds), I put it back in the deck, it was on the top.  Then I put it on top and it showed up on the bottom.  Then in his mouth.  Then he stole my watch.  It was seriously annoying… I desperately wanted to know how it was done but also didn’t want to know at all.  I’d watch the card light a hawk and see the two of diamonds go into the middle of the deck and then suddenly it was on the top.  INFURIATING!

Shawn seemed to thrive on my frustration and joy at being fooled.  The man is a master, and of course a super nice guy the entire time.  We got some cool images and a really good chat.  I really appreciate him taking the time from his schedule to spend some time with me (seriously the guy got home the day before, had one day home and then was going off to do a cruise or a show or something the day after, so 2 hours out of 24 home was awesome!

I met Prada West through the hip hop shows that I shoot fairly regularly in Surrey and Vancouver.  He’s got a great look (as you can see) and is a great portrait subject as I discovered when I shot him before (1, 2).  I’m not going to say he’s a teddy bear and that the hardcore rapper look is just a persona, but he is a super nice guy in person and great to talk to.  His new album, Clouded Thoughts, hit #3 on the iTunes charts recently, so this guy is kinda the real thing.

This time we decided to do a weed smoking shoot and found our way to a suitably downtrodden looking area of Surrey.  A minor crisis of not having a lighter was averted by a quick trip to a nearby gas station (with a couple of strange looks from people as my old and uncool self does not look like the person who runs in the same circles at this guy).

Most of the lights here are natural.  We were shooting late afternoon so we had some evening sun giving some nice rim lighting.  I didn’t bring my full bag of gear with stands and light shapers, just a single Pentax AF 540 FGZ flash and a Cactus V6 radio trigger and a very handy little flash shade (similar to this one but not exactly).  Not exactly a huge kit, but in the decent light of a (for once) non-raining surrey evening, we made out ok.

This shot, for example, was exposed for the ambient light, and then I put a flash zoomed to 85mm and pointed forward so it would catch the smoke and give a bit of rim light (see his camera right arm/torso).  Short and simple.  A bit of clarity / contrast / grunge added in post and voilà, there you go!

Oh, and the shot above was turned into some amazing artwork by the very talented @miss.sonia.joy…. so cool to see!

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, I broke my ankle at the beginning of January and have been going absolutely crazy not being to do photography. No, that’s not completely right… I can shoot photos, but I can’t drive or go anywhere myself, meaning that the list of photoshoots, both client and for personal projects has been growing longer and longer.

That meant that each time I correspond with someone about a shoot I have to tell them that I think that I’ll be back on my feet soon, but had to wait to set something up until I was actually on my feet so I could get to wherever we were meeting.  I made the mistake of rescheduling several shoots until after I was told I’d be ok only to find out that it would be another 4 weeks.

Anyway…

I finally got so tired of it that I did something about it. I put out a call on Facebook for locals to come and help me out.  I had three local ladies respond and set up three 30-45 minute sessions at my house.  Before I did the shoot I cleaned the house and spent far longer than I would have normally lugging camera and lighting gear into the living room (not an easy task with only one working foot).  Somewhere in there two of the three subjects cancelled on me (at least they were nice enough to let me know things had come up and not just flake out and leave me hanging!).  The last lady, Jessica, was my hero that day and showed up on time, dressed to impress with some cool eye makeup done.

I had a great time spending a good hour with Jessica and did a bunch of shooting, resulting in the images that you see here.  Enjoy!

If you’re interested in getting headshots like this for yourself, please head over to the contact page and give me a call or email to book a session!

Recently I did event photography for my friend Azam who did a fundraiser to allow her to bring clothing to underprivileged children in Tanzania through the NEEMA Project.  Azam is a student and heard about NEEMA and knew she could do something to help.  She decided to do a clothing drive to collect clothing for infants and children and will be going to Tanzania to deliver the clothes herself (and make a few memories of course)!

Sadly, she does not have the budget to bring along her own personal photographer (I already asked about 57 times)

Being tied up by a young fan

The NEEMA Project is, in their own words:

NEEMA is a US Non-profit and Community Based Organization in Kenya providing skills training, counseling and discipleship to vulnerable young women from Kitale and surrounding villages.

As the evening went on a fair number of people showed up, bought raffle tickets, and dropped off clothing for the clothing drive. People sat, chatted with Azam, drank tea and got excited about the trip.  I was there and brought my wife and a fellow photographer; Monte, from Fly in the Eye studio.  We may or may not have nerded out over photography stuff while my wife rolled her eyes and drank tea.

As the evening progressed I shot happy family and friends in front of the big poster, but mostly had fun just chilling out with an amazing young lady out to change the world.

At the end of the evening there was a raffle with some fun prizes from David’s Tea.

You can interact and find out how to donate to the NEEMA Project by checking out their Facebook page.

Oh, a big shout out to SippChai café, which not only was kind enough to let Azam and her friends setup the fundraiser there, but also is a wonderful menu of delicious teas, of which I have to recommend the chai tea latte as my favourite (though the masala chai is a close runner up).

A couple of weeks ago I went up to Cascade Falls, just east of my hometown of Mission, BC, to enjoy the falls in the snow and ice of the particularly cold and long winter (for this area anyway). My friend since university who I will identify as “Mr. C” was up there with us and we took a few photos in between playing with some photos of the falls and breaking my ankle (that’s a story for another time).

C looked good up there, I used the sun as a backlight and exposed for his face, but was careful not to blow out the highlights too much. The Pentax K-1 is great at maintaining details in the shadow, and I was able to keep the highlights nicely contained but still get some decent light on his face.

Post processing was pretty simple, fiddle with the colour of the light so that it matched what I remember it looking at without turning him into an orange umpa-lumpa, and make sure that the shadows and highlights were controlled. A little selective adding and removing of clarity here and there for effect and there are a couple decent shots of one of my best friends up at the falls!

I’ve never owned a new Apple laptop. My first foray into the world of Apple portables was a 2006 MacBook Pro that I used at a programming job, and took it when I left in exchange for a bunch of overtime. From there I upgraded by selling the old one and finding a new one on Craigslist. This took me to a 2009, then 2011, and then most recently in 2016 a 2014 15” MacBook Pro Retina. But until two days ago I’ve never had the experience of opening up a brand new (not just “new to me”) Apple laptop.

There are probably a hundred “2016 MacBook Pro impressions” posts out there, but this one is mine, maybe I’ll mention something in it that you didn’t see somewhere else?

Touchbar and keyboard in Mail

I ordered it not long after it was announced (after securing a sale for my current laptop), and after waiting more than a month (the tyranny of build to order) it showed up at my door two days ago.

Unboxing

I wanted to do a proper unboxing, with the reverence and ceremony that seems to be required of Apple products, but by coincidence the evening I got it I was going out to meet some friends at the local Starbucks and there was an emergency at work, meaning that the unboxing was more of a frantic ripping off of the protective film and hitting cancel and next as fast as I could through the first run setup so I could get to a terminal so I could try to find out why there were websites not responding.

The Hardware

The unit I purchased was the middle of the road version of the 15” with TouchBar, with upgraded disk (up to 512G, as the 256G on my current laptop feels really constricted) and upgraded GPU (Radeon Pro 460 4G).

Sexy non-light up Apple Logo

Physical Impressions

The 2016 is a bit smaller and feels lighter than the previous model. The bezel is smaller giving the same amount of screen size. As Apple-Watchers know, the companies obsession with thinner and lighter has meant that it’s also noticeably thinner and lighter than the previous model. Both good things in my opinion. Picking it up off the desk it is noticeably lighter. The hing has also been redesigned apparently to allow you to open it up without it being too stiff and causing it to pull the bottom off the desk (as it’s really light) but not flopping around (if it’s not secure enough).

USB-C Ports and headphone jack

I won’t go into the dongles. I bought a USB-C SD card reader and two USB-A to USB-C adaptors…. I’m not super happy about it, but I also realize that by the time this laptop is obsolete and it’s time for an upgrade, a majority of peripherals will probably be more USB-C, so I’m ok with being part of the awkward transition.

Performance

The disk is fast. Like, really fast, at least according to the benchmarks. I see about 800-900mb/s write and 1300-1600mb/s read speeds according to Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. The CPU is a bit faster than my previous MacBook, but honestly I am not seeing a huge difference. It’s faster don’t get me wrong, but it’s not “2009-2016 faster”, it’s definitely “2014-2016 faster”. It’s not like I was expecting a massive difference, so this is honesty pretty expected.

Keyboard

The keyboard takes some getting used to for sure. I never used the “MacBook Zero” so I am not sure how it’s keyboard feels, but this new one is…. different. Not bad different, just different. I suspect it’s one of those things that you get used to and will stop noticing after a few days of typing.

Update from a few days later: Yea, it’s still noticeably different, but it’s not a big deal. Now back to the review…

One thing that will take a bit to get used to. The arrow keys have changed from the traditional “upside down T” formation that’s graced the last few (or more) generations of MacBook to a new setup where the left and right keys are full height. This probably makes sense somehow (bigger keys for left/right which are probably hit more or something), but not having the spaces (in the upside down “T” formation) to put your fingers to find the location makes things a bit annoying for quickly finding your place on the keyboard.

Other than that, the keys are bigger, easy to hit and have a lot less travel than the last version. It also has an oddly “smooth” feeling. Not that the keys are physically smooth, but just somehow typing on it is smoother. It may be just the new keyboard feel, or that these keys don’t have years of crumbs accumulated under them.

TouchBar and TouchID

The TouchBar – Cool With Untapped Potential

TouchBar using Photoshop CC

So this is probably the biggest change in the MacBook for this iteration, though as far as changes to the laptop form factor, it’s probably the biggest change in years, if not decades. Replacing the row of function keys with an iOS-like programmable touch strip is pretty cool.

Honestly I haven’t been using it much. Most likely it’s because it’s new and I’m still used to my previous workflow of ignoring the keys on the function row unless I needed to adjust the brightness or hit play/pause for playing music. That said, when I do….

I hit ESC reflexively often, dismissing dialog boxes, when I’m in the terminal, and so on. I always have this moment of feeling like it’s not hitting a real key. As others have said, a bit of haptic feedback would be great.

Outside of that, using it as designed, as a set of non-keys to be used by apps as they please, is pretty bloody cool. In Photoshop I can adjust the size of a brush, with a tap and a slide, vs hitting [ or ] multiple times. Typing it offers spelling suggestions, which I generally ignore due to the fact I’ve been touch typing since I learned to type in grade 9. Other apps have implemented various degrees of usefulness with the TouchBar, and I’m sure it will only get better.

Oddly in my living room light (darker than the Apple Store) both the resolution and clarity of the TouchBar seem less so than the first time I saw it in the Apple Store. More likely my old eyes though.

TouchID

Right now the only things that use TouchID are:

• Logging on to the laptop
• System changes requiring authentication
• 1Password (see their blog post here) for website logins

I see this expanding as more and more laptops show up in the world and as more apps are updated to take advantage of it. Honestly it is super-cool to just touch my finger to the little button to log into my laptop, or authenticate my 1Password vault.

Trackpad

This thing is huge. You could play a full game of cricket on it and still have room left over after. I’m not sure I need this much trackpad, but I suspect after a week or two of use my other laptop’s trackpad will start feeling tiny. This thing is even bigger than the Magic Trackpad that I use at work. Seriously, it’s huuuuuuuuuge.

One big downside I’m finding is that when doing work and with with my hands resting naturally (with my left hand on the keys and my right hand mousing) I’m triggering the right click action much more. I’ve had zero issues with the palm rejection, it never seems to trigger false clicks or mouse movements, but with my left palm on the trackpad and my right hand clicking the “two fingers to trigger right click” is happening more. Again, probably just an adjustment of where my hands touch and when to unlearn some positions, but a bit of an annoyance.

That all said, it feels… smoother somehow. Hard to describe, but when mousing around it, like the keyboard) has an odd “more smooth than smooth” feel to mousing around (not physically smooth, it’s got the same physical feel as previous trackpads).

Screen

Obviously the screen is beautiful. I haven’t had the chance to compare to the old one, or see what people see with “wide gamut images”. It looks just gorgeous though, but not a hugely noticeable improvement over the previous 2014 model.

One interesting change to the defaults is that in the previous model, the default “best for display,” “scaled for retina setting has gone up one notch. On my 2014 model, the setting was equivalent to about 1440×900 by default, and of course you could set the system to scale higher or lower to give more or less desktop space (and consequently smaller or larger fonts and elements). This version the setting is up one to give slightly more desktop space by default (about a 1680×1050 resolution). I’m flipping between the default and bringing it back down one step in the resolution depending on how the light in the room is and how my 41 year old eyes feel.

Speakers

The last bit of the hardware round up is the speakers. I’ll be quick… not only is it cool to tap the speaker icon in the TouchBar and then slide to adjust the volume, but the sound is great. Nowhere near as good as “real” speakers of course, but at least twice as loud as the previous model with no distortion even at high volume. I have no idea how speakers this good and loud fit in a thinner and lighter machine.

Real World Use

Lightroom

Lightroom is what I use this computer for, and I’m very familiar with how it works and feels on my old laptop, so I have a fairly good feel for the difference in the new machine.

Default TouchBar look when apps don’t customize it

It’s a bit disappointing in some areas…. I was expecting the more powerful GPU to allow me to do spot corrections on 36 megapixel images smoothly and easily, but in some ways it almost feels slower. This might be something more specific to the images I’m working on however. Overall Lightroom and Photoshop run a bit faster than before (faster for things like loading and saving images) though some of this may be also due to recent Lightroom updates. The utopia of ‘hit the d key to develop and be instantly ready to develop the image’ isn’t quite here yet.

Conclusion

I’m making no attempt to rate this with any sort of normal rating scale, but I’d say that on a scale from “meh” to “HOLY SHITBALLS I’M FLYING” it comes in at a solid “decent!”. This is an expensive laptop don’t get me wrong, and I’m hoping it will be awesome for a good five years or more. If you have the 2014 the upgrade probably isn’t worth it to be honest, but if you’re in the market for a new MacBook this is a great machine, beautifully designed, and (if you can deal with dongles), ready for the next generation and the next changes in the hardware market.

The weather was not great.  I’m not sure if you remember November in the Lower Mainland, but it was not great weather.  In fact, up to a day before the scheduled shoot we were going to be at Heritage Park in Mission, but with the weather forecast looking gloomy (putting it nicely) we opted to switch over to Fishtrap Creek Park in Abbotsford.

With the help of several volunteers, Alyssa, Danni, Andrea, and of course Turbo the poodle, we had a nice setup with a tent, checkin area, some amusements for the kids if they had to wait…. almost like we knew what we were doing!

All together we created beautiful family portraits for 45 amazing families.  The money will go to people in need and I think we may have created a yearly tradition!  I’m really proud to share some photos of the families that I had the pleasure to photograph this past Christmas.

Kids can get bored taking photos, got to just roll with it.

These guys were just insane!

Dogs are family too!

Here is the three proud photographers handing over a huge check (in many ways) at the Christmas Bureau.

A very proud trio of photographers passing off the cheque.

You can also read

Help-Portrait is a global initiative created by photographer Jeremy Cowart in 2008. Its goal is simple, give portraits to people in need. It takes some very talented volunteers (in this case led by the awesome Brenda) to organize a gaggle of talented photographers, photo editors, hair stylists, makeup artists, and support people. They all come together and work to create a framed 8×10 photo that they walk out with.

Load of camera gear ready to go

The only one with more gear than the photographers are the makeup artists

While this is going on there are snacks, coffee, tea and other refreshments, a place for the kids to play, Santa who made a special visit, some live music…. the list goes on.

This year is the 4th year that I’ve participated in Help-Portraitas a photographer. This year again I was working at the Maple Ridge / Pitt Meadows location working alongside friends for the day. There were four talented photographers working this year, Rick, Missy, Jeff and myself.

Over the day we got portraits to 255 people, a great number (but hopefully we’ll break that next year).  Here are a few of the photos that I took over the course of the 8 hours of photography.

There were tears, on both sides of the camera, and every family we dealt with was respectful and thankful for the service provided.  They were all a pleasure to deal with.

The day was really made amazing, by the volunteers, photographers, makeup artists, singers greeters, and everyone I’m forgetting who worked hard for what was a very long but also very rewarding day.

These girls sung their hearts out most of the day

Registration and greeting

Editors be editing

Missy, another amazing photographer

The day was dedicated to Jody, a volunteer who sadly passed away this year in a work accident.  This sign and a full size card board cutout of Jody was there the whole day.

