The Chinatown Parade... LAST year (2018)

I’ve started to make it a habit to post up these Chinatown Parade photos a year later… whoops! Life does get busy and now even more so with my daughter’s arrival. However, this has allowed for a strange benefit: After having faced a Chinatown Parade in the freezing cold and then in a blizzard (literally moments ago… and the snow is still falling as I type), I now look back at the photos from last year’s parade and am able to enjoy them more after having let them sit and marinate for a year rather than if I had simply posted them straight away. There’s something about the passage of time that really matures a documentary photograph.

Also, after feeling the light singe of firecracker during the parade last year, I came back this year with a mouth cover and it somewhat helped in breathing in less of those firecracker fumes but golly…. stay away from those things!

Full Gallery below:

Photographs from a Ferry Ride

Recently I was telling a group of photographers at the ARC Conference that “you are not a ‘photographer’, you are more than that.” I really believe this to be true. While we are passionate about our photography work (weddings, family photographs, long-term projects), we are so much more than just a camera person who takes these photos. We are human beings: artists who create with our cameras. And sometimes, this creating leads us to explore other areas other than those that we would normally do in our line of work.

A while back, I was taking photographs while taking a ferry ride over to Victoria… or could have been on the way back? It’s been a while so I can’t recall off the top of my head. Regardless, we were on the water and feeling my usual restlessness, I felt the need to run around on deck with a camera and take some photographs. I felt a strong urge to experiment and take photos that I normally wouldn’t take. I wanted to explore my world with my camera… so I did just that.

One of the inhabited islands we passed?

I forget how powerful the waters can be sometimes. I just have to look down from the deck and I’m very quickly reminded.

Another ferry passes in the distance.

I wonder if there was anyone on the other side of this window thinking it weird that I was taking their picture when I took this photograph of myself :)

Reflective surfaces are great opportunities for selfies… er, I mean #selfies.

The passing ferry ship a little further into the distance. Now I understand what people mean by the phrase “two ships passing in the night”.

Street Photography - How I Keep Myself Sharp

Believe it or not, photography is a lot like sports exercise. If you leave it for too long, your muscles get flabby and you have to recondition them to get back into peak performance once again.

I try to keep my photographic skills well-practiced so that when it's time to roll for an assignment, I am in peak form and able to deliver. How do I do this, you ask?

Well one of my ways is Street Photography.

PS: I also condition myself physically as well all year just to ensure I'm in top shape for all the wedding and events and documentary photosessions that I do. It can be physically draining, especially if you're looking at 8-14 hour days!

It was the yellow that really highlighted this image for me. The shirt to the left and the basket to the center-right (plus it's reflection) ... oh, and the gentleman's yellow hat show off a cascade of this color all throughout the image.

I love reflections :)

Trying to find the right moment to get everything together in one photographic frame, especially when it's all moving very quickly, is tough. I do this around the streets that I walk and bring it then to all the weddings and sessions that I do.

Whether it be weddings, streets, projects or whatever, when it comes to photography, I'm looking for light, shadows, shape and also a subject. I try to tell a story in a frame.

When It's Cold, I Go Outside - Part 1

I like to spend my time walking. Outside. Even when it's cold. 

The January before last (that is, January 2014) proved to be an especially cold January. Brisk winter air was sharp on the skin but it was still strangely sunny. I took this opportunity to take some photos and, on this rainy February day in 2016, I thought I'd share a few.

Featured in these images are the Vancouver Public Library and parts of Downtown Vancouver. Film scans done by Caribou Lab, which has now closed it's doors :(

As a documentary photographer, I'm always practicing my "eye". I'm always looking to find ways to make my images better and more impactful. The main challenge for a documentary photographer is finding these images in circumstances that are usually outside of my control. Sometimes, though... as I've learned, it's all about composing the scene and letting the action and circumstances come to you.

