Category: Photography

I like to think I’m pretty comfortable with my camera by now. I know my aperture from my exposure compensation. I know how to take a decent picture of the cat and a flower and a child running full tilt away from the camera. The one thing that continues to intimidate and elude me, however, is how to properly use my flash.

The flash is one of the first accessories we bought to use with my D40, way back in 2009. I think I used it about four times and gave up when it made everything look like a deer caught in headlights. I took a workshop at Henry’s and realized I was supposed to take it off camera, but that my camera wasn’t properly equipped to take advantage of that functionality, so I lost interest again. When I upgraded to the D7000 last year, I figured I’d solved the problem and pulled out the flash again, and even bought myself an umbrella kit. And my flash pictures? Still sucked. I started researching and reading, internalizing concepts like guide numbers and the inverse square law and balancing ambient light.

I ran into a bit of a circular dilemma. Books and magazines and blogposts are good for some theory, but you really just gotta get out there and take the pictures. But when I looked at the pictures, they sucked and I was discouraged. So I started looking around at photographers I admired here in Ottawa, wondering if I could approach someone to do some mentoring, or maybe just sit down with me for a day and walk me through the basics. And that’s when I stumbled across a workshop at Harry Nowell’s studio for on-location portrait lighting. Eureka! This was EXACTLY what I wanted. I was so excited I tried to register on the spot – and found out it had just sold out. I was so disappointed, and equally delighted when a few weeks later Harry said they’d be offering a second workshop in the summer. I’ve been patiently waiting ever since.

The workshop was three days this week, and the instructor was Ottawa photojournalist and wedding photographer Blair Gable. If you ever get the chance to work with Blair, as a client or as a student, do it. He’s a good teacher, probably one of the best I’ve had in various photo classes over the years. But more compelling for me, he specializes in exactly what I love most about photography – people and storytelling. We spent a couple of hours in the class looking at some of his work for Reuters and Macleans, and discussing both how and why he chose to light them they way he did. And then we had to (gasp!) get out of our chairs and actually take some pictures.

This was the first time I worked with a professional model, and it was a lovely change of pace to be photographing someone who was not actively trying to resist me. And I didn’t have to bribe her with Oreos or video games, either. On the other hand, knowing she had probably posed for more than a few photographers who didn’t forget key steps like actually turning on the flash was more than a little intimidating, as was working while being watched by three classmates and the teacher. (Funny, by fluke the class comprised all female students – I’ve never been in a photo class or workshop with just women before!) This is the most successful of a few shots I took during the class. The flash is behind her, providing what was supposed to be gentle rim lighting to separate her from the background but I kind of overcooked it a bit.

Learning how to balance the ambient light and the flash was one of the major goals I had for the class, so I could make photos like this one I took the next day in during our most excellent Wakefield adventure.

While I got the exposure right (and Simon is awfully cute) I think the overall composition worked better in this one, which is why I ultimately chose it as the photo of the day.

I’ve been thinking about this shot ever since I attended the Joe McNally workshop (also on the use of flashes) a month ago. My dad has such character in his face, with the fur and the lines, and I wanted to use a flash to bring that out in an interesting way. Turns out that’s a lot harder than it looks. My sweet dad sat through probably 50, maybe closer to 100 shots as I moved the flash around, tried shooting through and reflecting out of an umbrella, rolled paper into snoots and even tried diffusing with a piece of tissue. I could not for the life of me get the shot I wanted, and he was so patient with me the whole time. There’s something to be said for still being Daddy’s Girl well into your forties. 🙂

In addition to being a week of fascinating lessons and flash photography, it was the last of three weeks of vacation for me (well, for now. More on that later.) So we did some fun stuff like visiting the splash pad in Barrhaven to chill out.

And we made another little day trip (how grateful am I that my boys are good in the car) down to Morrisburg to check out what turned out to be a very boring antique show and a very interesting St Lawrence River shoreline.

A sunflower, because I simply can’t resist them.

And last but certainly not least, a fun shot from a funny family porch portrait session this week. On one of the hottest days in 2011 I chased this little guy around a park for portraits, and this year it was blessedly cooler when he and his family came out to the porch for photos. He really wasn’t much more interested in standing still for the camera now than he was a year ago, though!

(He’s chasing the bubbles that you can just make out over his head. There is something about this posture that I absolutely adore. Three year olds are my muse and my nemesis in equal photographic measure!)