RIP Jody

The entire affair was featured in an article in the Maple Ridge News as well.   The whole crew will hopefully be back to do this whole thing over again next year!

I love this beautiful and serene look

It’s been a wet, rainy, and downright disgusting past couple of weeks here on the wet coast of BC. Here’s something to warm you up a little! I’ve known Miss M. for a long time, and I was so happy when she wanted to do a second boudoir shoot!

She was amazing.  Stepping out of your comfort zone is something that is very hard to do but so very empowering to do as well.  There was warming up (both literal and metaphorical) as we worked different poses and experimented with catching the light just right.

One of my favourite poses to use… works with EVERYONE

I love focusing on little details, and with a boudoir shoot like this I got to get some gorgeous shots like these.

More legs

Heels on the floor, legs that go all the way up…

Here are some other photos from the photo shoot below!

Veterans marching in the Remembrance Day Parade

Today is Remembrance Day here in Canada andVeteran’s Day in the US.  It’s a day to pay honour to those who served to protect us, and those who are currently serving.  I spent the morning at the local theatre where the Clarke Theatre where the parade was taking place, and then headed out to the Cenotaph at the local Legion Hall.

Spectator with amazing hair watching the Remembrance Day Parade

I wanted to take some photos, nice and simple, so I left the multiple zoom lenses behind and took just the Helios 44-2 (buy it here), a lovely old all-manual Russian lens with some great swirly bokeh.  It’s maximum aperture is f/2.0, which is where I kept it most of the time.  I processed the images in MacPhun’s Tonality black and white software.  Normally I’m a big fan of Silver FX Pro from Nik (now owned by Google), but I’ve had Tonality as part of the MacPhun Creative Kit for a while but honestly haven’t used it much, so I figured I should give it a chance to figure the software out.  I wanted the images to get a slightly somber but unified black and white toning.

Reading the names of the fallen in the Clarke Theatre

Overall I’m pretty happy with the selection I got.  I wasn’t in full photo mode, but I am glad I caught a few half decent shots of the celebration this year.  Hope you enjoy them.

Watching the laying of the wreaths

Crowd at the wreath laying

Cadet Honour Guard

Waiting to place their wreaths

Cadet Honour Guard at The Mission Cenotaph

Paying respects at the Mission Cenotaph

Pipers at the Mission Legion Building

Pipers at the Mission Legion Building

Poppies laid on the Cenotaph

Wreaths standing at the base of the Cenotaph

Got to shoot some headshots of the awesome Brittnie Rae this past week.  Brittnie is a Vancouver actress who needed some new headshots for her evolving look (not that she’s changing that much, but hair gets longer and changes colour, piercings are put in or taken out, that sort of thing).  Obviously, Brittnie was fabulous at the shoot.

We started out at the local school.  Not bad, gorgeous light, but due to just bad timing the entire school was there on the back field for a track day or something!

So what to do?  Well, part of what I was doing at the shoot was playing with some new gear (the new Pentax 70-200/2.8), so I backed up as far as I could, set the aperture to 2.8 and zoomed to 200.  Notice how the background is completely blurred?  Can’t tell there’s 200 kids somewhere behind her playing soccer (well, maybe they were more to the right of her and she’s actually in front of a grassy hill, but you get my point!).

This is one fierce chick!

Next stop was the harbour, which had some great locations, but we had to deal with rapidly losing the light.  Sadly the glorious, religion-inducing sunset we had hoped for wasn’t coming, and it was more of a “meh, sure, have a little orange in the sky, but not too much” sunset.  Still, the light was great on her and again, the 70-200 did well here.

Brittnie up against an old tree in the harbour

Done with the outdoor stuff, we headed to the studio.  Or an apartment anyway.  Here’s the setup photo:

Behind the scenes photo setup

Lets ignore the bathroom in the background for a second.  The setup is using a simple 5×7′ reversible background.  The main light is a 30″ Octagon soft box from Neewer, which I’m really starting to fall in love with.  Great light, just a bit unwieldy to carry around (and way more unwieldy to take apart and put back together, but it does fit in my car’s backseat all put together).  Backlight was provided by a Godox 24″ soft box.  That’s about it.  Main light for drama, a bit of rim light from the soft box, and boom, we get this:

Because of the small space I got a fair amount of spill on the background, which sucked, but I didn’t have another 5 or 8 feet to back up to eliminate that, so a bit of work in Photoshop turned it from muddy grey to black.  Definitely this is one of the disadvantages working without a studio.

Last but not least one of B’s favourite creatures in the world jumped up and had to have his place in the sun with her.  Love this shot of these two!

Brittnie and her gorgeous cat.

Here’s where we shot.

A few things to note here.  This is the games room of Left Media Inc, which is a great room to shoot in and where a lot of headshots have been created.  You’ll see our foosball table (I won against John 10-8 just today), ping-pong table (or as I call it, “horizontal storage”) and blackboard wall (the writing is left over from filming this video for the Canadian HR Awards).  The camera gear is of course my trusty Pentax K-1 with the Sigma 85/1.4 (a fantastic portrait lens).

Behind him is a Impact 5×7′ reversible background panel held up by a generic background stand.  This makes it easy to go from a white to black background as needed.

The two Pentax AF540GZ flashes are in Godox 24″x36″ softboxes to create some flattering light, and the whole thing is triggered by Cactus V6 radio triggers (the V6 has been succeeded now by the even better Cactus V6-II with many improvements, including supporting high speed sync).

For these shots Jay stood just behind the garbage can… uhm, “posing stool”.  He’s far enough away from the background that the light from the softboxes didn’t hit it too much, leaving it mostly black (inverse square law anyone?) and only requiring a little darkening in Lightroom.

After all the setup and tech stuff is over, as Peter Hurley says, you’re just playing psychologist, working to break the subject out of what shell they may or may not have, and to get a “real” expression to make this lovable mug look as fancy as he is for his gigs.

This last shot I think is my favourite.  I think this is my “real” Jay.

After I got the Pentax K-1 I decided it was time to invest in some of the newly released full frame lenses.  The first I got was the Pentax-D FA 24-70mm f/2.8ED SDM WR Lens, a gorgeous bit of kit that I’m happy to put together a “Real World Review” of.  This is a big and chunky lens, which is not what Pentaxians are used to with their lovely small and light APS-C lenses, but it’s been the lens that’s on my camera most of the time since I got it, as the 24-70 is the canonical “walk around” lens.  But does that come at a price?  Read on…

Photo via Pentax Forums

As with my previous review, I don’t have a complicated setup with sharpness charts and micrometers and whatever else you have when you test camera gear for a living. You can head over here for something like that.

I can however give some thoughts after using Pentax’s new HD DFA 24-70mm/2.8 ED SDM WR. Wow, that’s a bit of a mouthful so let’s just simplify it down to “the 24-70”.

The 24-70 is one of Pentax’s new “HD D FA” line of lenses to compliment the wonderful K-1 full frame camera. The other, the HD FA* 70-200/2.8 will get a review when either I can afford one myself (mid 2020 at this point) or if Pentax sends me a review unit (not likely, but if you know someone…).

Anyway….

So far I’ve used the 24-70 on both a crop sensor camera (the Pentax K-3) and the new full frame flagship the K-1. It’s also been in the wet, the really, really wet, BC rainforest wet, but more of that in a minute.

Why This Lens Is Important

When I was a newer photographer, I wondered why all the professionals I saw had either the 24-70, the 70-200, or (more commonly), both. Well, it turns out that this focal range is widely used by photographers at weddings, events, and music shows because it’s almost the perfect focal range. It’s wide enough to be wide and long enough at the 70mm end to make a decent head and shoulders portrait.

It’s no surprise that the Pentax DA*16-50/2.8 (a 24-70mm equivalent on a crop sensor), and later the Sigma 17-50/2.8 rarely left my camera.

It’s also no surprise that much as I love the FA Limited primes, especially the FA 31/1.8, I purchased the new DFA 24-70 as soon as I was able. A new camera body deserves the best, and using a non-Full Frame lens just seemed wrong.

Well, also gear-lust, but that’s something I get to talk to my shrink about.

Specs and Numbers

On the crop sensor the 24-70 turns into approximately a 37-107mm lens, which isn’t bad for a walk-around lens, if you don’t mind not getting super wide. Of course on full frame it’s just a 24-70. It’s compatible with any K-mount camera that supports SDM, which goes back to the K10D.

Focusing is done through the internal motor and not the screw drive from the body, which means it’s fast and quiet.

The filter is an 82mm and it can focus as close as 1.25 ft, and has an aperture range of f/2.8 to f/22.

More boring stuff like this over at the Pentax product page.

Size and Weight

In real use, the first thing about the 24-70 is it is big. Like the K-1 body, it’s not distressingly big, but compared to crop lenses it’s a beast. Be prepared to lug close to two pounds of extra weight on your shoulder with this bad boy. It may take a bit of getting used to, but then you can just ask your full frame Nikon and Canon friends how they manage

Features

Pentax DFA 24-70 via ephotozine.com

Not a lot to mention here. The lens just acts like a lens well. A couple of quick points though:

• There’s no aperture ring (unsurprising for a new lens).
• There is a zoom lock switch on the top. I’ve never had one before and don’t see myself using it, but who knows.
• The Pentax “Quick-Shift” system is present too. This allows you to adjust focus manually when the AF is working and without having to switch into manual focus mode.
• Comes with lens hood, lens cap, and a soft case.
• Interestingly, the little slide out section in the lens hood to let you rotate filters that has been a part of previous Pentax lenses is not present. Maybe due to the size of the hood, or some other factor.
  • Note: I delayed posting this review because I wanted to take the photo below showing the different lens hoods to make the point…. of course, now looking at it I realize that the reason is most likely the depth of the lens hood really isn’t enough to support or justify it.

Left: Pentax DA* 16-50/2.8 Middle: Pentax HD Pentax-D FA 24-70/2.8 Right: Pentax DA* 50-135/2.8

Bokeh

This is generally pretty subjective. It’s pleasant to see, maybe not as buttery smooth as something like the FA 31 Limited, but still no slouch. You can judge for yourself from this pair of gorgeous portrait subjects.

Weather Resistance

It’s right there in the name right? The DFA 24-70mm 2.8 ED SDM WR. Pentax has been making their pro line of gear fully weather resistant since the days of the K-10 (i.e. wash it under the sink) on their bodies and flagship lenses. The 24-70 is the same. I can’t say anything more about it than showing this photo of me shooting the (ironically named) Run for Water this weekend in a BC rainforest for over three hours.

Rain? No problem!

The lens was out and exposed to rain that went from “vaguely unpleasant” to “downpour” for three and a half hours. Other than wiping the lens now and then it trucked along just fine. I have to admit that as a long time Pentaxian I sort of take it for granted that my gear is waterproof though.

If you’re interested in the nitty gritty (pun intended) details of Pentax’s weather resistant and water resistant lenses and bodies, you can find more here.

Focusing

The real thing that people will care about is focusing speed. Let me say, it is fast. The SDM motor is essentially silent (I’ve been so used to screw drive lenses that I had to double check to make sure that it was actually focusing!) and the lens feels “authoritative”when it locks onto a focus point. I suspect it will still lag behind a top end Nikon or Canon, but it’s definitely no slouch.

In my use over the last few days I haven’t had any hunting or mis-fires. The cases of focus not locking quite right were while in AF.C mode and only with runners coming towards me, and I will put the blame on the Pentax AF system.

Overall Handling

If you can deal with the size of the new full frame 24-70, and done mind swallowing your pride a bit after these years of pointing out to your Canon and Nikon friends that your gear is as good quality and weighs so much less, this lens is for you.

My initial complaint (well, muttering) about the zoom ring being in the wrong spot (higher up on the barrel) and feeling “weird” disappeared, as expected, pretty quickly.  Now it feels completely normal of course.

Price

The $1300 US ($1599 CND) price tag is steep, but less expensive than the comparable lenses from other brands ($1750 US for the Canon and $2400 US for the Nikon). Image quality is top notch (as is edge to edge sharpness and all that stuff, but check the resources section for other articles doing that sort of review).

Depending on how sensitive you are to the weight of the lens, you may want to look at investing in the battery grip to help balance things out a bit.

Conclusion

You know what I’m going to say here I’m sure. This is a great lens, with great speed and sharpness, in an incredibly useful range, on both crop and full frame bodies. If you’re in the market for this, or want something that will compliment your new K-1, it’s hard to go wrong with this as a first lens. While $1600+ CND is no small chunk of change, for what you’re getting this is under the cost of the other big guys, and you will not regret it.

Pros:

• Great zoom range (wide enough to be wide, zoom-y enough to be used for portraits)
• Fast lens
• Sharp
• Water and dust resistant
• Fast focusing thanks to the SDM motor
• Full frame goodness gives that lovely depth of field
• New and modern to take advantage of the resolving power of the K-1’s full frame sensor

Cons:

• Big
• Heavy
• Expensive

So Who Is This Lens For?

The same question I asked in my K-1 review… who needs this lens?  First of all, I’m making the assumption that you have the K-1, because if not the question is do yo have need for a 36-105/2.8.  That said, if you are a wedding or event photographer, you already know that the 24-70 range is the one that is on your camera most of the time and this is a beautiful lens in that focal range.  The wide end is wide enough to allow you some wide angle feel and capture a big space, while the long end is in the nice range of portraits.  It’s not quite the same look of a 100 or 200mm portrait lens, but is perfectly adequate combined with the full frame’s lower depth of field look.  Or as I succinctly put it….

Wide enough to be wide, zoomy enough for portraits.

This isn’t a specific portrait lens, if you work in the studio or are doing headshots all the time something more traditional like a 70-200 or the Sigma 85/1.4  are going to be more your style.  I’m not a landscape photographer so I can’t comment, but if the focal length range is what you use for landscape, this is an excellent lens.  If you like a good walk around, just-about-right-for-almost-everything general lens, this is for you.

Who is it NOT For?

If you’re used to light prime lenses or a kit or superzoom, this may not be your speed.  It’s a big lens and realize this before you subject your pocketbook (and neck) to additional strain.  If you don’t have a full frame camera and are not planning to upgrade in the next year, then the Pentax DA* 16-50/2.8 or the Sigma 17-50/2.8 are excellent (and lighter) alternatives that are both gorgeous.  If you have specific needs, such as a portraits or wide angle for interiors, you are probably going to look for other lenses in those specific ranges.

Resources

• The Camera Store’s 24-70 shootout
• Pentax Forums 24-70 first impressions review
• EPhotoZine’s full review (completely with lots of charts and numbers!)
• Equipment purchase links (any purchases through these affiliate links will help this site grow):
  • Pentax K-1
  • Pentax DFA 24-70/2.8
  • Pentax DFA 70-200/2.8

Gallery of Images

If you read this far, thank you for honouring me with your time and attention.  Here is a selection of my favourite images taken with the HD D FA 24-70/2.8.

I finally broke down and picked up the Pentax HD D FA 70-200/2.8. I took it out for a quick run today at Chilliwack River where there was a kayak race being held. I thought it would make a really good test of the capabilities of this brand new lens from Pentax. I wanted to share a few quick images and some thoughts from the first few photos before a more extensive real world review is posted.

First Thoughts

The first thing I thought when I pulled this lens out of the box to put it in my Everyday Messenger Bag was “dear god what have I done”. This lens is…. “substantial,” to say the least. But that’s something for another time. The more important thing is the first impression I had viewing the photos on the screen for the first time, where my impression was “wow, this lens is nice.”

Of the 133 photos I took of the kayaks coming down the river, only a few were out of focus, and the rest were tack sharp. I’m not a sports photographer (my time spent as part of the photo teams for the Abbotsford Summer Games and the Mission Winter Games aside), but I’m pretty impressed. I’m going to have to get a proper subject in front of it in the studio for some real experiments, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be even more in love than I am now.

Note in this crop from the above photo just how sharp and well the water drops were captured by this lens.

100% (ish) crop

Physical Characteristics and Miscellaneous Impressions

• High quality build construction
• Built like a tank
• Heavy
• Fast focusing
• Simple controls (one switch for focus restrictions, one for focus mode)
• Built in tripod mount
• Water / dust proof
• Blah blah blah you can read a better summary of all this on the product page

Bokeh!

Like I said I didn’t have a proper portrait test subject to use, but as you can see here, looks good!

Bokeh!!

Conclusion

Paired with the amazing Pentax K-1 (who’s sensor was recently recognized by DXOMark as the third best sensor they’ve tested ever), this lens is fast focusing, sharp as a tack and heavy. I don’t know what it’s like to carry it around all day at a wedding but I’m really looking forward to the images I’m going to get from it!

