Not sure I posted this yet, but I’ve started a new concept photoblog. It’s quite different from this one, which I am no longer maintaining.

SO…

I’ve been trying to figure out why my pre-offline posts linking to flickr don’t seem to be showing their photos. After going back and forth with wordpress and flickr support I found out:

Everytime you change the state of a photo, by replacing it (a feature in pro accounts), rotating it, editing it, or setting it to private or to public, Flickr generates new filenames for it. It’s a security feature to prevent people from linking to images without permission.
Doing any of these things will permanently break the html code to the image and you will get a “photo is currently unavailable” message on your blog.

So that’s that. I could go back and manually replace the code in nearly two hundred posts. I’m not going to. I just retired my personal blog, so I think I’m going to do the same with this one. Being offline for four months basically destroyed my traffic,so no one’s watching anyway right?

I’m going to start a new photo blog, but one with a more personal focus rather than a straight showcase for my photography. I’m also going to start looking into setting up a real portfolio site for displaying my work. I’ve decided that inasmuch as I’m going to persue making photography anything more than a hobby, I would like to do it locally. Perhaps honing some connections in my community and going from there. As far as the blog goes, I’d like to get back to the original point,which was to chronicle my life through photos and words.

So be on the lookout for that. Once I’ve decided what the new blog will be I’ll link it here. Same with anything else for awhile.

Fred Eaglesmith @ Caravan Farm Theatre, Armstrong

This summer I had the great privilege of seeing Canadian indie country artist Fred Eaglesmith in the amazing setting of Caravan Farm Theatre. Not only did I see/hear a terrific musical performance, I also got to indulge in some concert photography, something I very rarely get to do.
The venue was in the open air, the crowd on bleachers and the band in a covered gazebo. There was a nice grassy sitting area between the stands and the stage. This afforded me the opportunity to get in nice and close. My main lens of choice this night was my 30 year old SMC Takumar 50/1.4. I used my 18-55 II for a few wide shots. The show was a lot of fun and managed to get some terrific captures, shown below.

Check out Fred Eaglesmith at his site

New photoblog

I’m starting up a fun new photoblog to keep myself entertained. Unfoto is an offshoot of lifeundefined, the premise is that I will post one photo everytime and offer some commentary to go with it. The commentary may be related to the mechanics of the photo, the equipment used, the locations it was taken, how it was processed, or anything else. I will also use it to showcase my best and favourite photography, and possibly the works of other photographers. The point is to focus on one photo at a time. This will give me some incentive to go beyond just posting photos and start talking about them. Check it out

Since my blog has been offline for nearly four months I thought that I would blog some of my favourite shots from that period in time for the “relaunch” in a few days or so.

First though, if you are one of the few that actually read this blog, and one of the even fewer that will remain after four months of radio silence, you may notice the very basic theme.  I’m using this theme because it is the only one that lets me not only blog photos at flickr’s “large” size but also lets me do so with more than one photo per post.  Monotone, wordpress’s “photoblogging” theme, seems to only display one photo per post, while no other theme has the single column width I need.  So if you know of one that’s slipped under my radar that would fit my needs (or even a different site) let me know.

Without further ado, my favourtie photos from the media blackout:

One of my favourite photographic ventures this past summer was shooting a work of Vernon metalsmithing artist Doug Alcock.  I volunteered ny services to get some photographs of a large piece Doug did for The Rise on bellavista road.  Having mentioned that the piece was lit and would therefore look best at night, I drove out late in the evening to get some shots.

The Rise is a subdivision on the outskirts of town, and true to its name is located on a steep rise above Okanagan lake.  This night it happened to be very windy.  When I arrived I realized that I hadn’t anticipated the scale of the work.  The sculpture is perched atop a turret flanking a stepped stone wall.  The wall rises in steps up to Doug’s piece which sits a good fifteen feet off the ground.  I started by getting some wide shots to include the large “The Rise” sign on the wall.  I then climbed up on the wall and set up my tripod to get some closer shots and some isolating interesting details.  I was worried the heavy winds would move,if not knock down,my camera and tripod during the long exposures necessary.  Luckily my tripod was heavy enough to maintain steadiness.

Getting the correct exposure was tough, most exposures were five seconds or more though on some I experimented with fill flash.  The trick was not to blow out the lit areas of the work, while still getting some detail in the dark ones, and on wide shots getting enough detail in the background to provide context.

