Awww, YA…check it out. Fire it up in FULL SCREEN and crank up the SOUND.
Music by Train – Hey, Soul Sister (click to purchase on iTunes)
Photos by Andrew Johnson and Tyler Neilson
Crystal and James – Camp Morice
02
Sep
I’ve actually known Crystal and James for a long time…we went to school together more than 10 years ago. Although I haven’t really been involved in their lives since I finished high school, I was lucky enough to be able to attend their wedding because they were having it out at Camp Morice and because I’ve been meaning to make a promotional brochure advertising weddings out there. It was so great of them to allow me to come out and take pictures so that we can promote Camp Morice. Thank you Crystal and James!
I know that Crystal and James met back in high school (at O’Grady Catholic High). They’ve been out to Camp Morice many times in the summer for family camps, so the camp is a special place to them. Family is really important for them both, so having both families out at the camp for 3 days prior to the wedding was great because it allowed both families to be able to get to know each other and have a good time in a beautiful setting. (You can tell by the way I’m writing that I’m going to use that to promote the camp! Haha)
I was not their photographer for the day, but I got to follow their photographer around in the afternoon so I could get some good promo shots. Here are some of my favourites!
The epic and amazing Mt Pope in the distance.
Camp Morice’s famous dock.
They used Rice Crispies instead of rice. Cool idea.
Cory and Annie – Dr Sun Yat Sen Garden
31
Aug
I’ve known Cory and Annie for quite a few years now (since about 2001 I think), so it was especially fun to be able to shoot their wedding along with my best friend Tyler (who is also a great friend to Cory and Annie).
Cory and Annie wanted to get married at the Dr Sun Yat Sen Classical Garden in Vancouver, BC. Tyler and I were pretty excited when they told us where their wedding would be and that they wanted us to be the photographers. The garden is absolutely amazing….there is no shortage of beautiful places to take pictures. In my mind, it was a sure thing to be able to get some amazing photos. But with that, I felt the pressure of using the facility to it’s potential for photos. When you have such an amazing place to take photos in, you had better get the best pictures ever. So, long before the wedding Tyler and I did some research online about the garden, looked at satellite images of the area, did a scouting trip, and even found pictures that other photographers had taken at the garden. For me, I wanted to see what others had done both for inspiration and so that I could possibly try and do something different….something that had never been done before at the garden.
When the big day finally arrived, things went perfectly! The enormous stress Tyler and I put on ourselves paid off, as we were able to get some amazing shots! To see our good friends, looking their best, and as happy as we had ever seen them, made for a very special day. Thanks Cory and Annie for letting us capture some memories we hope you cherish for the rest of your lives.
Enjoy the pictures everyone!
Multiple Lights
30
Aug
Tyler and I were talking the other day about taking a portrait picture of him for all his professional profiles online (LinkedIn, MSN, his work internal network, etc). Since he works for Allnorth we decided that a basic portrait with green background would look best (Allnorth’s logo colour is a similar green to the background we used). So we picked a day that would work and setup a bunch of flashes in front of a green background; two soft boxes, two rim lights, and one background light later we got these shots:
Here’s another shot that’s a bit more serious:
If we were to do these kinds of shots again, I would definitely change the framing of the picture to be able to be cropped to a square picture. A bunch of online services require the picture to be completely square (which is rather annoying). The way that we shot these photos, for us to crop them square would mean to cut off the Allnorth logo on his t-shirt and make the picture be his head and neck only….which is not ideal and gets you a little too up-close-and-personal with Tyler.
Victoria is a cool place for a group shot
27
Aug
Back in May a bunch of us took a trip to Victoria and my goal for the trip was to take awesome photos of us on the trip. I took lots and I posted my favourites on Facebook, but I held back this photo for later use. I wanted to get some kind of group shot with a bunch of us wearing my Sonic Interactive Solutions t-shirts, so as we were walking around downtown Victoria we came across this spot and I knew it would be perfect. We weren’t all walking around in the t-shirts (none of us wanted to look like all those Japanese tourists that show up in matching t-shirts)…we just put the shirts on for the shot. The shot above is my favourite, but the one’s below are pretty great too!
Effin Spider
26
Aug
After seeing a popcorn spider in Tyler’s back yard during the day, we decided that it would be sweet to wait until it climbed out to the middle of it’s web to take some macro shots of it.
Photographer info:
I’ve found the best way to do this is to setup the shot in a few ways:
- Put the camera on a tripod
- Zoom the lens out as far as it can go and then move the camera and tripod as close as possible to your lens’ minimum focusing distance.
- Set the camera focusing on manual and focus as sharp as possible on the subject. For me, I have a “Live View” mode that allows me to zoom in on a certain spot of the picture and see it on the screen in the back….it allows me to focus very precisely.