Here are a few other shots for your viewing pleasure.

Gallery

It wasn’t all backlit portraits, don’t forget to turn your subject around and let that great evening light fall on their face, and then use a long lens with a shallow depth of field with a neutral background (like the cedar trees in the backyard), as well as of course some fun shots in the grass.

A brief interlude with the cat.

I had a great time shooting Angel and I think we got some great shots that will help her kickstart her modelling portfolio!

For example, the Pentax K-1 allows you to use the 5 axis sensor stabilization as a quasi-tilt/shift adjustment.  Not nearly as good as a “real” tilt shift lens like the Rokinon 24mm (review on PentaxForums here), but enough to shift things a little.  Going through the FStoppers videos helped me understand why you need (or want) a tilt shift lens.  I sort of knew before, but actually being there really helped see it.  The whole seeing is believing thing.  Also knowing what to look for helped as well

I showed up around sunset (of course), and spent about two hours working through their lovely pool and back of the house.  I used the technique of remotely triggering the camera while popping off a flash to help accent areas needed.  The real pain (well, more for the computer) is after when you open up the images in Photoshop and then mask the areas you’ve accented and then use the lighten blend mode to eliminate the need for super crazy masking and blending.  Other than the computer screaming now and then, it seemed to work fairly well.

Some more practice is needed of course, and if you’ve got a gorgeous mansion that you’d like some artsy architecture photos of, contact me!

We had about three weeks of amazingly hot and nice weather here in Vancouver, and then, overnight it seems, it disappeared and temperatures went from 30°C+ to the 20’s or high teens with rain.  Still jeans and t-shirt weather (my favourite), but a far cry from summer.  Luckily I got out to the beach with Terra Jean, one of my wonderful model friends who I’ve been shooting with forever.

Anyway, TJ and I went out to Jericho Beach one evening and caught a brilliant and beautiful sunset.  Honestly it’s really hard to go wrong with a gorgeous model in a bikini on a beach at sunset, but I still think that the photos that I took are pretty nice.  We managed to find a nice area without too many people (do you know there about 5 million beach volleyball courts on that beach?  Seriously it’s insane.

Luckily the spot we found had no people (well, other than a couple of passers by) and we just enjoyed making some beautiful photos on the beach!

Sometimes photoshoots, like this portrait photography session setup in Surrey, go very differently than what you expect, and you have to think on your feet.  Myranda asked me “do you want to have an adventure?” when she proposed this creative shoot, and I thought she meant ignoring the Check Engine light on my car, or getting my Starbucks Chai Tea Latte without the spices on top…

This photoshoot was supposed to go very differently.  Her idea of an adventure was we were supposed to drive to Burns Bog in Surrey (technically Delta I guess), find a place to shoot amid the smoking remains of the fire that passed through there not long ago, and come back with some kick ass photos.  What actually happened was we found out that that area of the Bog was closed off by a ten foot high fence, and the burned area (which did look awesome) was over a wide ditch which runs around the entire area of the bog.  So if we were to ignore the (apparent) surveillance cameras and dig under or climb over, we’d still be stuck away from the “cool” area.

So we gave up

By giving up though, we ended up in the area of the bog that’s actually open to the public and walked along.  Tons of areas and ideas opened up.  We stopped to make photos a good 5 or 6 times, in a section of tall grass under a power line, by a rusted tractor buried in the bog, a grove, a different grove, and much more.

Here are some of my favourites from this “failed” photo shoot!  Hope you enjoy them.

So if you’re a photographer, or a client, don’t despair if things seem to go wrong.  Myranda and I made some great photos that evening after completely throwing out our plans we had.  Not only that, but with the success from his part of the shoot I convinced Myranda to be part of my as-yet-unannounced “girls with tattoos” project (more on that soon).  So everything worked out great!

I met up with my friend Eldon, who’s been in front of my camera before, out on a sunny day in Chilliwack for a quick portrait photo shoot, after seeing he got himself a new cthulhu tattoo (his first).

So Eldon got a new tattoo,
And it didn’t make him blue,
But it made his photos super cool….
Him and his little cthu-oohoohooh-lhu!

Ok, maybe I’m not the best song writer, but luckily I have the whole photography thing to back me up right?  It does tell the story though.

This photo shoot was done with nothing but a window and a love of gorgeous natural light in his kitchen.  The wall behind him isn’t brick, but is actually a wrap, the kind you see on trucks and cars, as he works in that industry for a living. It actually works so well as a backdrop I want to figure out how to get one to take on location to have a brick wall wherever I go!

While this may not be the best representation of Eldon as a friend and loving father, I can’t lie and say I don’t love this last shot!

Registration started at 10am with a breakfast put on by local firefighters. There were activities for the kids, face painting, (temporary) tattoos, a dunk tank and bouncy castle.  Lots of hugging happened, and lots of bikes signed up for the event.

The event was graciously hosted by Mountainview Harley-Davidson® and the weather was fantastic, sunny, but not too hot.  There were a few speeches by members of the group, talking about the mission and goals and thanking the folks for coming out.

Below is president of the Fraser Valley Chapter, “Maddog”.  I met him before when I first attended a BACA meeting (sadly not having a bike or knowing how to ride restricted what contributions I could make as a member), and he’s a completely sweet guy.  Sorry I mean a hardcore tough-ass, definitely not a sweet guy.

It was kickstands up at noon, and it was quite a site (and sound) to hear all those bikes starting up and rolling out.

I headed out after the guys pulled out, and I’m sure the guys all enjoyed the ride out to Hope and back!

If you’re interested in learning more about BACA, start with the video below, or head to their website, where you can find links to the local chapters.  If you’re a biker and you’re interested in participating, I definitely recommend it!

Real Estate agents (REALTORS®) need great headshots that convey not only that they are personable and trustworthy, but they also need something to inject their own personality into them.  Are they sweet?  Tough?  Playful?  A little bit of rock and roll?  Nathan Myhr is a little of the latter (though a good dose of all of the above).  Nathan is working to establish himself in the Langley area and has a great brand as “The REAL Estate Agent”.  He came to me through my Facebook page looking for some headshots that showed his personality as well as photography he could use for business cards, signage, etc.

Tough Guy

As you can see Nathan has some tattoos, and was in the military protecting our country, which is part of his “The REAL Estate Agent” branding.  He wanted them out front and centre for a few shots for his website to replace some older ones there.  I had the most fun shooting these I think.  I love tattoos and being able to have the mix of “business guy in suit” with “cool tattoos” was a great mix to play with photographically.

We spent a good two hours working together at his house in Langley.  First with a backdrop to do headshots that would let me pull some of him out.  Peter Hurley talks about how creating great headshots is 90% psychiatrist and 10% photographer.  This is now so apparent to me.  I used to think “nah, it’s just lighting and getting the person to just give you a good look” until I realized you played shrink for long enough for them to “just give you a good look”.  Luckily Nathan wasn’t too hard to deal with.  He honestly got into the business to help people find their dream home and loves to interact with them (not unlike myself doing headshots and working with people to get photos like these).

We went outside as well.  Living on such a great looking property it seemed wrong to not get some in front of the house.  Even though we had only talked about doing “studio” shots, I’m not going to let a good opportunity like this pass by!

Precious Pooch

Oh and he had an adorable dog as well, who somehow managed to get herself in a few photos.  No idea how that happened….

Are you a professional looking for photos like this for yourself?  Please head on over and book a shoot today!

This year I shot four sports.  Lets start with…

Baseball

Lessons learned here, the photographically interesting stuff happens at the mound, home plate and first base.  Integral plays and game changing events happen in the outfield, but as a photographer I planted myself beside first base and shot the pitcher at the mound, the batter hitting, and the runners rounding first.   The last photo above is one of my favourites though, taken from the … uhm…. observation deck?  No idea what it’s called, but you can see everything from there!  Oh, I also learned to keep an eye out for foul balls, I only almost got hit with two of those.

You can find all the BC Summer Games baseball photos here.

Sailing

When we were asked what sports we wanted to shoot, I chose ones I’d never shot before.  Doing the same again wasn’t nearly as interesting and as challenging as opting to shoot something that I hadn’t done before.  The biggest and most unknown one of these was sailing.  My partner in (photographic) crime was Bob Friesen, and when we arrived in Harrison Hot Springs we really had no idea what to expect.  We were met by one of the Games Volunteers who directed us to our boat (only one, the other had broken down earlier in the day) and we met our skipper and first mate.

They took us out, showed us the ropes (not literally) and got us in the absolute perfect spot for photos.  We were within spitting distance of some of these guys (as you can see), and they were going fairly fast in tiny little sailing boats…. it was awesome.

You can find all the BC Summer Games sailing photos here.

Swimming

Know what I learned about shooting swimming?  It’s bloody hard.  When the athlete are swimming either front or back stroke, you have very little time to get a photo with a face in it, and if you’re a split second off (as I was a lot), you just get an anonymous swim cap covered in water and bubbles.  Backstroke is easier but it’s really hard to get the right angle from the side of the pool (there’s a limited amount of time the athletes will be at the right angle) and from the top or bottom of the pool you either get the top of a head or waves.  Butterfly looks great though, as does the starting line.

You can find all the BC Summer Games swimming photos here.

Wrestling

Last but not least was wrestling, the last sport I shot. These guys and gals were amazing.  It’s hard to avoid seeing just how much heart they put in when you’re ten feet away from the sweat and (sometimes) blood.  These guys kicked complete ass.

You can find all the BC Summer Games wrestling photos here.

Welcome Dance

Want to talk about challenging photography…. I shot the Athletes Welcome Dance, which, as far as I could tell was in a literal black hole.  ISO 160,000 and the best I could do was stay really close to the front where the screen was and hope that the music videos that were playing had lots of white in them to give the maximum of light reflected.

You can find all the BC Summer Games special events photos here.

By The Numbers

As with the last games, here are some numbers for you:

Total number of photos taken: 2,379
Total photos uploaded to the Games Flickr: 348
Total disk space used: 128.1 GB
Total Sports Shot: 4
Total Events Shot: 1

Final Thoughts

As with last year, the lessons learned for workflow and for making good photos of sports remain.  Face in frame, show action, show the object of desire.  For workflow edit fast and upload by the end of the day.  I shot almost half the number of photos (partly due to shooting less events this time around), but some of the sports (baseball, I’m looking at you) were more challenging due to higher frame rate to capture the peak action of a pitch or swing.

By far the most memorable day was sailing.  It was a perfect day, with my buddy Bob beside me and sunshine and spending time out on the water.  Truly a great way to spend an afternoon.  The fact we were that close to the athletes and got those amazing photos was just a bonus

I had the opportunity to attend one as a photographer for the Chilliwack “Rockin’ The Valley” H.O.G. Rally and hope that the photos below give you a bit of an idea of what happens at one, and how it went!

We started off in the morning in a parking lot in Chilliwack.  There were people organizing riders, signing people in, signing waivers, etc.  Well organized and with high regard to safety and ensuring everyone has a good time.

After the preliminaries were done, I went out ahead of the pack of H.O.G. Rally riders to arrive at the first stop (Fort Langley Fort) before anyone else did.  I only had to wait a little while before bikes started showing up.

One thing I learned about Harley owners is that they really, really love to add cute details to their bikes.  Here are a few of my favourites.

The logo and motto of Harley-Davidson is fairly prevalent on many parts of the bikes as well.

Ever have a preconception about bikers?  Tough?  Hardcore? Dangerous? Scary?  Throw all that crap out the window.  First of all, most of these guys were in the “grey hair” age, and about as nice as you could get.  They were more than happy to tell me about their bikes, answer questions, and just generally shoot the shit.  It makes sense as well.. with a Harley being in the same price range as a car, chances are high that their owners are a bit older.  Not many young punks can throw $30k down on a motorbike to play with (and only drive in the sun).  A definite benefit of getting into the Harley lifestyle though, is you get a built in group of folks to ride with if you go to a H.O.G. Rally.

Bikers came from as far as Oregon and Alberta (one fellow technically came all the way from Australia!) and many hadn’t been to the Fort before. It’s a great place if you’ve never been, and not that far from downtown Vancouver.

Biker bling.  This lady was out of Oregon and went routinely (as you can see) to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a similar rally held yearly in South Dakota.

After hanging around for a while in Fort Langley, everyone packed up and headed to a very cool little ice cream store called Birchwood Dairy Farm.  A family owned and operated farm in the outskirts of Abbotsford, they make and sell their own (delicious) ice cream, and luckily were well prepared for 50+ bikers with an appetite for ice cream.  I won’t lie, I just really liked taking photos of tough looking bikers eating ice cream….

My only disappointment for the ride back was that my driver wasn’t quite crazy enough to get us past the riders on the way back.  Though I suppose with heavy traffic it was probably a good idea

I’ll end this post with a shot of the senior leadership of the organization, with Stan Nickel in the middle as their intrepid leader.  A bunch of great guys who I look forward to working with again!

If you’re a Harley owner and interested in finding out more, or want to sign up, head to the H.O.G. Events page, or the members page. If you were part of the Rockin’ The Valley event, thanks for the great time!

I had an amazing photoshoot last night with Bry Jensen, fitness model and personal trainer, and while I don’t have any photos to share (yet, they do look amazing!), I setup my phone and shot a 30 second time-lapse video of the whole shoot.  It’s pretty fun and I hope you enjoy it.

A few details about what you’re seeing….

This was done in a makeshift studio space in my carport at the headquarters of the Bailward Photography empire.  I wanted to simulate the grimy corner of an old gym as the environment for the shoot, and because with the framing of the photos you don’t see a lot of the background, the corner of the carport (already fairly grimy), with a bit of “set dressing” gave some interesting elements visually.  Of course by “set dressing” I really mean “I moved the random crap sitting in the rest of the carport all into the same corner”

The equipment you see in and around is mostly fairly inexpensive lighting modifiers that I got from Amazon over the last few years.  They range from “eh, not bad for $17” to “OMG I LOVE THIS“.  In that latter category are the two ePhoto 10″x36″ stripboxes with grids with a Bowens L-Bracket to make them usable with speedlights.  The lights were triggered by the Cactus V6 wireless radio trigger.  I do have some of the newly announced Cactus V6-II triggers, but there isn’t (yet) compatibility between the original V6 and V6-II triggers, and I wanted more than two lights triggered, so I used my (vast) collection of the original V6 triggers to fire and control settings on up to four flashes at a time.

This is a throwback photo, but I had a thought about it.  Photos are made by gear, but aren’t about the gear.  This for example, just looking at it takes me right back to where I was.  The ride was on and old steam train out of Whitby, England.  We’d just spent a day at Robin Hood’s Bay and were told we just had to take this old steam train.  We finally got on it, spent far too much money for tickets, waited around some more and then took the hour or so trip out and then back.

Somewhere along the trip back I decided to see what a long exposure would do to the trees and foliage rushing by.  I moved to the section of the car with an open window, jammed my head and hand (with camera firmly strapped to it), and used the side of the train to keep the camera as steady as possible.  I knew the key to the shot was two part.

Image Elements

First, the train itself had to be stable.  A blurry shot is (with some rare exceptions), just a bad shot that you don’t share, but a blurry shot with some parts not blurry, well that’s art!

Second, there had to be the right mix of elements.  Just trees rushing by would be boring, but just landscape wouldn’t show the speed we were going by.  If the train was curved away from the camera there’d be no leading lines to lead your eye through the photo.  Looking at other photos in this series, not having the splash of colour from the flowers, or the wrong mix of land and tree and train, it just didn’t work.

Gear

For this photo I used the Pentax K-5 IIs and the Pentax DA 16-45/f4 lens.  The K-5 IIs was Pentax’s first DSLR body without an AA filter, meaning that the images were very sharp, but you had the potential of “moiré” patterns on screen doors or plaid shirts.  They later solved this in the K-3 and new K-1 (my K-1 Real World Review here) with an AA simulation mode where the lens moves ever so slightly to add just a tiny bit of blur to eliminate the moiré.  The camera had a respectable 16 megapixel sensor and was deliciously small and light (yet still compact and solid feeling) which made it a decent travel DSLR.

The DA 16-50 is not one of Pentax’s premier lenses like the DA* 16-50/2.8.  It was sharp, but not especially fast, meaning it struggled in low light. It did however, cover almost the same range as a 24-70mm lens, which by most is the perfect all around focal range for a lens you keep on your camera all day long.  It is also .78lbs, which is practically a feather compared to the new D-FA 24-70/2.8 (my review will be posted soon!) at 1.75lbs, making it that much better for travel.  It’s wide enough to get some interesting effects indoors for wide angle shots, but long enough to give you a decent portrait shot at the 45mm end (67mm equivalent).