The Canon 1D Mark II N And Roberta Olenick

I was in the market for a camera as I was looking to make use of the digital Mastin Lab film presets to bring my digital images closer to the way I wanted them to look (like film) and I was also considering a digital full frame that could shoot in demanding circumstances. The type of work I had been doing and the type of demands asked of me made me consider a camera upgrade. Don’t get me wrong, I still love the Leica and my Pentax 645 and Pentax digital cameras but there was a gap that needed to be filled in my line-up.  In all honesty, I could probably use any camera to take a photograph but in practice I have found that some tools are much better than others when it comes to certain assignments.

Crowds line up for buses close to the Broadway City Hall Skytrain Station - Taken with the Canon 1D Mk II N and a 50mm F1.4 EF lens.

After some meandering and considering of various cameras (Fuji X Series? Nikon? Wait for the Pentax Full Frame? Other mirrorless?), I found myself at Beau Photo and fell upon the Canon cameras. As I was considering the 5D (we had rented one for a photoshoot at Whytecliff Park), I was looking for one in good condition (still am) but my eye caught this big chunk of a camera sitting in the back of the other Canon cameras. Closer inspection revealed it to be a Canon 1D Mark II N in very good condition and the price was within what I was looking for too. As I investigated it closer for any major scuff marks, the gentleman at Beau noted that the dirt marks on the grip may have been from “her using the camera on the ground”. Her? Ground?

Night and Day - Taken with the Canon 1D Mk II N and a 50mm F1.4 EF lens.

When I happily took the camera home, I looked into the box and found a little note on one of the spare focusing screens. It was a pink little sticky that had the name “Roberta” on it and a number. At this point, I came to a realization that I was very intrigued about all the evidence mounting and became ever more curious about who the previous owner was. At this point, all I knew was that she was a woman, used the camera on the ground (probably for wildlife) and her name was Roberta. Would she think I was weird for calling her up or contacting her?

Through some “googling” of things, I found a website (www.neverspook.com) called “Never Spook The Animals Wildlife Photography” and found a photographer named Roberta Olenick. I sent her an email explaining that I may have purchased her camera. After a few brief email exchanges, we decided to meet up and met for the first time at a local Starbucks.

Roberta Olenick is a wildlife photographer and has a great respect and passion for nature and animals. Her images of wildlife exude a sense of playfulness and character. The animals look alive and active and interesting. She shared many stories about the camera and also about her experiences and adventures. Prior to this, we had a brief email exchange:

As part of an email, I wrote: “ Thank you for the kind words on my work. I have seen your work on the website and they are amazingly good nature photos! They have such character and I feel like the animals are very much like people :) “

She wrote: “Interesting that you feel like the animals in my images are much like people because when I was looking at your images of people, I was thinking your people were much like animals. Your people were often doing interesting things as though they did not know they were being watched and that natural behaviour is exactly what I try to capture with the wildlife I photograph. A lot of people photos don’t have that ‘wildlife’ quality, but many of yours do.”

As first, I thought that this was a strange comment to make but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense and I realized exactly what she meant.

The one and only Roberta Olenick (www.neverspook.com)

As my friend Neil, a fellow photog focusing on bird photography (Instagram: njdav), and I sat at the table at Starbucks with Roberta, we learned that the camera had “seen” many things. With a shutter count of about 61,000 frames, this was Roberta’s first digital camera (after previously using film to photograph nature) and it had been in various places in Canada from Vancouver to Newfoundland and on extended stints in Colorado. The camera and Roberta had witnessed bears and their cubs, playful foxes, birds of various types and many other amazing animals. She explained that she would often try to get up at “first light” to get the best images.

“As for what the camera has seen … that would be almost exclusively wildlife and a few landscapes, almost never people. So it is seeing very different things now than it did with me. It was an excellent camera for me as well. If I recall correctly, I used the MkIIN from 2006 when I went digital to around 2009 or so,” she wrote in an email.

Roberta realizing I'm taking her photo with her old camera.

