Posted on
23/04/2010
Like other photographers who shoot a lot of architecture, I have a real love-hate thing going on with the sun. It gives me good shadows so I can convey depth, it helps me create contrast in certain textures, but just as often it will be firing into my eyes and blowing out the background sky or shining so intensely that I can't expose for both the sunlit and shadow sides of a building. Well, this past week I got even and made the most of Phoebus' inconvenient positioning in two images that, I think, only really work because of the appearance of the sun in the frame, generally a no-no. Both were found images - I walked onto the scene and found that I could shoot my subject while flaring the sun behind it - but in each case it took a lot of minute adjustments of exposure and, mainly, positioning to get it right. And in each case the final image was made on a return trip the next day when I knew what I was aiming for and what worked and didn't work from the first attempts. Images after the jump.
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Posted on
11/04/2010
In case you haven't seen them on Facebook, I do street portraits during the James North Art Crawl each month. The idea came from my desire to revisit the now antiquated idea of a street studio, a concept that dates from the era before the personal camera was invented, when people could only be photographed by a professional. A street studio was a mobile space at which a photographer would invite/cajole passers-by into a sitting, making a little money for himself and giving the subject a chance to take part in something usually unavailable to people of modest means. Today's equivalent works largely the same way, except that the money is taken out of the equation and you need to do more than show you've got a camera to get people to stop for a sitting.
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Posted on
02/04/2010
I had the pleasure today of getting into the Herkimer Apartments at Herkimer & Bay in order to create some images to accompany an article that Graham Crawford of HIStory + HERitage is writing for Hamilton Magazine. The building has been purchased by Steve Kulakowsky of
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Posted on
25/03/2010
Thanks to Tyler, Marc, Jamie, and all the gang down at factor[e], I've got a new website that looks great and functions smoothly. While the D.I.Y. method has served me well when it comes to hacking together gear for my photography, creating and maintaining my own website only resulted in frustration and embarrassment. The factor[e] team is great and I'd highly recommend them. Good at what they do, great listeners, locally committed, and cool. It was a pleasure dealing with them and I just want to say thanks.
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