Camera Settings and Processing

The settings for the shot were 1/15th, f/18, ISO 200.  In bright daylight the only way to get your shutter speed really low and not blow out from too much light is to restrict the amount of light going into the camera, thus, cranking up the aperture to f/18.  Looking at other photos in my Lightroom library near to this I experimented with 1/30 and 1/60 as well, but neither had the same “rush” of the landscape.

Processing in Lightroom was also fairly simple.  Bring the highlights all the way down, pop the contrast up a bit, the blacks down a bit, the clarity and vibrance up just a touch to give that “pop”.

All in all when I look at the photo I’m immediately transported back to the wonderful four weeks in the UK and that great steam train ride through the gorgeous English countryside. I have chosen to submit this photo into a project called Vantage Point, created by a new compact camera technology called Light.

This year I had the fun of shooting the Canada Day celebration at Heritage Park in Mission (my town).  Joanna and a group of amazing volunteers made the whole day come together, tons of booths, activities for the kids, food, a dog show, pony rides, a magician, various dance crews, singers…. the list goes on.

Here are a few photos from the activities this Friday!

There were dancers… these guys were absolutely adorable doing traditional Indian dancing.

I found out that modern dancers make really funny faces sometimes.

But when they weren’t they were doing awesome stuff.

There was a flag raising ceremony.  Local MLA Marc Dalton was there to hang out and enjoy the fun as well, and got a great photo with Captain Canada.

MLA Marc Dalton Hung out

The traditional logger show.  Same jokes as last year, just as good though!

There was a dog agility course setup, with everything from old dogs to fast dogs to puppies going around.

Not all dogs were part of the course though.  Some just looked adorable and hung around.

Various other demonstrations from local clubs were all over.

This tumbler was graceful diving into the mat…

Not all were quite as graceful….

Lots of activities for the kids!

The local fire department and RCMP were both out with fun stuff.

The day went off without a hitch (as far as I could tell) and everyone had a blast.

These weren’t fireworks in Mission, as the July 1st evening I was on a party cruise with Where It’s At Entertainment, but it’s hard to end a post about Canada Day without fireworks!

Cher came prepared, as they don’t (yet) know the sex of the baby they’re going to be parents to, they brought both boys and girls tiny (adorable) shoes with them.

Another must-have was props, lots of props.  A couple of maps, outlined so that BC showed up nicely on camera, and the wording all pre-written.

The chalkboard was a great idea, small enough to be held, but very versatile and it gave a variety of different photos with different looks, but a consistent message.

Photographically speaking (a great phrase, but also an amazing book by my buddy David duChemin), the lighting for this was challenging.  I thought it was going to be dark earlier, but we shot fairly close to the longest day of the year, so even at 5 or 6pm it was still basically full sun!  If you know about photography you know that bright noon sun is the worst thing to shoot in, or at least vey challenging due to shadows under the eyes, squinting, and harsh lighting.

Luckily the sun was a tiny bit lower down in the sky, and Alexandra Bridge had some great big arches casting shadows, which let me place the couple in the shadow, which gave them much nicer and more pleasing light on them, and with some careful positioning of myself, I got them, lit nicely against a sunlight background.

I can’t recommend Alexandra Bridge enough as a fun day trip if you live in the area.  It’s a gorgeous old bridge that was originally for wagons crossing the Fraser River.  Do note though, it is a bit of a hike down (and up).  Not a rough hike by any means, but if you have back or leg problems, be aware that it’s a bit of a slog up a gravel switchback trail.

Had the opportunity to shoot the Pitt Meadows Day parade and awards presentation.  It was a hot day, something that I didn’t even think about until after I had spent an hour in 30+ weather… in jeans… with no sunscreen.  Yea, my head is still flaking from the sunburn  In my defence, the weather up to that day was really bad, so when I left the house in the morning I expected it would be similarly grey and dull, not clear blue sky and 30+C!

The day started with a parade, the police and fire were all “armed” with water guns, and much water was spilled between them and the kids along the main drag of downtown Pitt Meadows.

After the parade was done, people moved into the park where there was a wide array of vendors and tents with everything from a bouncy castle, to the local (awesome) martial arts school, Yuen’s rabbits, dogs, and those big bouncy balls that they put people into!

This particular pooch looked like he was having the BEST DAY EVER, with non-stop petting and adoration.

And a skate park, where a group of kids were pulling off epic tricks on razor scooters.

The day ended with speeches and various presentations, Miss Pitt Meadows was crowned, the chief of the local Katzie band spoke, as did various dignitaries, including the person of the year.

Before the show itself, there was a lot of mingling of guests.  There were girls and guys out front serving drinks, playing games, and playing the part.  The entire hall was setup in a 20’s gangster vibe.

Which worked great for the mingling guests.

In amidst them I found two friends!  You may remember Stefanie from her great Angel Wings and 50s theme shoots, and Derek for the epic performance (most of it by his beard) at the horror themed shoot.

Stefanie was as radiant as ever.

Epic Derek

The models were all getting ready in a room in the back.

While people were waiting, there were games, a popup store, and a 4 piece band playing in the main ballroom.

Then the main event started, beautiful ladies in stunning lingerie, in all shapes sizes and colours.

The audience looking on.

The night (for me) ended with an amazing burlesque show (some NSFW images below).

Many thanks to Kristin for the invite to a great event!  Looking forward to next year!

The free version has some limits as to what you can do with it, but let’s be honest, the full version for $3.99 is a steal.

Unfortunately I don’t have an Android phone, or I’d do a full(er) review, but here is the press release with more details:

THOUSANDS OF POTENTIAL ASSIGNMENTS

Over one hundred individual assignments, everything from camera settings, rules of composition, creative shooting techniques, photographing people, landscape and nature, and more subjects. But there are thousands of possible ideas with random objects and places, combined with techniques, environments. The scavenger hunt assignment gives you lists of terms to find with your camera…with MILLIONS of possible combinations.

PHOTO365/52WEEK/30 DAY CHALLENGE LIST

The app will generate a full assignment list for your Photo 365/52 week/30 day challenge. With the daily reminder, there should be nothing stopping you from completing it!

SELFIE 365

Into selfies? There is now a Selfie365 challenge list generator to take your selfies to a new level! Thousands of fun, creative, and maybe even challenging ideas.

FAVOURITE ASSIGNMENT LIST

You can keep all your fav assignments just a tap away!

OVER 700 EXAMPLE IMAGES

Each assignment has a series of example images to demonstrate the technique or inspire you.

DAILY REMINDER

Taking part in a 365 day challenge? Get the app to send you a reminder each day to get your photo assignment to keep you on track.

NO NETWORK REQUIRED

The app is completely self-contained and does not require a wifi or network connection. No matter where you are, you can always get an assignment.

Apps like this are important, because sometimes you hit that “I have no idea what to do” point, no matter how creative you are.  Even if you have a back pocket full of “someday” projects, having a little (metaphorical) voice on your shoulder saying “maybe try something with fire today” or “why not an upside down selfie?” may get the gears turning and put you on a completely different path of creativity, letting you create something even more awesome.

You can find all this and more at http://www.learnphoto.ca/apps/.

Other Resources

You may want to dig a bit deeper, if so, there are some links below:

• Android free app
• Android full paid app
• iOS version
• Noel’s Instagram
• My look back at my own Photo 365 Project

So much hair here!

Last year a friend of mine at O’Riginals Trading Co had a successful crowdfunding campaign for a very cool pair of sunglasses with a unique design. While I realized that these glasses and my face probably weren’t a good fit, my photography and the glasses definitely were.

I arranged a shoot on spec for him (mostly for me though), and while it was really only the barest description of a “real” commercial shoot, I wanted to treat it as if it was and that I was a fancy New York (just as an example) photographer contracted to get awesome product and lifestyle shots for a client.

Thinking about shooting for a product is much different than family or wedding shoot. The product has to be the focus with the models supporting the product and not the other way around.

The Team

My first choice as a model was Adam Kelliher. Adam has a unique look that I thought would compliment the industrial look of the Sterling 53’s. In fact the first thing I thought was “I need to get that bearded and dreadlocked dude with fire reflected in the glasses.” We’ve tried to work together before, but timing and travel just didn’t match up. This time we made it work though.

Adam brought along Shelby Alexander, a model he knew who turned out to be awesome and fun to work with (who knew!?), and I brought along my buddy and fellow photographer Monte from Fly in the Eye Photographic Arts to shoot beside me and to exchange ideas with. I’ve worked with Monte many times before and he’s a great combination of fun and enthusiastic as well as an amazingly talented photographer.

Last but not least was Tanya Trip, a film student who had contacted me to shoot behind the scenes video. This was the perfect opportunity! You can see the finished behind the scenes video at the bottom of this post, or click here to head over to YouTube now (but please come back!).

Location 1 – The Parking Garage

I wanted to start with some controlled light to allow me to really sculpt the shot, and not have to deal with controlling both environmental lights and the fire I wanted reflected in the glasses. Also it gave me an opportunity to shoot some studio shots of the models with the glasses on. We didn’t have a studio, and the weather was hot. Adam’s apartment is full to the gills with art projects, so we chose the next best place, the underground parking garage! It was both dark (so the light could be controlled easily), and quiet with no (well ones) nosey neighbours wondering what we were doing.

Because of the properties of light we could set up the flashes and as long as they were far enough from the back wall, no light was bright enough to spill into the photo, giving up a black background.

Both Adam and Shelby were great, giving great poses that really directed the viewer to the glasses.

The only downside here was we had a relatively small flame to deal with, basically a bowel with some burning paper in it, not a roaring bonfire, so I had to push the ISO up fairly high and have a longer shutter speed to let the light from the flash and the light from the flames mix nicely.

Location Two – Industrial Area

After packing up the gear Adam led us over to an industrial area not far away with concrete forms and a great view of the bridge (and setting sun) in the background. No lights here, just a camera end the subjects and a great area to play in!

They call it “golden hour” for a reason I guess.

Location Three – The beach

By this time the sun was fairly close to setting and we had to move fast before we lost all the light. We raced (at a safe and legal speed of course) down to Fraser River Park which has a shoreline along the mighty Fraser River.

This let me mix flash and available light to show off the sunset in the background. The technique of dragging the shutter let the sunset “burn in” and mix nicely with the flash illuminating the model.

Other shot ideas we played with were reflections in the glasses and then Adam wanted to go out on a proverbial limb and posed on a slimy rock in the Fraser.

Last but not least we had a couple of smoke bombs in the car (best not to ask why) which led to some very cool setups with Adam dancing around like he was summoning spirits.

Granted by this point we were doing more fun stuff and less “commercial” shots. Mostly sunglasses look good in the sun or sunset, ya know?

Below you’ll find the video for the shoot. Huge kudos to Tanya for her awesome work!

Cast and Crew

Making cool images like this isn’t easy. Planning, equipment, vision, but most of all a great team is required. This shoot would have gone very differently if there weren’t awesome folks like these to make it happen.

• Model – Adam Kelliher
• Model – Shelby Alexander
• Videographer – Tanya Trip (youtube channel)
• Product – O’Riginals Sterling 53 / Seán O’Regean
• Photographers
  • Alan Bailward (that’s me!)
  • Monte Arnold – Fly in the Eye Photographic Arts

Some of the more interesting events I cover is a lot of local Vancouver hip hop artists.  Most shows are pretty damn fun, and at some shows the lighting setup is pretty great.  Fortune Sound Club near Chinatown in Vancouver is one of those places.  Their set up has some great moving coloured side lights that if you can catch them just right, you get a great “rock star spotlight” look.  Combine that with front lights on the stage that you can see the performers without having to use a flash, and boom, some great looks.

Big props to the performers.  I’ve gotten to know them well over the last couple of years and they are passionate artists who really love what they’re doing.

I’ve shot with Terra-Jean on and off since I got serious with portrait photography in 2011.  She’s always a blast to shoot with and when she came to me suggesting a lifestyle shoot in downtown Vancouver I had no choice but to say “hell yes!”

The shots above were done in the Blood Alley area of Vancouver.  It’s an…. “interesting” area.  Historic I’m sure, but if you stray up the wrong set of stairs you’ll fine some…. “interesting” people hanging out or nodding off.  That said, the iron railings had a great look and gives a very “old school Paris” vibe.

Not far away there are alleys with some amazing graffiti and opportunities for some interesting photos.

TJ always has a strong look and I love it when she gives me the “strong and powerful” look, with just that little bit of attitude.  This was a great shoot and a fun way to spend an afternoon of photography in beautiful downtown Vancouver!

I’ve known Shaun for several years now.  We worked together for a while, and have kept in touch since then.  In fact, while we were working together I got four kittens that were orphaned and had to be hand raised from 3 weeks old.  Shaun took the plunge and adopted one of them when they were old enough, and Shadow has been a constant companion to him since (except the one night when the cat decided he couldn’t possibly get down from the tree and was left up there until he got his own stupid self down, but that’s another story…).

Anyway, Shaun needed some new headshots as his tech job has been getting to the point that websites and business cards needed something a bit more up to date.  These were all done in his condo in Maple Ridge.  I wanted something that injected a little personality and used the environment a little bit.

And of course what photoshoot is complete without some photos of our furry friends?

Best cat ever!

If you’re interested in headshots like this for yourself for work, social networking, or similar, go ahead and book a session and lets make some awesome photos!

I got my Pentax K-1 last night and have spent the entire day with it, shooting and getting a feel for the camera, and thought the Pentaxians in the crowd might be interested to read a real world review of Pentax’s newest camera and first full frame offering.

Notice that you won’t find any test charts or shots or the same scene at different ISOs… there are lots of those out already but I wanted to do a more holistic review. The “how does it feel” review.

I was really happy to get this

My Gear and Type of Photography

Before today I shot with the K-3 and the Sigma 17-50/2.8 (24-70 equivalent) and DA* 50-135/2.8 (70-200 equivalent). I’ve shot with the K-3 since it came out and have used it for many hours and tens of thousands of shots. I know my gear and how to push it and how hard.

I primarily shoot people — Weddings and portraits — with occasional events and local music shows (hip hop and battle rap) in very dim conditions.

My new girlfriend and my favourite children

In my arsenal I’ve also accumulated the Three Amigos (the FA* Limiteds… 31, 43 and 77) and fell in love with the sharpness of the Sigma 85/1.4 (even if you have to be in the next county to get a full body shot) and the wonderful 100/2.8 macro!

Update: Note that the Sigma 85/1.4 has some issues with the K-1, and it’s recommended you not use it due to the potential for the body to get scratched.

My K-1 Test Shooting Situations

Today was a busy day. As I write this it’s past midnight in a pizza joint in Surrey and I’m shooting hip hop artist Snak The Ripper. Today I have the K-1 in three distinct shooting situations for my testing.

1. Visiting s friend in the NICU (infant) unit of the local hospital. Testing sharpness and clarity in a “normal” situation. Nothing crazy here.
2. A portrait session. In a house, setup in strobist style with flashes and softboxes. This sees how the sensor works in optimal conditions. Sharp lenses, lots of controlled light, lost ISO. Basically the best case scenario.
3. Walking around downtown Surrey and taking a few photos of buildings.
4. A hip-hop show, in a pizza joint with crappy lighting vaguely resembling a black hole. Basically the worst-case scenario. This tests low light, auto focus in low light, fast moving subjects and high ISO response.

I’ll go through some of the specifics of each situation after I go through some general thoughts on the pros and cons of the new body.

The New Design

Overall

Pentax K-1 from WhatDigitialCamera.com

While the K-1 looks and feels a lot like the K-3 and will be immediately familiar and usable by anyone who is comfortable with Pentax gear, the K-1 has some subtle and not so subtle changes.

First of all let’s get the big ones out of the way. It’s bigger and heavier, but not crazily so. If you’re looking for a lighter travel camera you need to look at Fuji or the M43 lineups from Olympus, Sony and others. If you’re comfortable with a K-3 or K20D this will be a little bigger, but not back-breakingly so.

I’m going to go through some of the changes below, mentioning each one and how it affects me. If there’s something not mentioned, chances are I haven’t noticed it, don’t care, or it’s such a small thing that it doesn’t warrant much comment (like the new font and look for the menu system… nice, but barely worth mentioning). Beware, it’s not all sunshine and roses.

