I already said a bit about Danielle & Cory’s wedding, so I’ll spare you the words and let the day sort of speak for itself below.
Special thanks to Jonathan Greenwald, who was the Goose to my Maverick. Oh, and don’t forget to check out “Everybody Dance Now”
Canvaspop
Over the past few years I’ve come to know the guys and gals at my local-international canvas making company Canvaspop. They’ve invited me to their warehouse to see how much care and work they put into their prints, they’ve given folks who attended my Photowalks gift cards, and they were my first choice when I started to offer my own limited edition canvases.
As a company they’ve expanded, and expanded again and it was their new space, in the heart of my own Hintonburg community, that they setup and rennovated a large warehouse space. I was thrilled when they asked me to photograph their interiors and am happy to see their hip, functional, and open space is making some of the office blog rounds like officesnapshots.com.
Tristan his son Phoenix are currently fundraising for “Ride the Rideau” in support of Cancer Research. You can donate to them here & look for their article in an upcoming issue of Kitchissippi Times.
There are plenty of natural light photographers, the good ones can work in any conditions, but even they are likely to admit the best times of the day to shoot are early morning, sunset, or somewhere in the shade. Even I prefer to seek it out because it is much more flattering (even and soft) light for my subjects.
But I don’t always get to pick the time or place, if I’m shooting editorial, or executive portraits I get to work when and where the client says I work. This is why I’ve invested time and money over the years in several portable flash setups to bring on location with me. It allows me to work under harsher light conditions while givingmy images a look and ‘pop’ that I personally prefer (and hope you like too).
There are a number of ways to do this, and not all of them cost a fortune. Indeed, you can probably get a lot of the way there just by using the flash built into your camera. In fact, I’d say that’s the ONLY time I use a pop-up flash. Quick fill on a really bright day can help get light into your subjects eyes that would look dark due to a hard overhead sun.
Of course I play a bigger game than that and will travel *light* (see what I did there?) with 3-5 speedlight flashes with the intent of getting them off my camera and into places I want to light my subjects. Sometimes, to create enough power to get the exposure I need (like here), I will group all the flashes together to create a single, strong, burst of light. Sometimes it’s just to get a few different lights in the right place to light my subject(s) accrodingly (like in the image in this post – taken for the next issue of the Kitchissippi times).
If and when more power is needed, to flat-out beat the sun into submission, i bring out my Elinchrom Ranger Quadra kit, which I’ve written about at length on Tiffinbox and was what I used to light the bridal party in my last post.
Quinn & Mel photographed using a single off-camera Flash (580exII) triggered using the Pocket wizard mini-tt1 & Flex-TT5, used a Lumiquest SBIII
as a mod.
I’d be lying to you if I said I wasn’t first looking for shade in these situations too, though, because I can better control my exposure and I avoid un-evenness due to the sun. But in a pinch, we can always put the sun at our subjects backs which, naturally, will then cast a shadow on their face. You can fill that forward shadow with reflectors – sending the light back at them – or see if a few hundred watt-seconds of lighting power will do the trick, or simply create some shade of your own.
All these lighting possibilities wouldn’t even exist if you didn’t have a MEANS of triggering your flash, to which there are no shortage of options, but seeing as I’m LONG overdue for a post on what I use – perhaps that will be another update in the coming month. In the meantime, you can read one way of triggering flashes via a TTL cord here or about the different softboxes & light modifiers I use here.
update: you can see this image larger, with a lighting diagram on Flickr
Danielle (the bride) and I go back to high school in Toronto, so I was thrilled when she asked me to be the photographer for her wedding this past weekend in Oakville. She snagged herself a handsome RCMP officer named Cory (you can see the couple on Flickr here) out in Manitoba and then dragged him out our way to seal the deal.
The wedding was certainly one of the most fun I’ve been to in a while, while the dancefloor wasn’t entirely vacant, the bulk of the evening took place in front of the bar, with good friends, and newly acquainted families, sharing good times over drinks.
The trip back to Ottawa even gave me some locked-in time to work on the wedding photo’s which, we all know, get harder to do once the kids are around.
Very special thanks to Jonathan Greenwald, who was a 2nd shooter on this gig, and VAL (Voice Activated Lightstand) when needed. He has a studio in Vaughan and has been doing a lot of maternity, newborn, and family photos – go check him out!
As for this image, if you haven’t noticed, not all exposures are created equal, and I had to borrow some eyes from another image to keep it from being less than perfect. If you want to see it bigger, which you should, it’s also on Flickr here. More to come…
So we got one of these.
I’ve been busy lately, busy is good; indeed, busy pays the bills. But busy can also mean I neglect other things I take pride in, like this blog. I made a commitment to myself to update weekly this year, and even though I haven’t quite met that challenge (sadly), I think it’s also important to infuse those who visit here regularly, or irregularly, with info that is valuable in some form. That said, this is less that kind of a post and more the kind of post that says:
I’ve been doing stuff, I can’t show stuff until my clients use the stuff, but then I will both show, and tell you all about the stuff. It’s pretty cool stuff too, if I do say so myself.
This coming weekend I’m off to Oakville to photograph a wedding, so I’ll be touching my toes into Toronto on the way there and back. But until I have something to show you, that I can show you, here’s Friendly the bunny; Quinn named her that.