- Set the camera settings to what you need to in order to get a good exposure of the subject. If it’s bright out, be sure to set to a low ISO to get a picture with the least amount of grain. If it’s dark out, make sure your shutter speed isn’t too slow to freeze any movement that his happening (if it is to slow, increase your ISO and/or aperture to compensate).
- Set the camera to take the picture 2 seconds after you push the button; this eliminates camera shake from you pushing on the camera shutter button.
Also, for what we were doing for these spider shots, I had to manually adjust the aperture to work with the flash that Tyler was holding. We had it on a low power (maybe 1/16th power) and he was moving it around to different angles as I was taking shots. Some angles gave a lot more definition on the spider than others while other angles highlighted the web very well.
Anyways, here are a bunch of cool shots that we got.
Fun with Portraits
25
Aug
The last little while I’ve been playing around with taking portraits using flashes and soft boxes (I don’t own studio lights). So, the other day I decided to setup my soft box in front of the curtains that cover my sliding door for the back deck; they’ve got some nice texture and make for an interesting background, so I thought they might look cool.
With the softbox in close, the f-stop of the camera has to be pretty high (11-ish), so the light falls off before it hits the background…thus the background is a bit dark.
Roberta, Ross, and I have been watching the three Jurassic Park movies the last few days and it’s become a tradition to grab a blizzard before watching the movies. Ross is trying to figure out if this is his blizzard or not.
I really like how crisp and clear everything is in this picture. The eyes are in perfect focus with nice catch lights in them, the blizzard looks so good that it’s making me hungry.
As a side note, of all three Jurassic Park movies were great, but the first one was by far the most enjoyable.
A Few Moments With A Caterpillar
06
Jun
I’ve been meaning to try out my macro adapter to shoot some video for a while now. It’s a lens element that came with a fisheye adapter I purchased a while back. Just this past weekend I was out rock climbing and found a caterpillar climbing on my shoulder. So, I moved it to the ground and tried out the macro lens on it while shooting video with my Canon Rebel T1i. It was pretty hard to keep focus since the depth of field is so small when you are in that close.
Once I got the footage into the computer I slowed it down a little bit and added some music. I think it turned out great for my first try using the macro lens to shoot video. What do you think?
Playing with a Blue-Screen
07
May
In the last year or so I’ve found it would be useful to have a quick setup for doing a blue screen. A lot of my website clients have a need to record some video to be overlayed on top of pictures or video, so I decided to try several different lighting techniques to get the best results when trying to key out a solid colour from video.
The “key” is to get even light on the background so that the colour is uniform enough for the software to pull it out without affecting the rest of the video. Being able to properly expose your foreground and background is pretty important too, so being able to manually adjust the exposure of your camera makes things a lot easier. For my Canon Rebel T1i, I don’t have the ability to manually set the exposure, so it makes things a little bit more complicated. It means that I have to have the lighting on the subject about the same intensity as the lighting on the background.
This is one of the setups I did. It works ok, and the lighting works for what I’m doing in the video (looking menacing towards the camera), but it’s not ideal for regular use. The shadow down the middle of my face kinda works for this video. Here is the lighting diagram:
Because of the limited room on the lighting diagram window, the soft boxes look like they are closer to the subject than they actually are. In fact, they were about 6 feet away. They were above the subject and pointing down to minimize shadows on the background, and each had a 500w light shining inside it.
Camp Morice is a youth camp that I volunteer at every summer. It’s in Fort St James, BC and boasts some of the most amazing sunsets you will ever see. One of the activities that is played every week is Capture the Flag (or CTF). The Red vs Green rivalry has been going strong since before I was born….so naturally there is lots of smack talk back and forth. This leads to the idea for my test video:
So that’s it for now. I hope to try a few more setups to see what works best. Hopefully that means more test videos as well.
Weekend Goals
22
Apr
I have decided that I will try and take photos or shoot video every weekend for posting on this blog. During the week it seems as though I have moments of inspiration where I come up with a cool idea, but then each day is so busy that I never get a chance to implement it. So, I’ll be writing those ideas down and adding them to my todo list for weekends.
For this post, I decided to upload a video clip of something I was working on a while ago. I got the idea from a time lapse video that became popular around the Vancouver Olympics. The idea of time lapse photography to make a video has intrigued me since I first saw the Planet Earth series and the time lapse video that they do there.
Here is the video:
For this video, I had the camera tethered to my laptop and aimed at the crane. I set each shot to be taken every 5 seconds and let it go for 30 minutes. When it was done, I imported all the frames into Sony Vegas and set their length to be only 1 frame. So, when played back at 30 fps, it speeds up the video to show 30 minutes of real life time in about 13 seconds. Also, since each image is 15 megapixels (on my Rebel T1i), I can zoom in on the photo quite a bit without loosing quality and pan out to a wider view.
I’d love to take some time to make more of these videos.