The Images

This is most important, and this is the last part of this review I’ve written, mostly because it’s almost a given that they are big and beautiful. And they are. Here’s a 100% crop from the headshots I did with Shaun. Sharp as a razor and huge on my monitor. Nothing like zooming into an eye on a 27” monitor. Images come out at 4912×7360 pixels, with DNG files weighing in at just under 50mb per image.

Here’s a portrait sample with only basic adjustments.

Headshot of Shaun

And the 100% crop.

100% Crop of headshot

More interestingly, and I thought this was just me until I saw DPReview talking about the K-1’s impressive dynamic range, but the ability to pull the exposure up from an underexposed image was, in a word, impressive. The amount of shadow noise was low, and I know it’s hard to quantify (at least until I saw the DPReview article), but the files felt “fat” in terms of the data that was there. In fact, DPReview says

In conclusion, the K-1 gives one of the best Raw dynamic range results we’ve ever seen, when shooting in single shot mode and absolutely outstanding results in circumstances where you can use the pixel shift mode.

I knew that going to full format was going to give some advantages in terms of being able to push files farther, but I didn’t realize that Pentax was going to blow past the competition in this respect.

Wifi

I’ve been looking forward to this forever. Hearing Zack Arias talk about how cool and easy it is to shoot dangerous things by using remote triggering, or Derrick Story and his Nimble Photographer philosophy and ability to pull data right off the camera and post from your smartphone sounds great.

Via parkcameras.com

So far — mostly — so good. The first time I connected it the camera froze up hard, so hard I had to pull the battery out to get it to turn off. Not sure what was wrong, but when I tested it more, connecting with the Image Sync app, it worked with no issues at all. I could use the remote trigger function to focus and take shots, and the image sync to pull photos from the camera into my iPhone’s camera roll to then edit and share. I’m still a bit worried about the lockups I had, but I’ll chalk it up (for now) to first day jitters.

New Function Dial

Pentax K-1 Top View via PentaxForums.com

Probably the biggest surprise and change is the new Function Dial and Setting Dial. This is a third control wheel available for your right hand while shooting. Using the Function Dial you can select from a series of settings such as ISO, EV +/-, HDR, Bracketing, Wifi, or Crop mode. Then you use the Settings Dial to adjust that setting.

Some of these settings make sense. This gives you the option of having a dedicated ISO dial or a dedicated EV dial, which makes complete sense, but other settings, like Wifi, doesn’t make as much sense. If you look at it as a shortcut to getting into a few levels of menu it does make more sense, but the options available seem mostly to be things that you don’t need instant access to.

And while it does seem silly to have two ways of setting the ISO so close to each other (either holding down the ISO button and rolling the rear dial, or using the Setting Dial with the Function Dial set to ISO), I did use it while shooting the Hip Hop show, where the spotlight gave a 2-4 stop difference in light if the performer moved a foot or two right or left. I got used to it surprisingly quickly and it felt pretty good.

The downside is for the ISO setting it didn’t seem to always work. I’d click it up or down and it wouldn’t always change the ISO, and I’d have to move it again. Also for some functions there’s no feedback for settings. For example for bracketing you’re just enabling or disabling the setting, the sub-settings (number of EV steps and number of images taken) still need to be set through the rear controls. Same with wifi… The only indication that the button is doing anything is the blue wifi light goes on and off. Other settings there isn’t even that. The function dial has small writing and no illumination as well, so if you’re in a dark club and are trying to set it to change ISO, you better have a flashlight.

Smaller Top LCD

The downside from the addition of the new dials on the top of the body is the top LCD panel got shrunken considerably. Not a huge deal, the main important information (shutter speed, aperture, ISO, battery, etc) is still shown, but you lose a lot over the K-3. Flash settings, bracketing / remote / timer setting, capture formats, metering mode, AF point settings, and more are now all relegated to having to be checked in the info menu on the back screen or in the viewfinder.

Here’s a comparison between the information from the K-3 and the K-1, taken from the manuals for each camera.

The pure amount of feedback you lose here kinda sucks. A lot of the previously mentioned complaints about the lack of feedback for the function dial would be addressed here easily.

However I think this is an “I’ll get used to it” change for me, with the exception of losing the EV bar scale. I used this a lot, and it made it very easy to do things like check your exposure in manual by simply pointing the camera at pavement or grass and seeing what your exposure was like. Now you can’t check your exposure any way other than holding the camera up to your eye.

It also seems harder to quickly see the settings in the LCD. Might be my eyes are getting older, but the half-as-big LCD display will definitely decrease the “glanceability” of your current settings.

High ISO

1/100th f/2.0 ISO 20,000

“Bloody Spectacular” is my completely off the cuff review. In the hip hop show the lighting is, as I mentioned before, horrible. I was shooting at ISO 20,000 and to me it looks as clean (or cleaner) than 8000 did from the K-3. I’d very seldom push the K-3 past 6400 if I could avoid it, as that was about the limit for digital noise that I could get rid of with some noise reduction. Beyond that things got bad and I’d only push it that hard if I absolutely had to. Looks like this gives me another 2 stops (or more) of acceptable noise.

Here’s a 100% crop of the shot above. Settings are 1/100th, f/2.0, ISO 20,000, with no noise reduction in Lightroom.  Other than pumping up the shadows a bit, nothing additional has been done.  You’ll probably say “but it’s got noise in it”, and you’re right, but this is also about the same (or better) than what ISO 6400 on the K-3 looks like.

100% crop of ISO 20,000 Image, no noise reduction applied.

The Shutter

This might be another case of me being hyper aware of every tiny difference, but I found the shutter button to feel, for lack of a better term, “mushy”. I wanted the very first shot out of the K-1 to be of my friends new baby. New camera, new life, symbolic right? But this is the very first shot I took with the the camera:

Image 0001.. out of focus!

Out of focus because when I half pressed to take the shot I was a tiny bit close and the FA 77/1.8 didn’t focus that closely, yet I still managed to fire the shutter. It’s almost like the resistance going from “half press to focus” and “full press to fire” is just a little less. I’d chalk it up to me, as I got used to it very quickly, but someone in the Pentaxian Facebook group mentioned they had the same thing.

Shot 0002, much better

Luckily I was pretty happy with shot 0002

I tend to touch the shutter to wake the camera up or turn off the preview on the LCD, and I’m finding I’m taking more photos accidentally because of this. I’m planning to go to the store to compare my copy against others to see if this is something only my K-1 has or if it’s how the new design has made things. If it is just me this might be something I’ll trade mine back in for, as it’s right on the edge of being annoying.   Here’s a really terrible diagram of what I mean if it’s not clear as mud already.

The New Viewfinder

One of the other big changes in the K-1 is thew new viewfinder. Previously the viewfinder used LEDs to show focus points, and an LCD display along the bottom for settings display. Now the K-1 has an LCD overlay, meaning that it can, among other things, show multiple focus points at once. Other new tricks is the grid line overlay can be changed by changing a setting in the menu (or quick access through the Setting Dial.

(Video via Pentax Forums)

I did find it a bit hard to see the focus point sometimes in darker environments. Because it’s not a bright red LED flashing the display of where you’re focused is a bit more subtle and may take time to get used to.

That Funky Rear LCD

Pentax LCD setup via Imaging-Resource.com

I almost forgot to mention this. It does kind of fall in the “meh” category. It’s super-cool, but unless you’re doing video or holding the camera at odd angles while shooting it probably won’t affect you. I did use it taking this photo of my friend Shaun’s cat “Shadow” though, definitely made that easier.

Shadow the cat, taken from his level using the articulated LCD

The decision to not put it on a traditional hinge mechanism is a very Pentax thing to do though, even if it does make it so there’s no selfie mode.

Other Little Changes

Here’s a quick list of other details or new little tweaks and things I’ve found or noticed.

• Finally Pentax users can enjoy a flash sync speed of 1/200th, compared to the 1/180th or 1/160th that we had before. It’s not a huge change, but at least puts sync speed on par with Canon’s latest offering (though still behind the Nikon D810’s 1/250th).
• GPS works as advertised. One quick button press to turn it on and Lat / Long / Height / Angle data is written to your RAW files automatically. Of course it will decrease your battery life if it’s on constantly.
• There is no popup flash anymore. I never used it myself as a flash, but it was nice to have a commander mode for other Pentax flashes in a pinch. Most of the time now I’m using Cactus V6 remote triggers to fire off my flashes, but once and a while I would forget and would have to use the popup.
• Another new button showed up on the left of the lens mount, a lock button, which you can press to keep settings (you can choose from two different sets) from being changed. Seems an odd thing to dedicate a button to, but handy I guess if you are handing the camera to someone, or want to be sure you don’t accidentally change any settings. I guess.
• The Raw/FX button on the side of the lens can no longer be set to quickly activate bracketing mode. A bit of a bummer, as it was a handy way to quickly get to HDR mode, but now I guess there’s the Function Dial to do that.
• The K-3 had an odd mode in addition to AF-S (single auto-focus) and AF-C (continuous autofocus) called AF-A (autofocus auto, where the camera tried to figure out if/when you needed one or the other). This is something that I never had work and in this body it’s gone.
• The strap lugs now have little plastic bits in them instead of the faux leather bits.
• Another “only Pentax would do that” change is adding a series of small LED lights around the body to help with things like putting lenses on in the dark or seeing which way your SD card goes in. It’s small, but another “holy crap this is handy” change, especially when trying to swap lenses in a dark club.
• Autofocus speed may or may not be improved. I haven’t done any testing and can’t be sure if it feels faster just because it’s new, like my car seems to perform better when it’s just been washed!
• Overall performance is great. The dreaded “I just took five shots in a row and want to see the last one really quickly but it’s just sitting and showing me the hourglass” situation seems to be mostly gone. I can view images almost immediately even after a burst. No more telling a client “just hold on a few more seconds” when trying to show them a photo.

Conclusion

I think that the Pentax K-1 is a high end and capable camera that any current Pentax user will be very happy with. It will be immediately familiar but has some subtle, and not-so-subtle, design tweaks that will augment the fantastic new sensor. If you have a collection of FA glass you will be very happy. If not, you’ll probably want to find some used, or (and mostly if you’re a wedding shooter for example) invest in the new DFA lenses (15-30, 24-70, and 70-200) to get the most out of your camera (I can hear my own wallet crying right now).

Pros

• Great sensor and image quality
• Ergonomic and familiar design
• Older FA lenses are fairly easy to come by
• Many new options and features to enjoy and enhance the shooting experience (tilt-y LCD, GPS, Wifi, Pixel Shift technology, etc)
• New Function Dial opens up some new possibilities
• High ISO improved by 2 or more stops

Cons

• DA/DA* lenses will only give you 15 megapixel images and you’ll have to frame through the viewfinder with the crop overlay
• Limited number of new full frame (DFA) lenses available
• Smaller top LCD
• Some possible issues with Wifi and the shutter feel
• Slower FPS than the K-3 (4 vs 8.3 in full fame mode)

This is not a complete no-brainer. If you have a K-3 or K-3II, unless you need (and I’m the first to I admit that I didn’t need to get this camera) the more megapixels and full frame, the question of an upgrade is a bit of a push. It’s the best price for this size of sensor on a DSLR (about $1500USD less that the competition), but at $2499 Canadian (or $1799 USD) it’s still a hefty chunk of change. Also if you don’t have many, or any, full frame lenses, the benefits go down as well. If you do have full frame lenses and a bit of cash burning a hole in your pocket, go for it!

The Pentax K-1 Is For:

• Users with Pentax FA lenses
• Landscape photographers looking to eke out the highest quality images possible
• Portrait shooters (especially with the Sigma 85/1.4 or the Pentax FA 77/1.8 Limited…. mmmm… that bokeh…)
• Pentax users who have been waiting for an amazing new camera to light up their lives
• People who care about the “zen” of the camera, not a pure numbers checklist of feature tick boxes

The Pentax K-1 is not for:

• Sports photographers (lets be honest, Pentax has never been for sports photographers)
• Users with no full frame lenses
• Video shooters (I didn’t really go into this, but Canon and Nikon offerings have more for video people I’m told)
• Folks on a budget

Gallery

Other Resources

• DPReview talks about the K-1’s dynamic range.
• DPReview video overview
• Pentax-forums – Low light and pixel shift samples
• Pentax-forums – 10 things that make the K-1 unique
• The K-1 Manual
• Photography Blog Review
• Pixel-Shift in depth
• K-1 tethering plugin

We started with a couple of shots outside.  We had great weather with a nice sunny sky but some open shade.  Andrea was very easy to work with and looks great in these natural light photos.After this we moved inside and I set up my portable studio inside one of the rooms.  It was a lovely large room with a nice dark feel giving a very cool effect that reflected what she wanted for her headshots, giving something a bit more than the normal “headshot on white background” (which we did as well) that gave a bit more of the “I’m an awesome stuntwoman” feel.

Interestingly, one of the things you want as a stuntwoman is to look smaller than you are.  Andrea has muscles from her stunt training and parkour work, but if you’re doubling a 90-pounds-soaking-wet actress for a scene, you need to give the impression you’re less hardcore.  For this we chose the above pose that hides a bit of her muscle, but still makes her look elegant and employable.

Makeup was a natural look and done by the very talented Maple Ridge based Jen Vanderzalm.

I’m pretty sure that I saw this hallway this week on The Flash…

Being a stunt person there was no way that I was letting Andrea go without setting up some “stunt” shots.  For this we chose two locations and Andrea basically did jumps and flips over and over again while I got the timing for the photos working.  You’d be surprised how hard it is to get the peak action while someone’s flying through the air!

And the team celebrates after a successful shoot!

Photography: Bailward Photography (me!)
Hair and Makeup: Dames & Dolls Makeup By Jen Vanderzalm (Web / Facebook / Instagram)

The final day there I woke up early and took my camera out to take some photos of the sunset.  I found that I wasn’t sleeping in super-late (I’m not some young party crazy guy), but by 8 or 9 the sun is up and blazing hot already, and I had yet to see the sun rise.   So I walked down to the beach, put my phone down and spent the next hour taking photos, panoramas, HDRs, and all angles and framings that I could.

The morning was already light, but the sun wasn’t up.  As it rose up the sky got lighter and eventually a red ball was visible on the horizon.  It rose above, and just when it was fully visible it went back behind the wall of smog and pollution that had been hovering along the horizon from the start of the week, not bad, but enough that we didn’t seem to get those “all the gods painting the sky with unicorn tipped paintbrushes of angels” type of sunsets or sunrises (not that they were anything but wonderful of course.

When the sun rose high enough it hit the big puffy clouds that were hanging around, giving them some wonderful light.  After that it started to feel like a normal day and I headed back to the room to drop my camera off before going back out for another quick dip in the ocean before I headed home.

So now I’m back, catching up with email, and getting back on track.  Head over to Bailward Wedding Photography to see more details of the wedding or you can view a quick preview of the wedding currently posted on Facebook in this album.

What I did with my phone you might like to see.  I pointed it over the beach, set it on time lapse mode and ignored it for the hour I was shooting.  The resulting time lapse is, in my opinion, pretty nice and a decent representation of what it’s like to be there.  Please enjoy it below!

I love being able to give back where I can.  I can’t build houses or cook meals, but I can take photos that don’t suck all the time, and somewhere in my travels I found Michelle and the Putting On the Glitz project.

We all work together to provide local high school graduates in need with ‘formal attire’ so that they can attend their graduation festivities with pride.

In short, this means that students in need who can’t afford the hundreds or in some cases thousands of dollars to have a “proper” grad experience (dresses and tuxes and hair and makeup and formal photos and limos and whatnot) get sponsored by someone (so it isn’t for just anyone) to have that experience.

This involves volunteers who set up a gymnasium full of dresses and clothing, hairdressers and makeup artists and barbers to get everyone looking their best, people who will help the kids look for the right dresses, jewelry, shoes, ties, hats, and anything else to make them look and feel like a princess or prince for the day.  The night finishes with amazingly done senior portraits of them in their new attire, and formal grad photos with them in cap and gown.

Unfortunately due to privacy concerns, I can’t show you any of the photos of the kids, but I can show you some of the behind the scenes of the event before it was filled with kids to show you the pure scale of the entire operation.  Michelle and her team deserve all the credit in the world for getting this madness organized.  An amazing group doing wonderful things for deserving kids.

Here are some photos of the gym and the volunteers who were responsible for this year’s event.

You can find out more about Putting On The Glitz at the PLEA website, or through the Facebook event.

