Architectural & Interior Design Photography, Corporate Commercial Photography, Advertising & Portrait Photographer | Ottawa | 613-558-7585 | justin.vanleeuwen@gmail.com
For the second year in a row I visited the Parkdale Food Centre to make portraits for a new batch of thirteen youths. The “Thirteen” is a social enterprise for youth under the Parkdale Food Centre in Ottawa. The year-long project is an entrepreneurial training program for teens aged 14-18 with help and support by […]
Every Summer the Ottawa architectural, design, and builder community rushes to put the finishing touches on their GOHBA Housing Design Awards submissions. Of course, without the heroic efforts of the interior and architectural photographers who capture the finished project, they’d never be outside of their own neighbourhood. I personally photographed several projects for the Awards […]
What a pleasure it was to walk into my local craft beer brewer – Beyond the Pale – one day and have them ask me to take updated photos for their website. “You want me to do beer photography? Yes. Yes I will.”
It can be funny who you meet at your child’s bus stop in the morning. In my case, a couple whose children go to the same school as mine also happen to be residential builders in Ottawa and had their own custom built infill just down the street. They also needed some proper interior photography […]
On a cold winter morning earlier this year I teamed up with Ottawa Singer/Songwriter Danielle Allard and body-paint specialist May Mutter to produce the promotional and cover images for Danielle’s forthcoming album, Chameleon.
How fortuitous that my favourite hair stylist (yes, I get a “fancy” haircut) and one of my favourite interior photography clients came together to design the new Mint Hair Studio. While Grassroots Design hasn’t done a great deal of commercial interiors, I instantly fell in love with this transformed space.
A portrait photographer often has to push people and seek out the best shot of an individual, sometimes they’re hard to coax in front of the camera and unwilling to do anything that would lend themselves to a good portrait. Sometimes they offer to light their hat on fire. Chef Patrick Garland of Absinthe Cafe […]
You never know when you’re going to get your next great client. Emma Doucet’s youngest daughter and my youngest son both go to the same daycare. Normally you spend your time making trivial kid-based chit-chat about poop and food and growing out of clothes, but after a year your’e sure to learn something interesting about […]
I nearly forgot about these commercial food photographs I took for Suzy Q Doughnuts here in Ottawa last year. The shop is only a few blocks away from where I live. I was their second customer when they opened up and did as much as I could to recommend the crap out of them to […]
I’m very pleased to announce that, from October 18th to 28th I’ll be opening a PopUp photo studio right in my own Ottawa neighbourhood: Hintonburg. 1089 Sommerset is a great space, that in-no way could I afford on a permanent basis, but it’s there, it’s empty, and I said I’d be willing to clean it […]
Knowing your subjects always helps. Often getting to know your subjects means doing some research, google, a bit of social media stalking, to get a feel for who they are, what they’ve accomplished, so that you have a familiarity going into the shoot. Of course, actually previously knowing your subject makes it all that much […]
A few portraits today. Typically, the new year starts of pretty slow for me, my clients rub off their hungover weary holiday eyes, realize they’ve spent all their money on egg-nog and iPads and need to hold off a bit until February to start booking me again. Thankfully, the Kitchissippi Times wanted the first issue […]
I photographed Sarah to help showcase her new play, one she’s co-written and staring in, based on the lives of civil servants. There’s few better representations of the brutalist architecture our indentured servants than Tunney’s Pasture – the place should have a perimeter fence. You can now read full Kitchissippi Times articles online, which isn’t […]
Rare is the time that I’m not assigned to take photographs of some sort of goings-on in the city. While some may take it as a sleight when iRun decided to go with their tried-and-true Ottawa Race Weekend Photographer Ian Murchison out of Toronto (fiend!), I took it as an opportunity to explore a personal […]
I live in a part of Ottawa known as Hintonburg. Anyone following me on Twitter will know I’m strongly community oriented; so, along with lots of photography related stuff, I chat to and about those in my neighbourhood. The gentrification of the main strip of Wellington West in Hintonburg is nothing new to folks who […]
There are two steps to being a professional photographer: one is to value your own work, the other is to create work of value. You do not have to do these in order, but doing neither is unsustainable. The above photo I shot while on assignment for my local paper the Kitchissippi times. While it’s […]
Did I skip a week between posts? oops – my bad. I was contacted this week by my local (like, neighbourhood local) paper, the Kitchissippi Times, to cover the Hintonburg 5K for my first editorial photography assignment. I jumped at the chance, of course, since I love being associated with my neighbourhood, but it’s not […]
Bonkers, pictured, is a local watering hole in my Hintonburg neighbourhood. I posted this photo on Flickr yesterday, and this is a suggested crop of that image (thank you for your input folks!). The nice thing about this shot, for me, is that it was something I had pre-envisioned. I knew I wanted to take […]
There are few things you can purchase that will improve your photography. Indeed, the only way I’ve seen people get better is through practice (or riduculous intuition and artistic ability – but we don’t like those people). 10,000 photos, or 10,000 hours; either way, it’s gonna take you time, trial, and error. But if there’s […]
It’s been a while since I posted a HDR image – mostly because I haven’t been shooting them. Some people hate the effect, some love the results. I find it’s usually pretty polarized within a few groups “photographers” and everyone else. See – photographers themselves are always polarized – which camera company, bag, lens, flash, […]
I’m going to put this simply: If you live in Ottawa, or specifically Hintonburg, come by Hino Restaurant on Monday October 25th. Doors open at 7pm, there’ll be a bit of food to much on, some prints I’ve made special with the boys and girls at Canvaspop. There’s gonna be some good people there, Photographers, […]
When Mel and I first moved into the Hintonburg area in Ottawa, we only had a few restaurants that we knew about beforehand. With a preemie in the hospital, we were really always looking for comfort food – the familiar. That said, there wasn’t much variance in what we ate, and one of the places […]
I’ve only been in Ottawa a few years now, but I have come to closely associate myself with the Hintonburg community I live in. I’m not an activist or anything, but I’ve been fascinated in where the neighbourhood’s come from, and where it’s going. From a real-estate point of view, the area’s “up and coming” […]
There’s something appealing about a building number spelled out for me. As if it’s a higher level of sophistication – only the literate may enter – if you can’t read, you’ll never find it, like it never existed.
