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Last Man Standing

Last Man Standing
Recently I took a trip down to a local provider of fine canvas goods, Canvaspop. From their website they’ll look like any random “anywhere” based print shop, but finding a Canadian, or even Ottawa-based, distributor for me was huge because A. I could save on duty and shipping B. Work closer with the company to provide the best possible quality prints to my customers.

I was actually kind of shocked when they got in touch with me and invited me to come down and check out their opperations. The group at canvaspop was very cool, a little TOO cool actually, but I was lucky enough to have enough street sense to fit in and not act like a total douche.

I spent some time talking to Nazim & Adrian, the two guys who started the shop up, and they’re really interested in provided both the most seamless and pleasant ordering and product experience you can imagine, and making sure that they spend the right kind of money on making your canvas the best quality it can be. Check out their fancy quality page here.

Full Disclosure – they gave me some 8×12 prints of my images – not to write about them, I chose to do this, but so that I could see the quality of their product first-hand.

Lucky for you, I don’t feel right keeping these great little prints to myself. Sunday, on Twitter, I gave away one of the canvases. I’ll do the same today – I have an 8×12 canvas of this image which you can TOTALLY win from me if you answer this one skill testing question, either in the comments or via Twitter:
Which photo, on this blog, did I actually post TWICE (it’s so embarassing) or… if you want to take a guess – what is the subject matter of the photo?

hint: scroll to the bottom of this page, it was one of my first dozen posts and posted again by March 2007… Contest runs all day Tuesday May 4th and on Wednesday I’ll load all you up into a random hat and pick a name. I’m only willing to ship this in North America though, since I’m not made of diamonds or printer ink. GO!

Update: Canvaspop’s given you (my peeps) a 10% discount on orders, so drop me an email and I’ll hook you up!

Boo Wah

Boo Wah
Another shot of Quinn – family pics don’t get a lot of play-time in the comments. Maybe y’all are being nice not to critique the photos of my kids but I assure you – they won’t take it personally 😉

Sorry about the site being down for the past week – for those of you subscribing via RSS you probably didn’t even notice since it’s like any other hiatus around here – my buddy’s server, on which jvlphoto.com is graciously hosted, had some sort of hardware anyeurism. All seems to be restored and in working order.

For this photo I took out an old favourite – the Canon 50mm f/1.4 – I’ve been playing with shallow depth of field a lot lately prepping for wedding season. Makes me really respect the photographers that can pull off the Canon 85 f/1.2 – the depth of field at that aperture is razor thin, and you’re likely to miss more shots than you’ll get. Of course, if done right, results can be pleasing.

Clean

Clean
I had every intention to spend some time taking out my big lights, doing some fancy setup on a park – exposing for the sun, the ambient light, the clouds, and getting some cool dramatic poses and portraits of whoever I could possibly find.

Instead I took care of the kids while Mel gardened – slapped the 50mm on the SLR and just had at it. Time well spent.

Return

Return
It’s hard to resist the temptation of budding flowers when you’re taking photos. Even when, typically, you pass over the shots of petals and stems you typically see online. But here we are, with 3 photos this week, all with flowers. Thankfully – you can stick around only as long as you like 😉

Special thanks to Josh for the better title for this post

Juliet

Juliet
I can’t watch the news, not the news that the media wants me to see. It’s full of tragedy, and more specifically, tragedy that has befallen children. You can’t read a newspaper or turn on the TV without hearing the horror stories. As a parent, I’m pre-programmed to already imagine all the horror that can befal my kids, I don’t need any help. And while there may be an argument for “don’t do this” kinda moments.

Most of the times it’s a toddler running into the road, flailing out of a parents arms, random acts of car, man, dog etc – and really – even locking my son up in a cage could hurt him (kid cage recall after toddler swallows lock)… whatever, if kids dying every day is the real world then I’ll happily live in the matrix. Ignorance is bliss.