I work at a little company called Left (formerly Left of the Dot), right in the heart of the Fraser Valley in Maple Ridge, and on April 1st I celebrated five years with them.  In our morning standup meeting, my boss, John, recited this poem:

You’ve grown old fine fellow, in our company
Five years in… And still – you do tolerate me.
You do not bitch, or moan, or gesticulate
Wait… that’s not right. Let me ameliorate.
You’ve grown old fine fellow, in our company
Five years at Left, and this is what you’ve done to me
I started skinny and Chris had hair
Now look at him standing over there
Hmmm… my tribute seems to be going adrift
These words are wrong, but perhaps a gift
Might lift your spirits above the highest peak
As we say thanks to our grey beard geek
So Lefties do note this stuck point here
Alan and Joe are out, they’ll be back for beer.

(Joe is my friend and awesome designer and owner of Full Frame Marketing who has also been working with Left for a number of years.

Now, because of SEO you’ll already know how this story ended. But a quick run through anyway… I had no idea what was going on, at one point during the day Joe disappeared, but it was just out for a meeting. Around lunch we were pulled out and John and Chris, the founders of Left, took us out.  We had an …. “adequate” lunch at the cafe at the Pitt Meadows airport, I think I remarked that I was happy that five years garnered a lunch of a chicken wrap…

After though, we were taken to Sky Helicopters and introduced to another Alan who was going to be our pilot.  A bit of this and that, many, many thanks given, and we were handed a mysterious picnic basket and sent on our way.

Taking off in a helicopter is weird.  My first time in and the sensation of lifting up, but not being entirely stable, was odd.  After that we took the 20 or so minute trip up to a glacier in the cascades, chatting with the pilot and looking at the really unique view we had out of the bubble cockpit.

Arriving on the top of the glacier we touched down to something out of a movie.  Cold snow below us, mountains surrounding us on three sides, a view (though a bit smoggy) down the valley with a view of what I assume is Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge.  The sky was the brilliant blue of a rare gem and the sun was blazing down through a cloudless sky.  Even though it was cold we were warmed by the sun and the excitement of doing something we’d never done before.

Pictures were taken, selfies snapped, etc. The picnic basket was opened up and lo and behold some lovely scotch and two glasses came out and we toasted to our good fortune.

After about twenty minutes of marvelling at the view, the location and our good luck we got back in, and flew back home.  The trip was fantastic and my huge thanks to my amazing company for the unique experience!

Thanks goes to:

• John and Chris and Left of the Dot
• Sky Helicopters

I’ve known Krysta for a while, we shot several times together and she’s always a blast to work with.  I called her up a couple of weeks ago to help me work on some new lighting techniques.  I’d come across two interesting ways to do lighting and I really wanted to play around with them.

Sadly, none of the photos in this post are using anything but natural light and a reflector!  It did not go well.  Both were utter failures through the fault of the execution on my side (or maybe the instructions weren’t as clear as they should have been, or the authors embellished a little as to what else they did to get it done, and it wasn’t as easy as “put this here, put that there, and boom, amazing portrait lighting.”

Either way, after no success with the second method, though some of that was due to outdoor wind and my lights deciding that they had no interest in firing for me properly, I said a few naughty words and then “ok, lets just take some photos.”  Krysta is a realtor and thought something professional to use would work, so in a lovely little park in Langley as the background, with some nice houses behind her, we got a few great shots that I’m happy to share!

I’m super proud of my friend Suzy for the grand opening of her new ballet studio – The Ballet Lounge.  I was invited to the grand opening and (of course) brought a camera along (with only the Pentax FA 31mm Limited on it).  There were quite a few people, drinks, snacks, and a great look at the just completed studio!

Located right on Granville St. there’s a great view right out the front.

But seriously the cool stuff is inside.

Check out that ballet bar!

If you don’t remember Suzy for some reason, you probably will remember her from my two ballerina photo shoots, ballerina in the city and ballerina in the city part 2.

Here are some images from the grand opening.

So if you’re wanting a different and fun way to get a great workout, head over to The Ballet Lounge to check out their Ballet Fit classes.  You can contact them by stopping by 1340 Granville Street in Vancouver or by calling 778-379-7543 or emailing info@balletlounge.com.

Tell Suzy that Alan sent you!

This Easter long weekend I had a ton of plans, then plans changed, weather disrupted things, and basically all my shoots and fun stuff (other than seeing the new Batman V Superman with a couple of buddies) fell through.  At the last minute a local model, Janelle, was available, had her makeup done up by her sister and with her boyfriend in tow (I am always happy to have an unpaid pack mule and VAL – Voice Activated Nightstand) we headed out.

Timing is always important, and we managed to hit things just about right.

• There was cloud cover to prevent super harsh sun from creeping in.
• There wasn’t so much cloud cover that we didn’t get to see the sun as it set.
• Weather wasn’t that cold (though I did Photoshop a few goosebumps off her arms!)

I love how the 85/1.4 was able to separate her from the background beautifully!

While we started off with some more simple “girl in forest” but as the sun went down I really loved how the light filtered through the trees.  We didn’t have the budget or gear to get a couple of air blowers to kick up a bunch of dust to get the “god rays” visible, so we had to make do with just beautiful backlit cedar trees.

I did accentuate the backlighting a bit.  Careful observers may see a gelled bare flash to the back and left of Janelle, giving a bit of a boost to the natural sunset behind her.

Here’s a quick behind the scenes shot with the boyfriend, acting as lightstand holder, coat holder, and pretty much holder for anything we didn’t want falling over or touching the (still wet from the rain the day before) ground.  He was a good sport about it though!

Thanks for reading!  If you’re interested in doing a cool fashion shoot like this in or around the lower mainland please contact me and lets set something up!

I have a confession to make. While I trumpet the truth of “buying more gear won’t make you a better photographer,” and I do truly believe it, secretly I’m a slithering ball of lust for new gear. I know in my heart that that new lens, camera, or bit of lighting gear isn’t going to matter a bit when it comes to creating photos that impact the viewers, create emotional connections with my wedding clients, or just plain make people’s hearts jump for joy…. but oh my goodness they’re so SHINY!

Ahem.

So I recently purchased one of the “Three Amigos“ of the Pentax FA Limited series the FA 31/1.8 Limited. These lenses are semi-legendary in their construction and sharpness (even by mainstream media who don’t normally look at the Pentax side of the world), with the 31 bring known for its great bokeh. Through chance, scheming and a forgiving wife and bank account it is mine.

I don’t have a fancy test lab or sharpness charts or ant of that, so I relied on my own unscientific method, the “lets take it out for a spin” test suite.

Pentax FA 31mm/1.8 Test Images

First up was a wander along the dyke in Maple Ridge near Jerry Sulina Park on the north side of Maple Ridge. High noon isn’t the best time for photos, but you work with what you can.

I particularly like this shot using the sun for back lighting.

Next up was some time near my day job near the Golden Ears Bridge. We have some great cherry trees in the property, and I wanted to see how a shallow (and deeper) depth of field work work. Again using back lighting in some of the shots, just for fun.

And a random dog (named “Lilo”).

Last but not least I was out that evening to Abbotsford where I met up with my buddy Monte, fellow photographer and owner of Studio Rouge. While I was waiting for him to get ready so we could get some excellent sushi over at Hana Sushi, I used the opportunity to get some photos of the setting sun down a nice little residential street.  Monte also had some lovely cherry trees and as the sun went a bit lower on the horizon, the moon showed it’s face, and I played again with using the moon in the background and the cherry tree blossoms in the foreground to create some depth to the image.

This photo is basically right out of camera, it really did feel like something out of the summer of the 70s…

So my test results say, unsurprisingly, that I love this lens. It’s not perfect, definitely wide open it’s not as sharp as stopped down a bit, and there seems to be a bit of ghosting or chromatic aberration in certain situations (this was designed for film and not digital, so I think it is missing some of the fancy new “digital” coatings that the more modern lenses have), but the sharpness, great bokeh, speed and great field of view, along with of course the high quality construction, more than make up for those minor things. I also know I’ll love it even more when the Full Frame Pentax K-1 is released next month.

References

• Lost stories of the 3 FA Lenses
• FA 31mm Wikipedia page
• Purchase the Pentax FA 31/1.8 on Amazon

It was a fun time, relaxed and easy, and we alternated between inside and a few shots outside on the deck with the evergreens in the backyard as a backdrop.

If you’re interested in some relaxed and beautiful portraits like these, contact me and set up a portrait session!

Landscape photography is a lot harder than portrait photography.  With portraits you can move the person, change the lights, change how they’re posed, their wardrobe… basically anything you want you can change.  With landscape photography, you can get to the perfect location, at the perfect time of day (4am I hear), get the absolute perfect composition… and the sunset isn’t good.  Or the weather is crappy.  Or there’s not a cloud in the sky.  And you can do nothing about it but come back the next morning (at 4am).

I met Brad Koop through the fact he’s another Pentax shooter (there aren’t a lot of us around) and that he has some really amazing landscape photographer (as you can see here).  We met up for a drink at the historic Mission Springs and talked photography.  I mentioned that I wanted to find waterfalls to shoot (possibly with a person in front of them) and he pointed me to Steelhead Falls, about 10 minutes drive from downtown Mission.

I will say that the trip was unintentionally long for me.  I got to the switchback and parked, saw the trail entrance, and followed it.  The trail went down the hill, switch backing along the road, which made perfect sense as I expected it would cut inland when I hit the dam at the bottom of the hill.  When it didn’t, with a sinking heart I re-checked the map (hard to zoom in on an embedded google map with a custom overlay on an iPhone unfortunately), and realized that I had gone the wrong way.  I’m not in awesome shape, so the prospect of hiking back up the hill without any photos as my trophy, sucked.  But I did it, huffing and puffing all the way up.

At the top I realized where I’d gone wrong, and saw the other trail entrance.  Ugh.  Ok, didn’t look too long on the map so I trudged along, all the while realizing that a) I had brought too much gear and b) that while the Peak Design Everyday Messenger Bag is awesome, a better bag might have been a backpack style, if for nothing more than to save my shoulder… there’s only so much padding can do.

Hiking along farther I almost gave up, but then there was a sign pointing the way.  Of course, it basically pointed straight down, a narrow staircase with barely enough room for my butt and a tripod, but we made it.  It was fairly dark, maybe 5pm at this point, the sun was basically down, it was raining, things were getting darker, and I started wondering just how many bears were out here, and how tasty I would be to them.  Spent a few minutes shooting some shots and scouting the area (for the aforementioned model I want to bring), and then packed up and headed home.

Turns out going up is way harder than going down, who knew.  I did make it though, and discovered there’s a parking lot almost at the top of the hill, which I’ll definitely be using next time.  I also avoided any bears that were in the area, and returned unscathed but tired and sweaty.

We started the day mid-afternoon, with a gruelling drive into Vancouver (seriously, how can traffic be that bad on Saturday at 2pm?), where I picked her up from her apartment, along with her friend Margaret, who had agreed to assist and had unwittingly been enrolled to be my Voice Activated Lightstand (or VAL as they are known in photographic circles… or “person who gets to hold the freezing cold metal stand in the wind and rain while moving it imperceptibly tiny distances at the whim of an unreasonable photographer yelling at them thirty feet away” in normal person circles).

First stop was the Vancouver Seawall, but not just anywhere on it, the spot with a good view of the Lions Gate Bridge , so I could get photos with it in the background.  The location worked really well, just past a side sitting area there were a set of stairs going down to the edge of the water (low tide luckily) which offered a great view of the bridge, along with some interesting things in the foreground.  Of course the most interesting of these was going to be the amazing ballerina, who was ready to brave the less than ideal weather (not rain, but close) in her tutu.  Margie was awesome and held the light stand at just the right angle (while I yelled at her to move it three millimetres higher, lower, left and right from thirty feet away).

Here are some of the images that we made.

Next step was a shot that I got inspired by another local photographer and Pentaxian Brad Koop (@bradkoop) and a great shot of his up at Whytecliff Park.  I thought it was a great photo, but could I do something like it with say, a ballerina in the foreground?

Getting to the islet wasn’t that bad, I only slipped twice.  Then forgot my tripod in the car  and slipped twice coming back then as well.  This is definitely a shoot to get to when it’s light and leave when it’s light.  The rocks are not super fun if you can’t see where you’re going!  The sunset was…. “ok”.  I’d love to come back with the same setup on a night when there’s one of those “holy crap I can just die now” sunsets that we sometimes get out here.  I’m not going to complain though!

Technically it was fairly tricky.  I used a 1/4 CTO gel on the flash to give it a bit of warmth, and as the sun went down poor Suzy had to hold her poses on a barnacle covered rock for longer and longer, at at the end of the night she was holding a pose almost perfectly still for 10 seconds!  Of course in low light (lets call it “darkness” to be more fair), camera’s don’t focus all that well, so I had to have Margie not only holding the light stand, but also shining a flashlight on Suzy so my camera could know what it was looking at.

I will definitely be continuing this series and if you are a ballerina and would like to make some awesome photos like this, please contact me to set up a shoot.

Model: Suzy Kaitman
Hair and Makeup: Suzy Kaitman
Assistant: Margie Y.

The lighting setup was fairly simple.  First I had to move the kitchen table, then set up a simple black background.  Then using two ePhoto 10×36″ strip boxes, with grids on them, one on either side, giving definition to his muscles, and a 24″ soft box to give some on-axis fill.

Post processing was fairly simple, a bit of clarity and “pop”, and I converted a few of the photos into black and white in Silver FX Pro.

Prada is still one of the coolest (and nicest) guys I know.  Definitely check out his website and YouTube channel for great hip hop music from this local Surrey BC rap artist.

Took a bit of a break from portraits and people to take a little drive out to Kilby Lake, east of Mission.  My wife was out and I was going a bit stir crazy at home, so I packed up a couple of my favourite lenses and took a bit of a drive, and a bit of a walk-about.

I played around a little with intentional camera movement, taking a bit of a queue from friends David duChemin and Cynthia Haynes.

A close second for my favourite shot from the walk.  I was walking down the beach and a family was putting their boat in the water.  The kids were playing around behind and I love how the background is slightly blurred.  The lens was the Pentax SMCP-FA 43mm f/1.9 Limited, settings were 1/500th, f/3.2, ISO 100.

I had a great time with this great family, and wish all the best to them with the latest addition to their beautiful family!

Are you interested in having a fun and relaxed maternity photo session like this?  Maternity photos like this are best taken at around 8 and a half months, and in a familiar and relaxed environment, either at home or at a local park or location that has some meaning to you.

Email or Contact me, I’d love to chat more with you about booking your own maternity photography session!

This may surprise you, but before I was a photographer, I was a rock climber.  Not professionally, but from grade 11 to the middle or end of University it was what I did on evenings and weekends.  I loved it.  Being 18 helped, probably my prime fitness, no job (or at least no job I cared about), free time, and I wasn’t old enough to worry and get stressed out about the cost or logistics of, for example, driving to Yosemite for a week.  I had nothing else going on on the weekends so what else am I going to do other than get up at 6am, pick up my buddy in Abbotsford, drive an hour and a half to Squamish, climb all day, grab a meal at McDonalds and then drive back home, then repeat the next day.  After school or university I’d head out to the small little rock in Abbotsford, climb for a couple of hours after school and then go home.  When the weather got bad I just moved to the climbing gym.  In fact, I used to get phone calls there (it was the pre-cell phone days) from my parents when they needed to get a hold of me.

Yours truly climbing in Tuolumne Meadows – 1996… (sorry for the horribly angled image)

And in all this time I wasn’t a photographer.  The best I had was a little point and shoot camera with only two controls on it, the shutter button and a switch on the back to go between 100, 200, and 400 ISO film.  I took it to the climbing gym a couple of times and on the two trips to Yosemite I took.

I really wish I’d gotten into photography back then.  I think about the things I saw and did and the memories of the amazing time I had I can imagine the amazing images and stories I could have told with a camera and a bit of skill on my side.

But alas (or maybe for the better), I’m left with only a collection of photos and a lot of memories.  Now I am a photographer though, I know I’ll have a camera on whatever my next great adventure is!

Caught this beauty of a sunset right at the end of shooting a maternity session with Tracy in Waterfront Commons Park, in Maple Ridge.  I have to admit that after I shot photos of the couple (with-one-on-the-way) that I snuck back to the waterfront to capture a few shots.  Ssshhh…. 

Honestly I find photographing people far easier than landscapes.  People you can manipulate while they’re in front of you, changing their pose, adjusting the light on their faces, or telling a dirty joke to get an honest smile (I employ a long list of extremely dirty jokes for this purpose).