For the close up detail shots I used a fast normal lens.  For the rest I switched between my 28mm and the 18-55 (used almost exclusively at 18mm).  All used mirror lockup.

I was struck by the beauty of the work, the amazing little details and sheer epicness of the piece in this setting.  I’ve seen Doug’s work before and been very impressed but the scale of this one blew me away.

I really enjoyed the challenge of this session and it was satisfying to do something for an amazing local artist.  My favourite photos from the session are below.  Check out Doug’s work at his website and at many locations throughout the Okanagan

In the months that I have been willfully absent from public sites such as this blog, I’ve (reasonably enough) been little compelled to write or post photos here.  Life has been very busy indeed.  That said, I’ve missed posting photos here.  Here’s what I’ve been up to photographically in the last while:

Took a trip to my hometown, took a bunch of pictures, including a few that fit into my ongoing project based on In Between . I did not however do any work on the two projects I intended to develop while there.   Oh well.

I broke my SMC M 50/1.7.  Boo.

I found a load of cheap 135 film, and as such have been shooting alot with a borrowed Canon slr, my Spotmatic, and Olympus Trip 35.

I put together three books in two volumes each of my photography since I began in 2005.  I’ve wanted to print a lot of these images and this is the most cost effective and attractive looking way to do it.

Not much eh?  Truth be told, a lot has been happening in my life and I have put photography on the backburner.  I think this is good, as I only want to shoot when I have the focus necessary to think through and carry out what I want to get across.

What I think is next is a sharpening of ideas related to the work in In Between, to flesh out concepts further and develop  a coherent narrative, eventually integrating this into a photo book possibly incorporating the work of writers I find exceptionally apt in describing the state of civilization currently.  Also on the book front, I’d like to put together some images I’ve taken of my hometown over the years and self publish them, perhaps getting some copies in circulation there.  This may take the form of a one-off, free zine.  It would likely be in the vein of this post .

And currently I’m about to start a project taking my favourite photo from each month of 2008 and giving it a new lease on life via remixing.  Sort of a “best of 2008″ kind of thing.

Being as you are reading this post, go check out Flickr for all the stuff I’ve invisibly uploaded in the past four months.

Panoramas

So you won’t likely be reading this is until months after it goes up, as for reasons somewhat beyond my control I’ve had to suspend my online presence for a few months. This does not mean I’ve stopped taking pictures however. By the time you can actually view this entry there will be a good three months worth of new photos on flickr for your perusal.

I have had time to do some stuff I’d been meaning to: making a couple volumes of photo books compiling the last few years of my photography; printing some of my work; completing some projects; among other things.

I discovered a very cool panorama creator for Linux today. Hugin is simple to use, and within minutes will stitch together a few photos into a very well done pano. Given more time you can make many refinements and tweaks to the images. I find a few images to use and spent a good portion of the day playing around with this program. I’ve always wanted to shoot panoramas but this is the first time the software has been available to me (and like most Linux software, it’s free). So I made three panoramas today, they aren’t perfect but they’re a good start. I think I’ll soon be posting some purpose-shot panos.

These are best viewed at full size, but I’ve posted them medium here so they fit. Click through to flickr to see the large ones.

This is a composite of two photos I took last year from Becker Park in Vernon. I really enjoy the detail of the path winding along the top of the hill towards the camera.

The landscape is a bit wonky on this one and I’m not sure why. I couldn’t decide on a good crop so I left the image as-is. This is a composite of three shots taken at Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver. I love the variety of trees in this shot. Lighthouse Park is an amazing place, and is accessible by transit in the lower mainland.

This is my favourite one. I hiked the hard way up Turtle Mountain and was rewarded with amazing views of an impending storm over Kalamalka lake. I was also rewarded, to my astonishment, with a double rainbow as the storm approached and passed over. I took shot after shot and naturally when I was looking for some to make a panorama out of, I thought of these. This was made using two shots.

Taking a bit of a break.

So I think I’m gonna take a bit of a break, as real life is getting a bit complicated right now. I’ll still post stuff previously uploaded to Flickr, and damn I might even take some photos, but I won’t be posting anything new here for awhile. Unless that is, I manage to get together a spare $200 or so to process my backlog of film…

A pretty, if complicated shot. From Lynn Canyon Park, North Vancouver.