Roberta is a spunky and social person and very friendly and very open to telling the stories of her experiences, adventures and her thoughts. She explained that she had two rescue cats (which she pointed out in our emails after seeing my own blog post on my own rescue cat) who are now respectively 12 years and 15 years old.

Little did I expect that I would gain a friend out of purchasing this camera. If anything, it has been very enlightening to learn where this camera has been and to give it a second life as a documentary and wedding camera. In the same way that the camera had seen the story of a vast plethora of nature’s animals, I am hoping it will capture the story of the many, many people in this world.

Roberta's current cell phone which excels at something that current smart phones don't excel at: punching in numbers and making phone calls.

Technical Note: The Canon 1D Mark IIN is actually an APS-H sensor (with a 1.3 crop factor, so it's a crop camera but not as cropped as your usual APS-C DSLR. So I didn't get a full frame camera per se but I find APS-H is more than good enough thus far).

Street Photography September

With the sun staying out from Summer time, September turned out to be a pretty awesome month in terms of light. I took advantage of this but taking my camera with me and walking around Downtown Vancouver.

I've been contemplating putting together a book of Downtown Vancouver and the various scenes and daily moments I've seen throughout the last few years but I'd like to maybe take a few more years of photos before creating a book. 

Whenever I make photographs of the street, I consider the light, I consider the composition and I consider the moment. There have been times when I'll see an image come together (the light is great, I've got a good composition of everything) but the moment I raise my camera, it's gone. Such is life. 

Beyond the technical awesomeness of a photograph, I really want my street photograph (or any photograph I make, for that matter) to make you think about humanity... and how beautiful a creation we are. Truly, we are beautiful. Getting it all in camera is the hard part.

A "Colourful" Journey

While I've heavily been a black and white shooter for a while, there's been a slight tugging to colour. I truly enjoy the tones and the mood that black and white images have. It forces you to look beyond shades of red, green, blue and straight into the geometry and also straight to the people's expressions and actions in an image. 

The truth is though, I enjoy colour too but... I think I'm really picky about it. It HAS to be right. It's so easy for us to just explode images with colour without thought or to get it wrong or inaccurate. Colours play an integral role in a photographic image and, believe it or not, also in black and white imagery.

Film for me gets colours right.

(And, with some tweaking, digital images with film presets).

Some Photographs Are Like That

I was going back through my Japan photographs from a trip in 2014 and found this one. Upon my first review I didn't think too much of it but after working with it, I found it actually turned out to be something I like. Some photographs are like that: They take time to mature. Or... another way to put it... your perspective changes and the photograph says something different to you.

View fullsize

Looking Back to Look Ahead - Part 4

In this final segment of the series, I do another selfie (gosh, they're addicting), run around in wet weather and show one of my favourite places to go.

Photographic "Selfie". Arcade machines. Reflection. Boo yeah.

On this day, the rain was coming down lightly (thankfully). My camera was hidden under either it's case or something else but I was hastily walking when I saw these people. I had to quickly raise my camera, run forwards to wards them to try to frame them and get it all focused. 

I looked up and saw the lights. :)

For those outside of Vancouver, BC... be warned. It rains a ton here. 

And when it rains that much, we go indoors into cool shops like this. This is the inside of the Old Faithful Shop in Gastown.

Interaction in Old Faithful. 

Looking Back to Look Ahead - Part 3

In this set, I see the need to take a selfie and explore the darkness of Vancouver Downtown. This all took place in 2014.

I'm not a fan of "selfies" but I do look to document myself. This usually involves finding reflective surfaces in which to take a photo of myself... all while telling a story or setting a scene...

Or just taking a selfie.

There are some areas where the lights are really nice in Downtown Vancouver. This one is by the Birks store.

When there is darkness, I'm attracted to the light. I'd say I'm kind of like a photographic moth but that sounds kind of weird.

Moon Party!!

In this image, I waited a few moments for the person to walk into the light before taking it. I wish I was a tad closer but timing was critical.