Halifax Public Gardens visit

Good Wednesday from Prospect.

At the front gates. Corner Spring Garden and South Park

This is the live band Gazebo in the centre of the park.
Live music is usually held on the weekends.

Last year you may recall, if you've been keeping up with this blog, I posted a piece on the Rock Camp here in Halifax

One of the many statues and floral arrangements you'll find in the Park

[LINK to previous post].

Well what I didn't mention is that we arrived a little early and went for a stroll through the Halifax Public Gardens. This is a space dedicated by the city as a Victorian era garden green space in the heart of the Halifax peninsula. It was founded in 1867 the year of Canadian Confederation and has been designated a National Historic site.

With the onslaught of Hurricane Juan in September 2003 it was all but completely decimated. But with the strength and determination, that the people of Halifax are known for, the Gardens once again blossom in the heart of this fair city.

Unfortunately the day was a wet one and just finished up a July shower when we arrived so the grounds were wet and still over cast. Colours were muted and a bit dark, not the best lighting for a garden shoot, hence the black & whites. 

Note: my favourite medium has always been b&w. 

As a favourite of tourists and newly wed couples on their wedding day, I can just imagine how many photos have been shot in this park over the last 146 years.

If you ever stop by Halifax take the time to stroll through these beautiful gardens. Here's hoping for good weather when you visit.

Enjoy, Derek

From the Past

Good Monday from Prospect. 

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I've been struggling with what I want to add to the blog. I keep coming up with stupid rants. Thinking they may be interesting but all I get out of them is negative so I drop them. It's a winter thing for me. 

Well here's some positive I can share and build on.

I was rummaging through my old negatives and came across this gem. I have to apologize for my scanner. The HP scanner I have sucks at transparency scanning. It's okay for prints, but that's about it.  But Now I can't wait to get a good scan of this and make a good print.

Ambrose as an aspiring young designer and musician

The time, 1979 or 1980. The subject, Ambrose Pottie. We were class mates at NSCAD back then and shared a love of Design, Photography and Music. Our hang group consisted of Jerry (Ambrose) Jim Mantle, Elaine Frampton and myself.

I'm not sure what project this is connected to but it really doesn't matter. It is however, one of my first "one light" shots (with some available to fill the background and side). Crude but effective desk lamp. Incandescent overhead with daylight to the right and back. Well, since it is black and white who cares about colour temp right?

This would have been shot with a Yashica, medium format, TLR (two lens reflex) on KODAK PLUS-X Pan 6057 b&w negative film.

I would have shot with something like this (photo courtesy wikipedia) 

I'll post the good version once I find a decent scanning source. Wish I had found this in one of my previous lives.

Enjoy, Derek

Getting it on the LOW

Good Tuesday from Prospect. I didn't get a chance to write yesterday, I was out running the streets and taking care of business. When you work for yourself you have to wear all the hats and yesterday was schmooze and delivery day.

Today I just want to leave you with one little note. While I was shooting my son's GTI the challenge was to get the right angle and stay out of the shot. One thing you need to be prepared to do is get low. When I shot the Beetle (whale car, LINK to that post and the gallery) I was lying or sitting on the ground, as well as eye level and from above, to get the right angles .

Although I didn't get a shot of me shooting the VW my son did get a shot of me shooting his car.

As you can see it's a little tough sometimes getting back up with gear in your hands. But as you saw from last week, the position was worth it and no "me" in the reflections. It was the surrounding elements I wanted, which you can clearly see in the final from last Tuesday.

Enjoy and see you tomorrow, Derek

My book is ready and so am I

Well here we are, humpday. Middle of the week and lots going on.

The one thing I want to share today is my new portfolio book. It arrived last week, along with my first ibook version.

The book is primarily a portfolio of my photographic work over the last 5 years. It includes some creative spec, some whimsical, some event and some commissioned works with published layouts.

In the past 5 years I have been fortunate to create works for a variety of clients ranging from Fox Harb'r Golf Resort & Spa, Boating Industry Magazine, ADesign Studio and Northumberland Ferries to name a few.

I was also lucky to be a part of the the Bay of Fundy's bid for the New7Wonders of Nature contest as Marketing Director and Staff Photographer (yes the budget had a limit). Through this campaign I developed and implemented the branding and marking collateral (votemyfundy.com).

As a Graphic Designer and Photographer I tend to fill in a lot of my own images when needed in my layouts, so my sense of imagery towards commercial use is quite defined. I really tend to understand how the story needs to play out and the design of imagery is just as important and typography. Mind you not everything I do has just my photography. I do use others work when it fits.

Until 2005, I've spent most of my career behind the scenes and shot only for personal pleasure with some work used commercially. But since forming Just That Communications I have pushed everything forward and strived to better my photo skills to a level of professionalism that satisfies the most discerning client.

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I have also noticed a shift in my creative work as well and have recently reintroduced film back in my work flow. Whether it helps or hinders only time will tell.

View Larger Size

Well, I hope you like the book. It's listed to the right of my blog page under links. Clicking the link will force the download and expansion to either your desktop or downloads folder depending on where you have your downloads configured. Once it's expanded just drag it to your Apple iTunes folder, add to your iTunes Library and sync with your iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch.

If you like my work don't hesitate to contact me about discussing your next project. Maybe we can do something great together. Design or commissioned photo project, it's all good!

BTW, the printed version will be accompanying me on client meetings.