Landscapes are harder… you can find the exact right location (a 6 kilometre hike off the trail through bear infested woods), and exactly the right time of day (4am, obviously), and have the weather not cooperate and give you grey boring skies.  Or rain.  Or perfect blue skies…. ugh, boring.

Landscape photography is the supreme test of the photographer – and often the supreme disappointment. – Ansel Adams

Now and then I get lucky though, right time, right place, gorgeous sunset.

Technical details:

• Pentax K3 DSLR
• Sigma 17-50/2.8
• Camera Settings: 1/50th @ f/16 ISO 500

The problem is that when someone comes to me looking for information on weddings, I want to be able to send them somewhere that is only weddings, so they can get the most information possible without having to dodge flying babies or crazy creative experiments.  Since I’m concentrating on wedding photography as my “main thing”, this gives me a home where I can concentrate on only this, and lets me stretch my photographic legs and explore other types of photography, experiment and do some crazy things and share them here.

I’ve been working on Bailward Wedding Photography for a while now, tweaking things, assembling images, writing posts, trying to determine to go with beard or no beard on the about page… you know, the big decisions.  I have a site that I’m proud of that I can send people to when they want information about Wedding photography.  No more “go to this other site site and then click on galleries and then click on…”.  Now you can go to http://bailwardweddings.com and know that it will give you what I hope you need to make the decision to select me as the photographer for your wedding in the Vancouver and Lower Mainland areas.

Site Features

• A blog, updated with photos and stories from real weddings, showing how a day can look from start to finish.
• Galleries showing a selection of my favourite photos from the Getting Ready at the start of the wedding day through the Ceremony and Formal and Family Portraits, all the way into the last crazy dance party that they call the Reception (not forgetting any of the Details or the real start of a wedding, the Engagement).
• Selected Testimonials from satisfied clients.
• A bit more about me.
• Pricing information, with different package options and of of course extra add-ons that are available.

I’m really proud of my wedding photography and the website and I’d love for you to go through and have a look, share it online, or send it to friends or family who are getting married and value preserving the amazing memories from their wedding day!

I’ve always loved how bodyscapes look.  There’s something simple and beautiful about the look of the high contrast black and white look where a simple curve shows you both nothing and everything about a human body.   If you’re not familiar with the concept of a “bodyscape”, Wiktionary defines a bodyscape as:

An artistic style where closeup photographs of the human form convey the impression of landscape.

Bodyscaping and Bouboir – Photography by Alan Bailward Photography – http://bailwardphotography.com

The lovely Miss C was kinda enough to be a model for me.  I worked with her on a different project, and she was more than happy to collaborate with me to create some beautiful images.

When I first looked at bodyscaping photos, I thought “oh that’s easy”.  I mean, it’s just zooming in on a bum, boob, or side and clicking the shutter, right?  I have to admit that getting good images, is challenging.  The posing and lighting all have to come together right to get not only an interesting look, but lighting that compliments, but also make it a good photo.  It’s all the challenge of still life, but with a human to deal with.

Miss C was really excited coming into the shoot and was really happy with the photos.  It was definitely challenging, but also very rewarding, for both offs! I can’t wait to shoot another bodyscape series soon!

If you’re interested in seeing other artist’s bodyscaping work, start with a search on 500px or Flickr.

If you are in the Lower Mainland and are interested in creating some amazing bodyscapes of your own, or perhaps some more traditional boudoir photography, please book a session now!
Credits:

• Model – Miss C
• Hair and Makeup – Cinthia Torres, Esmeralda Dane Makeup Artistry

Tony Barton messaged me sometime in November with a really leading question… “What are you doing Christmas day?”  At the time both my family and my wife’s family was probably going to be travelling, and we’re not really big “Christmas People” anyway, so when the offer came in, it was hard not to take.  In short, on Christmas day, come up run the spotlight and and take some photos of the Whistler Fairmont Château’s Christmas Dinner and Dance stage show in exchange for a hotel room for the night and a bit of cash in the pocket.  Hard to say no to right?

So I said yes.  It sucked a little to not be able to do the traditional Christmas get-together with mom and dad, but we could do that the day after easily enough, and hey, it’s a free night in Whistler!

So up at 7am on Christmas morning (known as “sleeping in” to parents, but I’m used to lounging in bed until 10am…) and on the road, hot tea in hand.  The drive up was gorgeous, one of the benefits of travelling on Christmas morning is that no one is crazy enough to drive then.  As we got farther up the beautiful Sea to Sky highway, the snow (hovering in the distance of the mountains surrounding the Fraser Valley before this, started moving closer and closer.

By the time we stopped in Squamish for a fuel-up (and by that I mean a Tim Horton‘s mocha dome lid with a sleeve) the snow was right next to the highway and with the sky looking gorgeous with white puffy clouds and blue sky, I made my wife stop so I could take a few photos of the Squamish Chief.  You can’t tell now, but back when I was young and fit I was a rock climber, and I missed the old girl.  She looked great too, just enough snow to define the nooks and crannies of a mountain that will hopefully be admired and climbed on for generations after we’re gone.

The closeness of the power lines and the wide angle sort of sucks from a landscape photography point of view, but unfortunately there aren’t any pullouts with a good view going north.  “We’ll stop on the way back,” I said (there was a pullout with a  good view southbound), “we’ll be passing by around the same time of day so the weather will be about the same and it’ll look gorgeous like this!”

Spoiler alert – it wasn’t and it didn’t, 24 hours later it was snowing, foggy, and we headed straight home without stopping (other than for another mocha dome lid with a sleeve).

We got to Whistler a bit before 11am as requested.  Turns out there were a couple of minor details that hadn’t been mentioned.  Remember the “come up, shoot some photos and work the spotlight” part of the deal?   The part that wasn’t mentioned was the ‘help set up’ and ‘help tear down’ part.

This was the MacDonald ballroom when we got there.

The lights and stage were setup the night before, but you’ll notice a distinct lack of audio equipment (and with the doors to the truck with it on the left of the photo, a distinct lack of a path through the nicely setup tables and chairs).  The gear showed up and I got to learn on the fly how you set up audio gear for a show.  Turns out, there’s a lot of moving and carrying heavy things, uncoiling, and most importantly a lot of leaving the wiring of important bits together to the guy who knows what he’s doing.

We escaped for a short break for lunch a while later.  Disappointing sadly, I have to give low marks to the hotel… a $24 burger should not be cold, low staff and Christmas day aside.  Our server was great about it though, and made it right.

A bit after this photo was taken, the stage was finally setup and ready for the band.  Tony has a full nine piece band, so that’s a feat in itself!  Then came sound check, which to me looked like  a lot of twiddling of knobs, people asking for a different mix in their monitors, and playing short sections of some of the songs to confirm what the plan is for certain intros or outros.

Somewhere in here I got a quick lesson on the spotlight, my main task for the night.  In short, point the bright end at Tony, or someone else if he hands it off to someone else for a solo.  Easy right?  I was going to be perched on an equipment box that wasn’t big enough for me to be behind the light, so I’d have to aim it from beside, making it a bit trickier.  Easy stuff, right?

Once sound check was done it was time to wait.  The banquet started at 6 and then the band came on at 7, so we got to wait in the green room.

The green room turns out to be another unused, smaller banquet hall where you get to sit and wait, or watch your fellow band mates change clothes while partially hiding behind the spare Christmas tree in the corner.  When we ordered dinner (on the house, woo, living large now!) most of the guys in the band ordered the 36oz steak (menu price of $95), until they were told that they would take an hour to prepare.  At that point these were converted to the more reasonable 8oz ones.  There was chatting, more discussions of the flow of the evening, and makeup touchups.

A couple of other things related to my job for the night were finalized as well.  Being that it’s hard to take photos while keeping a spotlight trained on an energetic entertainer, during “Oh Holy Night…” Tony would stay in one spot, and I could leave the light in one spot.  Then I could jump down from my perch (ugh my poor aging knees) grab camera, take some shots through the song, then jump back up before it ended.  Also there was going to be a parade of people entering at the start of the festivities, point it at Santa and keep it on him until he leaves.  Ok, easy.

Time comes, and we head out. I take my place behind the spotlight and this will be my view for the better part of 2 hours.

So, remember the part earlier about a parade led by Santa, and keep it on him?  Well that started and I turn on the spotlight, but…. nothing.

Heart sinks into floor.

I had set one goal for the night: Don’t make anyone notice me.  No mistakes, no screw-ups, nothing that would have Tony, the band or guests notice me.  Be invisible because the spotlight was Just Working like it should.

I freak out internally.  Hit the power button again, but nothing lights up.  Shit.  Jump down (ugh, knees) and run to Alex, the lighting tech who is across the conga line led by Santa.  He sees the panic in my eyes and comes across and quickly diagnoses what I would have if I’d thought for a second longer, the other end of the power had come unplugged (probably the kitchen staff moving things around).  This was resolved quickly and (hopefully) no one noticed.  Tony entered, and the show started.

I’m not going to lie, I always think I’m not really into the type of music that Tony sings until he starts singing, and then I remember that I’m a huge fan.  This guy puts on an amazing show and I was rocking out with him and the band for the entire set.

I found it takes a lot of concentration to keep the spotlight centred on the guy on stage.  Seriously, you can’t let your mind drift, look at the rest of the band, or glance at the audience or servers, because if you lose it for a second suddenly he’s outside the circle of light and I’m fumbling to smoothly move it back to him.

Remember I was told to do the photos during “Oh Holy Night…“?  Well, on the fly there were set changes and it got completely passed over.  Eeek… ok,  just stay perched.

The end of the set comes and we head back to the green room.  This time we agree that “Fever” is the best song to take photos to in the second set.  I tell him that on the off chance if there’s a change of plans (why would there be though, “Fever” is a staple of his show), give me a little click click camera motion to let me know when’s good.  Of course I’m behind a big freakin’ bright light, so he can’t actually see me while he’s on stage, so the communication is only one way.

Second set ready.  We file in.  Band sits down.  It all starts again.

I have to give props to the band as well.  Other than Tracy his gorgeous wife and Kyle The Drummer (note the photo of him above is in his sound check clothes) I don’t know anyone’s name, but they are all really great musicians at the top of their game.  They play the hell out of a room.

“Fever” is almost here, I steel myself, scope out a path through the dancing throngs of people, wait…. wait…. wait….

…and he skips right by it, another set list change on the fly.  Arghhh.  Ok, keep on spotlighting and worry about it later.  A couple of songs later I see the click click hand motion and spring into action (ugh, knees).

Fight my way through a 12 deep, completely packed dance floor (I may or may not have elbowed an old lady in the face to get to the front of the stage) and shot.  Snap snap snap, focus, snap snap adjust settings, snap snap, all the time whispering the photographers prayer.

Lord please let me not f**k this up.

Give a nod to him from the side of the stage and head back to my perch.

Something happened during the show that any tech person will recognize as a moment of pure terror.  Somewhere midway through the second set suddenly all the stage lights went out.  All of them, black, all at once.  The music was still going and the spotlight was still going, but all of those nice coloured lights you see behind Tony suddenly went dark. I could feel Alex The Lighting Guy’s panic from across the room.  It’s that moment that you dread when not only something has happened, but it’s very, very public.

Luckily after about 10 seconds everything came back on.  Maybe someone flipped a breaker to test something, or unplugged the wrong cable somewhere.  Alex told me later he thought it was a power failure, but  because of where the outlets were  there was only one of the three we were using he could get to if it hadn’t have come back.  It also happened in the song that was currently going where it might have been planned.  I think he still lost about 5 years in that 10 seconds.

A while later (and after a great finale), the night ends, lights go down, people filter out.

Packing up was, unsurprisingly, about as much work as unpacking.  Lots more moving heavy things, and far more cable coiling.  We worked until about midnight and got most things packed up, and then Alex the lighting guy and I said “screw it, beer time”, and retired to the pub for a couple of cold ones and a couple of war stories before passing out for the night.

The next morning was fairly uneventful.  Pack up the rest of the gear, get it into the truck (which involved me stepping outside for the first time since we got there… spoiler alert: it’s cold and snowy).  Headed home to do our Christmas a day late.

Honestly it was a great time.  I learned a bit about the show biz biz, and got to be aa useful part of the AEB Productions team.  Found out that no matter what goes wrong stay calm and think things through, and that even if you have to step on a small kid on the dance floor it’s worth it for a great shot!

Big thanks to:

• Tony Barton for the invite and the opportunity to see how a show is made from the inside.
• Alex for taking me under his wing for the lighting and tech side of things.
• Tony’s great band for making me feel like part of the team.
• The Whistler Fairmont Château for putting us up and putting on a great Christmas show.

The setup was pretty simple.  Two soft boxes on stands, in the living room with the kitchen table moved out of the way.  Mel was great, giving me a couple of costume changes and different looks, and being patient while I did a bit of fiddling.

Mel was great to shoot with and the shots were great.

Another December has rolled around and Help Portrait has finished.  Help Portrait’s mission is to provide portraits for families in need.  This year I participated in the Maple Ridge / Pitt Meadows group, probably 20-30 volunteers doing everything from greeting, photography, hair and makeup, food and snack preparation and everything in between.  I got into this several years ago when I heard about it and wanted to increase my photography skills, and now I’m doing it because I can see the difference it makes in people’s lives.

It’s incredibly rewarding to see families who maybe haven’t had a good photo done getting treated to the full movie star treatment, and show up in front of the camera feeling, and looking, like a million dollars.

I’m not going to lie.  Sometimes it was challenging.  The first family that was brought to my photo station was a mom, son, and a little girl about two who burst into tears the second she saw me.  “Don’t worry, it’s probably not you, she’s scared of everyone.”

Greeeaaaaat….  I’m not used to dealing with kids at all, but luckily some of the other volunteers were, though she really just had to cry herself out until I was able to get a photo with minimal tears and red cheeks.  Another later group had a 10 year old boy who thought having a funny face, or his fingers in his mouth or nose (or both) was a great way to have a photo done.  Lets say his mom was even less impressed than I was.

Not all kids caused problems, some were awesome, cute, adorable, and more than willing to give their mom/brother/dad/granny/best friend a big hug on camera.

Lots of wonderful people trusted me behind the camera this weekend, and it brought me great joy to be able to be a part of a team that can give back to them.

Here’s a little setup video from the point of view of the volunteers as we setup.

Here’s to all the wonderful people I got to spend the day with, can’t wait for next year!

Update: There is a nice article in the Maple Ridge Times about the event by Ashley Wadhwani.

(Image via Model Mayhem Blog – Model: Ella Rose Muse; Photographer: Karen Jones)

Nudity is perfectly normal, but I have modelled for the occasional ‘newbie’ whose hands have visibly shaken at the experience, who’ve wanted very much to mention their wives and happy marriages within the first two or three sentences (perhaps in the opening email) to assure me of their lack of intention, and who announce that they will be leaving the room every time I change pose. It’s sweet, but largely unnecessary.

Since two of my most popular posts are on Photographing Nudes (part 1, part 2), I thought I’d post this here.  Luckily most of the shoots I do I fall into these categories, forgetting to take the lens cap off, mentioning I’m married… all these things I do pretty much every photoshoot, regardless of the state of dress of my client.

Source: 10 Things You Might Not Know About Nude Models

Family photos in the park.  How cute are these guys?!

The son, Alex is a little… well, lets just say “obsessed” with monsters.  So we did something a little special for him!

Thank you Dan and Barbara-Ann, you guys were great!

Fellow photographer Bob Friesen asked me to take a new headshot for a wall plaque.  I put on my best Peter Hurley (headshot photographer extraordinaire) impression, set up a couple of soft boxes in my living room and spent an hour shooting.  I’ve known Bob for a few years now, he works as a photographer for the local paper and we’ve shot some events together.  Great guy and a great photographer, and a pleasure to work with.

Got to go out to Vancouver to shoot Affinity Law Group for Full Frame Marketing. Cool offices and some neat photo opportunities.  Normally interior photography isn’t something I do, but Joe’s awesome and I have no problem giving him a hand for something that doesn’t have a person in it.

The challenge with doing Architectural photography when you’re not an architectural photographer is to find the interesting bits.  The right angle, the right bit of selective focus. Even with a cool office space, you still have to “find” the photo.

Yes Joe, this is the end that takes the photo…

Some of the other big challenges faced here was the lighting.  The colour of interior building lighting is (in general) “blah” (that’s a term that experts use), but by changing the white balance it’s fairly easy to correct for.  The big challenge comes when you mix the interior florescent (green tinged) light with exterior light (which is more of a warm orange, relatively speaking).  Having both colours of light in the same photo (as in the one above where you can see outside) means more colour correction time in the digital darkroom.  Also because I was shooting out the window (when you have an office on the 11th floor of downtown Vancouver how can you not show that off?) I used (subtle, in my opinion) HDR to allow the bright interior and darker exterior merge together.  If you can’t tell it’s HDR then I’ve done my job (there are others who aren’t as subtle with their processing).

