Photography Posts

I came to Buenos Aires with an iPad, a Macbook Pro, a Canon DLSR, a 28mm lens, a Kodak Playsport HD camera, and a Canon something or other point and shoot camera – quite the load. Here’s a little update on how it’s going. The Good The iPad is great for reading at home, but it’s not so good for reading out in public in a city with a lot of petty crime. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single iPad down here since I’ve arrived. As a result, I’m thankful I brought my Kindle with me, since it blends into a coffee shop scene far easier. Right before I left Canada I purchased (or rather, my dad purchased for me), a little blue Kindle cover, so my Kindle looks a lot like a normal book or maybe even a daytimer if you didn’t know what it was […]

This last weekend I had the opportunity to visit the world renowned Japanese Gardens in Buenos Aires. Outside of Japan, they are some of the largest Japanese Gardens in the world, and I have been looking forward to visiting them ever since I arrived. The Japanese Gardens are located in Buenos Aires, just north of the Palermo area and the Buenos Aires zoo. I walked there from my apartment near Paraguay and Gurrachuga, and it took me about 30 minutes or so to get there. This was the first real trip I had done in Buenos Aires where I decided to take my digital SLR along with me. At the advice of a friend, I stowed my SLR in a backpack, and simply removed it whenever I needed to take a photo or so. The reason to do that is that walking around with a fancy SLR camera makes you […]

We have limited flight options here in Canada, one of which is WestJet. Compared to some of their competitors, WestJet comes across as fun, receptive, and youthful, which is why I do my best to fly WestJet whenever I can. Every Wednesday, WestJet asks people via their Twitter stream (@westjet) to submit photos of the winglets on their planes. For those of you who don’t know, a winglet is the little tip that points up on the edge of the wings. Winglets technically increase drag on the airplane, but decrease the turbulence from wingtip vortices. In most cases winglets improve the airplane’s efficiency, causing it to use less fuel for the same flight. So not only does WestJet benefit financially from their use, but it also lowers the impact of the airplanes on the environment. I’ve taken quite a few photos of WestJet winglets over the years, but I’ve attached […]

There was a time when I had over $6,000 worth of camera gear sitting in my computer room. I love photography, and having a whole kit full of professional lens is great to have, but it’s not really very practical to lug that much gear around, especially if you’re trying to travel light. I’ve spent a lot of time over these last few months thinking about what type of camera gear to bring. My first plan was to simply take along a high-end point and shoot camera and make due with that. Given that my old Canon Digital Elph was dying, I went out and bought one of the nicest compact cameras I could find: the Canon PowerShot S90 The Canon S90 was definitely one of the nicest cameras I saw when I was out looking. It sports a 10MP digital sensor and can handle an ISO of up to […]

About a month ago I was in my room moving some stuff around when I heard a big thump. Looking down, my SLR had taken a small dive off of my bed and landed directly on my Flash unit. Unfortunately, being that the mount is this flimsy plastic thing, it immediately snapped, rendering the 430EX Flash pretty much useless. I spent a little time investigating whether or not it may be fixable. Not only is it fixable, but it can be done at home for relatively cheap. The first step is to order the part online. I actually found a store in San Diego that carries all the Canon parts. Here’s a whole section dedicated to replacement parts for Canon flashes. I ordered the replacement hot shoe for the Canon 430EX, which comes to around $15 USD, including shipping. I also found this video regarding a repair of the 530EX, […]

I realized last night that I’m sort of envious of the people who only post their best photos to their Flickr stream for the purpose of showcasing work or soliciting opinions on techniques. Given that my current Flickr account is pretty jam packed of personal photos, I thought I would start a second account for mainly my high-quality photos or photos that I’ve taken time to process and enhance. If you’re interested in following along, the new account is here. Feel free to add me as a contact and I’ll add you back. I’m going to challenge myself to try and do a setup shot each week to try and improve some of my techniques. Also, it may help with the occasional boredom that occurs from time to time.

As most people know, I spent a lot of my time in Vancouver taking photos of the city. I was one of the first people in the city to dabble with high dynamic range imagery, and because I carried my wideangle lens around with me quite often, ended up with quite a few HDR images of Vancouver. While down in the Dominican, I was talking to Dale about possibly putting together a little package for media organizations during the Olympics. While in the process of putting that together over the last few weeks, I figured I might as well put everything online as well. To that end, I registered the domain VancouverStockPhotos.ca the other day, and was up until about 5am on Saturday putting it together. Most of my Vancouver shots are now up for sale, primarily as stock photography, but also a few that are available in prints. As […]

Canon has just announced a brand new EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens – the 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II. This is one of Canon’s most popular L-series lenses, and is pretty much a must-have for most serious wedding and event photographers. I have the non-IS (image stabilized) version, which works fairly well in most scenarios, but I’ve heard the IS version allows you to hand-hold shots in scenarios where the non-IS version would fail. Here’s some information on it: Canon has improved the optical performance by redesigning the internal elements, incorporating a fluorite element and a fifth UD element to help minimize secondary chromatic aberrations and produce better image quality with improved contrast and resolution through the entire zoom range. The new lens design features improved auto focus speed due to a new focusing algorithm and a shorter minimum focusing distance of 3.9 feet (1.2 meters). It also features improved image […]

A long time ago I wrote that I had started to try and turn the Crossroads Flickr plugin into a full-featured stock photography plugin. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to work on it in the last six months, but finally sat down last night to start to hack on it a bit more. I’m thankful to say that I’ve finally put most of the pieces together such that I now have a full featured stock photography section on my website powered almost exclusively by Flickr. If you’d like to browse around, I suggest you head over to Leslie Feist gallery and start there. There is still a ton of room to improve upon things, but most of the larger pieces are now in place. The prices are set based on available Flickr sizes, and are priced according to image megapixels. I need to go through my archives and re-upload […]

Without a doubt, shooting in low-light conditions is one of the most challenging aspects of taking photographs. I would still probably rate weddings a bit more challenging (since most weddings include some elements of low-light in addition to outdoor shots), but it’s definitely near the top of my difficulty scale. With the advent of digital cameras, most SLR bodies now have the ability to allow the user to arbitrarily increase the ISO setting on the camera in order to improve the low-light responsiveness. So obviously when a photographer encounters a low-light situation, he or she can simply increase the ISO sensitivity of the camera to compensate. I can actually handle random noise fairly well in my photographs, but there’s another type of noise that I can’t deal with, and that occurs as the ISO increases. Effectively what happens is that in high-light areas of the frame, the light ends up […]