Thanks and enjoy, comments are welcome, Derek

About Digital Photography

Well guess what. I finally added a post to this blog about one of my passions, photography.

What I'd like to talk about is my experience and transition into digital cameras.

In early 2005, I decided it was time to put my film camera away and buy a decent DSLR. Now I may get some flak on this but I don't care. I do all my shooting with Pentax cameras for two reasons.

One, I learned on a Pentax SP1000 in college, (NSCAD) (last thread mount if I'm not mistaken). It was great. It was completely manual, no bells at all and it gave me great pleasure since all I wanted to shoot was b/w and make my negatives sing in the darkroom. As a matter of fact, the first camera I bought (actually it was a gift) was the famous K1000 which I still have today.

Two, they cost a lot less than many of the "professional" grade cameras, as some would say (that's a topic for another day), with millions of production lens available and usable on all Pentax DSLRs.

Now you have to remember I wasn't a professional photographer, not that I consider myself one today, I just loved to shoot like so many others. I actually shot a few weddings to get extra money while in college as well.

But when I started Just That I realized I could do more than just shoot and give my prints to people as their wedding gifts.

So off I go looking for the great DSLR. I bought an ist Ds. It worked with the lenses I had and I could pick up practically anthing used and it would work. Sounded good to me.

Since then I have added two more digital bodies (K10 and a K20) and started to update my lens and lighting to suite my new adventure in photography. It has all worked well for me but I must say it has been an up hill climb.

My problem hasn't been with the cameras, they do everything I ask of them, iregardless of what some others say are "cameras for the professionals". lt's been the software.

To let you in on a bit of my past. I have worked in the prepress industry for over 25 years and I was one of the very first in my market to embrace the apple computer and desktop publishing, as it was called back then. I used a Macintosh SE30 in my design work with Photoshop 1, Illustrator 88 and Quark Express 2.

I have worked on large horizontal copy cameras producing continuos tone separations for the printing industry. I'm talking 20 feet long. And have reproduced some very fine lithos of some great art. As well as the large Hell drum scanners ( analogue computing ).

As I moved forward with the new technology I became the general manager of one of only two service bureaus east of Montreal. Mind you that changed very quickly as the technology became more readily available.

Anyway, I'm starting to move away from my topic. You get the idea, I've been involved with this stuff for quite some time.

But, when I decided to start using my first camera and shoot in RAW, that's when it all got tough. No one really explained the simple fact that if I use anything other than the processing software that came with the camera I wasn't getting the settings I set the camera to. So here I was, shooting jpeg and adjusting and it did what I wanted. I thought that moving to RAW just meant that the settings just weren't permenant and I could change it all later. What's funny is when I started shooting RAW I was using PhotoshopCS and the RAW version was pretty close to what I expected, or thought that's what I should have expected.

So as I moved on, to shooting to suppliment my design work, I thought I needed special software to handle all these big RAW files I was shooting. I would go out and shoot, come back in, upload the photos to my laptop, check them out quickly in the browser software supplied with the camera. All seemed fine so I'd burn everything to disk (to be safe) and move on.

When I got back to the office I would then import them into what was my processor/organizer of choice at the time and start to work on them. Everytime I would do this I'd find I wasn't seeing what I thought I'd seen after the shoot. I would end up comparing the original browser software image with the organizer software then finally bring it into Photoshop and get completely confused. They all looked different.

Turns out not all venders write their software within a standard set, at least not in 2006. Recently I have re-evaluated my needs, since I just upgraded my computer equipment and have gone back to all the adobe products I have grown accustomed to. I have been using the CS suite for some time, I use CS3 at the moment and have added LightRoom 2. When I purchased the previous organization software there really wasn't anything else to choose from at a reasonable price and although I'm not going to name the software, because really it's not their fault, it's mine for not digging deep enough at the beginning. I figured hey it had to be right and I must be wrong.

My mistake was looking at the cameras and software and thinking, hey, I shouldn't have to do much of anything and this gear will give me exactly what I want. What I putz I turned into.

In the past I always took my negs, or slides, as an intermediate step and finished my piece in the darkroom, or scanned the neg/slide into my computer and finished it there. Even when I was reproducing other peoples images I added a part of me into everyone of them.

These days I fly through my images and produce what I feel they should look like not what they were shot like, or what the camera shot.

I suppose what I'm trying to get to with all this is, if you think you have the wrong camera and think you need to buy the latest and greatest marketed gear to get great pictures, stop and think. The camera you use should simply produce a usable image you want to start with, at the highest resolution you can afford. I hear, and read, this all the time, professionals spend as little as possible for their equipment because they just want to shoot and get the best return for their buck. But their idea of inexpensive is pretty steep for me, price a Nikon DX or Canon 5D mark II recently. Not that there's anything wrong with those but hey, you got to practice what you preach right?

Well one other thing you need to get is software you're comfortable with and what produces what you want or what you can sell.

Photography is still about what you want to finish with not what you think the equipment should be giving you. Creating great images is what matters.

Here are two images I would like to share with you. One is a b/w I shot in college, at the beginning of this blog. It's a shot looking south down Granville Street in Halifax in 1979 after a good rain. The second is one from Ottawa in 2007. Click on this [link] to view the Ottawa shots. I shot the first one in the gallery, put it in my software of choice and thought it wasn't worth using. I've since re-evaluated the shot and realized the shot was fine, the tools weren't letting me do what I wanted to do.

Hope you enjoy and talk to you soon.
Derek