You can find out more at the great Cambridge In Colour article on white balance.

All in all a good day in a beautiful but challenging location for Vancouver architecture photography.

Tammy is what I refer to affectionately as a “Horse Person”, so of course we got them in on the action.

The big grey one decided she wanted to get even more into the action…

Tammy I had a blast shooting you guys and I can not wait to shoot your wedding!

Fred and Dorothy are two of the sweetest people I’ve met!  They are the parents of a friend from high school (go GSS Rebels) who do acting as extras from home base in Maple Ridge.  There’s a lot of movies filmed out here, and from that comes a lot of extra work.  They were told that they needed new headshots to get more and better work.

They’ve worked on a lot of cool movies and series.  Best story was getting invited to share a heater while filming one of the Mission Impossible movies with Tom Cruise.  He’s apparently a super-sweet guy who invited them over to get warm during the filming, saying the heaters were for everyone, not just him.

Fred and Dorothy were awesome to work with, we spent a bit over two hours shooting in their apartment, and the result were some mighty fine shots that will hopefully rocket them to the stardom that they’re looking for!

If you’re in the Vancouver area looking for some headshots for yourself, head on over the the contact form and lets make it happen!

After a traditional greeting song, we ate right away, which is a tradition that I now plan to follow!  The mayor presented the chief with some items he got in the southern states, sweet grass and a talking stick.

The food was delicious, provided by Chef Theresa Contois, of Cedar Feast House.

The menu, in case you were wondering, was pulled bison with rhubarb BBQ sauce, smoked salmon mousse and bannock crackers and venison meatballs with blueberry compote.

A lot of mingling and conversation happened over food.  I had a great chat with Tony, the local RCMP officer who does not only outreach with the local youth, including the band, but told me about Pulling Together, a very cool sounding meeting and collaboration between the RCMP and the members of the various bands.  Tony, I’m hopefully going to see you on this next year!

In all this (when I wasn’t grabbing another bit of pulled bison), I was in and around, ducking and weaving, grabbing shots of the mayor, the chief, and the interesting people in and around.

All this time Angus Jordain Jr, a first nations singer and songwriter was playing.  Just him and a guitar, beautiful music.  He’s got some great stuff, I recommend hitting up his various pages and having a listen, some powerful stuff in there.

After this there was the official naming ceremony for the three rooms in city hall that were getting first nations names.  The best part of this was when the name on the last of the three rooms wasn’t what was expected, and a small conference formed to figure out how to pronounce the name properly.  The letters look… well, lets say pretty different.

The day ended with a game of Slahal – the bone game. The tribe member who described the rules made it sound like it was being made up on the spot with some of the ways that it worked, but to be fair I feel the same way about cribbage…  The guy running the game said that he’s seen games as short as 15 minutes and as long as seven and a half hours.  Crazy stuff.

As I left the two sides (the Katzie Band vs The Mayor and his team) playing to tribal music as each side took their turns.

I’ve known of Prada West since I started shooting the Rap Battles and Hip Hop shows.  He’s one of the guys who has made it big time enough to tour and take his music and his art on the road, touring and this year spending a month travelling across Europe. I made a portrait of him at the last hip hop show that I shot, and I just wasn’t satisfied, so I set up to make some photos with him.

We met up in downtown Langley, chatted a bit and then went to a couple of nearby locations that worked for his look.  Prada is a cool guy, concerned with the industry, the local artists and his family.   In other words everything you’d expect from a heavily tattooed, bad-ass looking hip hop artist from Vancouver

Follow Prada West via

• Online – http://pradawest.com
• Twitter:  @pradawestmusic
• Facebook: RealPradaWest

Steve and I have been trying to set this up for a couple of weeks now. We need some new headshots for a few people at my company, just casual, chilling out shots of some guys at a startup, photos at their desks, against a wall, something like that.  Easy stuff, don’t need a bunch of lights, but I’ll grab my 6″ soft box just in case.  Turns out what he wanted was more stylized photos against a black background.  If I had my full lighting kit I’d have set up a beauty dish, maybe a large soft box or 60″ soft lighter II, a rim light to give a bit of definition, setup my backdrop stand and my 5×7 black popup background.

But I didn’t have any of that.  Just a flash and a soft box.  What to do? You still want to make them…. sexy…

Well, rock it out and kick ass in 12 minutes.  What you see below are the fine folks who got their photos taken.  The background is the black door to one of the side offices.  The light is the little soft box just out of frame just above and slightly to the camera left. There’s a fill board being held just out of frame against their chests.  No I’m lying now, it wasn’t a fill board it was a white shelve out of the storage closet.

The subjects were given a combination of my best imitations of Peter Hurley (“squinch“, “jawline“) and Tyra Banks (“smile“) and they pulled off the look really well. After we wanted some “fun” shots to contrast the start faces, and they performed admirably.

All the photos for all the subjects (6 in total) were in and done in 12 minutes!

Remember, you can do a big production with lights, camera, and craziness (I’ll be doing that this Friday morning actually, keep in touch to hear more about that), or you can work nice, simple, and get some great character photos like these!

Really, what can you say about a girl like this.  I met Jasmeen recently and we set up a shoot at a great old barn location here in Mission.  I wanted a little bit Indian bride and a little bit fashion star, and she gave me both in spades.  Enjoy a selection of photos from the shoot below.

Big thanks to Jasmeen and her stylist for the great photos!

Some photos from a shoot in the local Mission, BC locations of Community Futures and the Economic Development office done for Tikal Construction, a great company that has recently moved from Abbotsford to make their new home nestled up here in Mission.  You can see the end result of the shoot on page 40 of the online version of this month’s Business In Focus magazine.

Apparently baby “cake smash” photoshoots are all the rage these days, at least with the cool kids.  This cool kid is no exception.  I have been photographing Malique since he was negative three months old and just a bump in his mommy’s belly, and I was honoured to be asked to shoot his 1 year birthday party cake smash and dress up.

I’ll be honest, it didn’t go 100% as planned, but he gave us a good hour of patience, and while he didn’t technically do a lot of smashing (more like distracted poking), the end result I think is worth it.

Happy birthday little guy!  I’ll see you in a year!

Yup, I was back again!  This year’s awards moved locations but were still an amazing time.  Allison and her team put on another amazing night of glitz, glamor, jazz, and of course, awards for the best small businesses in town.

MLA Marc Dalton was there and always a great guy to chat with.

MLA Marc Dalton

You can see more of the photos from myself and Andrea Walker in the gallery on the Facebook page.

Something a little different today.  This was a shoot setup by my good friend Kelly McLeod, a makeup artist and creative guy who has a head full of ideas.  This one was a creepy shoot inspired partially by The Ring.  The model, Caitlin Price, was setup in a very creepy fashion (some behind the scenes shots at the bottom of this post) and then contorted her body fantastically.  Honestly a couple of times I just had to step back and tell her she was freaking me right out.

For the above shot we got Kelly’s brother Derek in.  I saw him (we were shooting at his house) and immediately knew we had to use him.  An epic beard, tattoos, and the muscles of a leading man.  Throw a spare machete into his hands and boom, we have a story in one photo.  I’m really proud of this one.  Here are some behind the scenes photos of the preparation for this shoot!

Model: Caitlin Price
Makeup and Design: Kelly McLeod / Mastermind By Design
Photography: Me!

So there I was, at the Fortune Sound Club, with nothing more than wanting to go home. I thought that I might be able to salvage something from the night though, make the best of a bad situation. The club had a very cool look, tall pillars, lights, smoke, with a “big room” vibe. I won’t lie and say I didn’t think it looked a little like Joe McNally’s boxer setup. Ok, so what to do. I had only a single flash with no modifiers, so the lighting was simple.

First thing was to see what the room was lit up as. All photos straight out of the camera. First shot as metered (4 seconds at f/4.0 at ISO 400) was a bit bright, so the next one I set the shutter speed down t0 1/8th with no other changes, which gave a bit more under exposure and gave the room at least some ambiance.

Next get my subject in. Mike’s a ham of course, and posing is not an issue. Too bad the flash never went off

Test shot – f/3.2, 1/8th second @ ISO 400

These two weren’t bad, but I didn’t like the positioning of the circle on the wall behind his head, and in the other one the fine gentleman in the white was a wee bit distracting.

These two were the hero shots. Simple enough lighting, a 5 minute shoot (maybe 7 if you count me convincing my flash to fire properly). Post processing wasn’t that complex, a bit gritty and larger than life, just like Mike and his Red Shirt.

MVP Workshop portrait by Alan Bailward – http://bailwardphotography.com

A trio of ladies came in to the studio a few weeks ago for a fun shoot, sadly I only got to shoot two of them, but I’m pretty happy with how things came out.

MVP Workshop portrait by Alan Bailward – http://bailwardphotography.com

MVP Workshop portrait by Alan Bailward – http://bailwardphotography.com

Awesome Hair and Nails shoot

I had the pleasure to do a studio shoot with Amanda Marie, a friend and hairdresser from Coquitlam. She’s got all the access to awesome hair and makeup and looked amazing.

Awesome Hair and Nails shoot

Awesome Hair and Nails shoot

Awesome Hair and Nails shoot

“Queen of Hearts”, Makeup by Angela Ayre

I had the pleasure to be invited to hang out with my friend Kelly MacLeod (an amazing creative makeup and special effects guy) behind the scenes of the Body Painting at Art World Expo in Vancouver.  The show was at Science World downtown, and the artists had four hours to get their subjects ready.  That may seem like a long time, but when you’re painting and costuming an entire human being, that’s not as long as you think.

I got there and was a bit nervous about taking my camera out.  I didn’t know anyone but Kelly and his wife Amanda and literally half the room was women wearing literally nothing but tiny underwear and pasties, and varying levels of paint.  However everyone there was amazingly friendly and open, and over the six hours we all bonded and I took a lot of photos.

Makeup Artist: Cory Keys

The quality of art was pretty impressive.  The theme was “Fairy Tales” and I saw everything from First Nations themes to forest fairies to ice princesses.

I kept on telling her she creeped me out. She liked that.

Here are a few shots from the event.  A big shout out and thanks to everyone involved for the skill of artistry involved and their friendly attitude!

The lighting was fairly easy, though it still needs some perfection (always).  Two rim lights and a main light (on axis fill for you Strobists out there) and the dog on black paper.  There was only one “costume change” (collar on, collar off) and the shoot actually took less time than it took to set up all the gear!

At the end of the shoot there were big slobbery kisses….

This is probably my favorite shot!  If you’ve ever tried to get photos of animals you’ll understand the challenge in getting a dog to pay attention and stay in one spot for more than a few seconds!

Sometimes in a shoot you have to take…. shall we say, “liberties” with what’s allowed and what isn’t allowed.  For example, the underground shoot with Rav started in a parkade of a mall.  I won’t say which mall, but I will say that just as the sun was going down and we had some gorgeous light to work with a gentleman in a truck drove up and told us that the mall was closed, what are you doing here and he was going to lock the gate in 5 minutes.

We had to rush around, pack gear up and get out of there like a group of crazy people (I’m thankful I had my buddies Shaun and Neil with me to help with the gear and packing).  I don’t begrudge the guy doing his job, I sure as heck wouldn’t want to stick around work for an extra hour or two because some yahoos wanted to use my parkade.  But still.

So we moved, ran over to a different mall, found a quiet section of the underground parking and quickly set up, keeping things hidden as long as possible.  Of course, three cars and a group of people looking like they were trying to not be noticed are immediately noticeable, and within 5 minutes I saw a security guard walking towards us and our pile of lights and stands.

Luckily, Amrit was awesome.  A part time model himself, he was completely cool with us using that corner of the underground as long as we didn’t mess things up. Offering to take a few shots of him with the same setup probably helped a bit too.

Check out Amrit on his Instagram @amrit_dhot.

Myranda Warren, a great makeup artist and overall cool-chick from the last MVP Workshop.

A preview of my shoot with Rav Kalsi, a bit of underground drama.

The sun set was a great ending to a wonderful afternoon full of smiles and kisses (you can tell how much they hated me telling them to snuggle and kiss a little more!)

Thank you Amy and Jason, I can’t wait for the wedding!

I had the great pleasure to find KacyK on ModelMayhem who was interested in working on some boudoir and nude photos.  She was great, and we worked really well together to create some really awesome images.  I did my best to go with one of two looks, either a 50’s noir vibe, or a bright relaxing morning (you know, just lounging around in your lingerie, as one tends to do).

If you’re interested in making some beautiful images like these yourself, please contact me and book a session!

Remember in the last post how I said I’d been wanting to make photos of dancers for years?  Well, just about the time that I set up the shoot at the FVAD, I also contacted Suzy, who was a friend of a friend, who was also a ballerina, and I set up and shot with her the day before the FVAD shoot.  It was a weekend of ballet!

Suzy was a blast.  She’s been a dancer all her life and is now setting up a ballet school in downtown Vancouver.  Suzy brought along her friend Andrea who did hair and makeup, and my sister-in-arms was the amazing Cynthia Haynes, doing more great intentional motion shots (way better than mine that’s for sure).

Shooting on the top of her apartment building in downtown Vancouver and in the dance studio she teaches in was very different.  On the roof there was an amazing view, but photography wise the lighting was challenging.  It wasn’t direct sunlight, but it was pretty light out, which made controlling the light fairly challenging.  What you don’t see in the outdoors photos is just out of the frame is either Cynthia or Andrea with a hand on a flash and softbox providing a bit of light to shape Suzy.   It was a bit windy, so I was a bit paranoid about the lights flying off the roof!

It was amazing to shoot with Suzy, though I knew I use that adjective a lot.  If you’re interested in Ballet for yourself or your kids, definitely give her a shout at the contact info below:

Suzy Kaitman
Ballet Fit
778-875-6482
www.BalletFitClasses.com
https://www.facebook.com/BalletFitClasses

Ever since I discovered the photography of Joe McNally I’ve said “I want to photograph a ballerina”.  Really for the last 5 years or so I’ve had that thought in the back of my head, and this year I finally did something about it.  After a post on the Bailward Photography Facebook page, I was contacted by a fellow photographer whose daughter went to the Fraser Valley Academy of Dance (FVAD), who put me in contact with Carolyne, who was possibly more excited about doing a shoot with their dancers than I was.

With the help of Rick MacDonald (Rick MacDonald Photography), Cynthia Haynes and Monte Arnold (Fly In The Eye Photographic Arts) we set up and shot.

The dancers were, and I can’t say this enough, amazing.  These girls are between thirteen and sixteen and can fling themselves what feels like twelve feet in the air, as many times as you ask them to, and each time is exactly the same.

Throughout the shoot the owners of FVAD, Carolyne and John were great, giving advice to the photographers on when we got a shot that would look good to other dancers, suggesting poses that would look good for our needs, using some sort of foreign dancer language.

“Try doing a second position with a sauté and make it allongé, then move from fifth into échappè.”

I could be wrong, it could have been icelandic, but all I know is the girls went from gorgeous pose to gorgeous pose, giving us all an amazing variety of photographs.

One of Cynthia’s great talents is thinking outside the box, and she’s wonderful at using intentional camera movement to create motion in her photographs.  I saw some of the results she was getting and immediately stole this idea wholesale, putting my own spin (pardon the pun) on it.

Don’t think that these were all ladies here.  Anton is one of the instructors at FVAD and in addition to being a really nice guy and a great dancer, I’m pretty sure he was made of pure muscle.  I’d love to tell you how I spent hours photoshopping his muscles on or making his abs pop, but no, he just looks like this.  I’d jokingly say I hate him for it, but when you put the hard work he has into your art like he does…

The day really stressed to me the importance of personal projects and shooting just for me.  The dance academy was amazingly accommodating for us, and the dancers were very patient with us, and the end result is I have a ton of amazing images that I’m very proud of, and I proved to myself that I could set up an event like this and have it work wonderfully.

Some figure study style shots with Natalie Marie.

It’s taken far too long for me to finish editing these shots of Stefanie.  I posted the first from this set ages ago, and recently found myself with time, some creative inspiration, and a lovely new (to me) Wacom Intuos tablet to play with, which resulted in these, which I’m very proud of.  Also big thanks (again) to Bill Wadman for some advice that he gave on some specific techniques.