Now I just have to commit to learning to use my flash with the same ease and comfort with which I use natural light. If you see Willie squinting and twitching a lot in the next little while, you’ll know it has less to do with Lucas chasing him all over the house and more to do with being glareblinded by me. 🙂

Oops! I was supposed to post this last week before we went on our summer road trip down to southern Ontario. Oh well, better late than never?

Wow, it seems like I took this two years ago instead of two weeks ago! I met with a fun family in the Arboretum for family pictures on a quiet Sunday morning. I’ll share more of the pictures from that session soon, but I loved the serenity of this one as they had a wee picnic with snacks for the kids, right at the end of our session.

This is Tristan in his natural habitat – exploring and climbing and being cute.

FromWhereIStand – on a sidewalk mural downtown. Ooooo, shiny and colourful!

I drive by this spot every day on my way to work. The way the morning light hits the field always catches my eye. One day early this summer, maybe even mid-spring, I was zooming past and the little canyon was filled with cows. It was such an unexpected sight, cows all over those little hillocks, and the light was divine. And I was incredibly late and for once in my life didn’t have my camera with me. Every day since, I’ve driven past and looked wistfully at the spot, but every day no cows. And then one morning last week, cows! Not a whole herd of cows, like last time, but these two at least. I had to stop, after all that regretting that I’d missed it the first time around.

Lucas on the run:

These aren’t my coneflowers, they’re my neighbour’s. The ones I planted the day after I took this are already brown and crispy. I’ll blame the drought and not my embarrassing lack of gardening juju.

I have been coveting a wide angle lens for a while, and knowing we’d be going down to southern Ontario farm and lake country for our vacation, I figured it would be an excellent time to rent one for the week to take it for a test drive. I got a 10-24mm DX lens from Vistek for a week. OMG how much do I love it??? The nature of a wide angle lens makes it distort anything that it is very close to, and pushes everything else even further away. It’s great for sweeping vistas, which I’ll show you in next week’s pictures, but how fun are these?

(snicker)

(snort)

(guffaw!!)

I love this lens a little too much!

Sorry for the radio silence this week, but I have SO MUCH to tell you about coming up in the next little while. Be prepared to be spammed, as soon as I unpack and clean out the car and get my passport. Passport? Stay tuned! 😉

Holy cow, I just realized this may be the first week in who knows how long that I don’t have a picture of either Lucas or Willie or both! Well, you can see a wee bitty Lucas in this storyboard of our quick and eventually stormy first visit to Petrie Island last week. We had just arrived and had a little picnic lunch and the boys were splashing their feet (we hadn’t brought bathing suits or towels as the beach was not our original destination) when we noticed the threatening clouds coalesce into rain way up the Ottawa River toward Kanata. We watched the rain get closer and closer, and had just decided we had better move back to the car a little faster than anticipated when this wicked wind kicked up a sandstorm, just in front of the pouring rain. We made it in the barest nick of time!

I’ve planted daisies and pink coneflowers in the front garden and sunflowers all over the place, and the damn things just refuse to grow. Who can’t grow sunflowers?! Apparently, me. But there’s a patch of daisies in the back garden that are flourishing and delightfully photogenic.

I’ve been working on honing my off-camera flash skills in anticipation of two flash workshops (well, one lecture and one workshop) that I’ll be attending later this summer. I’ve made lots of test shots, but these ones were the first ones that were interesting enough to share. I put the flash down on the ground amidst the daisies and pointed it straight up at them, then set my camera on manual with a shutter speed fast enough to kill the mid-day light, so the camera would only register what the flash was lighting. I liked it better in B&W, as it gives a more dramatic glow to the daisies, I think.

We got our first CSA share from Roots and Shoots farm this week. Fresh, photogenic and yummy too!

It was a crazy-busy last week of school! First, there was the talent show.

Then, I helped supervise the fourth grade class picnic. I was talking to Tristan’s teacher when she said, “Oh, the baby goats are here!” I thought it was a colloquialism, but no, a parent had arrived with their family pet goat’s two newborn kids. They were only two days old, fresh enough that they still had their umbilical cords attached! I tell ya, stuff like this doesn’t happen in city schools!

And then it was the last day of school. If you look closely, you can see Simon is fighting back tears here – at least I didn’t have both of them bawling this year. Does anyone else’s kids cry instead of dance the last day of school? I suppose I should be happy they love school so much, and with report cards that have B- as the lowest grade between them, it shows.

Just for fun, here’s last year’s version. Huge difference!

And this is the last year there will only be two in the traditional first/last day of school pictures – Lucas starts JK in September!!!