Wild West Coast

Botany Bay – Got soaked

Went for a drive from Victoria to Port Renfrew, hoping to catch some good bad-weather photos. Stopped at China Beach and Jordan River. The ocean was going wild, wind and swell in uniform crashing against the rocks. Port Renfrew was without power so there was no coffee to be had in town.
Botanical Bay was beautiful as ever, if not more so in the howling wind and rain. As the rain and the wind swept through the trees, the sun sometimes made brief appearances making the light qute dramatic and stark. Good day for images and refreshing for the windswept Icelander that lives inside me.

The 12 Commandments

I’ve decided to weigh in on the 12 most important issues and debates in photography. I´ll keep it short and clear.

Nikon vs Canon
A year ago, Canon= Full frame. Today? Does not matter. Whatever floats your boat. Get an old Leica.

Apple vs Microsoft
Since Bootcamp I do not see the need for anything else but Apple. Our Steve thou art in heaven…

The Internet

Fisgard Lighthouse, Victoria BC

The Internet is fun, like a gigantic library full of info, humour and things related to photography. Here are some things and pages I am consuming these days.

This guy wants to get paid, I sympathize – who doesn’t
Chase Jarvis is a pretty cool cat and has a fun blog
A Canadian Comic turned Photog, David DuChemin
A Photoeditor, funny, sharp, sometimes an a$$ but always entertaining
The new Photoshelter Collection – Stock with a different feel, more on them later.

Photojournalism on Steroids

Can adding a ball save a mediocre photo? Photo-Illustration

Maybe it´s like beating a dead horse, but here goes an article I wrote last spring on ethics in photojournalism. The photo is from a Uvic Vikes game – by no means a good sport-photo and it wont be saved by that ball, but serves its purpose!

Photojournalism on Steroids

In recent years photojournalism has gone through major changes. Switching from film to digital has been a fast and a furious process. Digital imaging has many advantages but it also raises new ethical dilemmas. The main dilemma being how easy it is to manipulate photographs, turning good photos into perfect ones. For some photographers the temptation to perfect their photos by manipulation is too hard to resist. For some, just like with athletes and steroids, the prize at the end becomes all that matters.

Fashion

Just finished printing shots from fashion shoot, for the portfolios of some models here in Victoria. I enjoyed shooting fashion and working with the models.
I did 2 sessions with Amanda Joseph, the girl on the photos, very different sessions but I like them both.
The black and white one was shot with available light but for the colour ones I used my 550 flash off camera and with an umbrella. Very simple set up but worked nicely.
All of the photos were shot with my 24-70, I just love that lens for portraits, very sharp.
I did a fair amount of work in Photoshop, smoothing the skin and some selective curves.
I printed them on Hahnemule Fineart Pearl, I cant get enough of that paper it just shines.

Photojournalism – Day in the life

Photojournalism is a hard master. There are strict rules that apply, and severe punishment follows any wanderings from the road of the rule. Allan Detrich a renowned photographer formerly with the Toledo Blade , was forced to resign from the paper due to a wandering from the path. Apparently he cloned out distracting legs of a fellow photographer in one of his submitted photos from a Baseball game. Allan has given explanations on the matter.
If what he says is true, his punishment seems very severe.

The photo at the top is from an assignment in school called Day in the Life, it is altered and therefore its not a photo anymore, its a photo illustration. You can see the whole series here.

Flash vs Photoshop

When I was studying photography at The Technical School of Reykjavik we went on a fieldtrip to the Icelandic Museum of Photography. At the end of our tour of the museum, the curator, a woman in her thirties(relevant as she was clearly not of a generation that only had wetplate or camera obscura at their disposal), walked us through an exebition of some work by the Swedish photographer Lars Tunbjörk. Tunbjörk sometimes uses some big flashes to light up outside environments. Scenes like suburbs and supermarkets get an erie feeling because of this. At the last photo the curator said smugly that the best thing about Tunbjörk was that he didn’t use any photoshop-tricks to manipulate his photos and did not cheat in that way.

This led me to thinking, so many consider Photoshop as a manipulation, cheating and false in some way. Flash on the other hand is considered by the same people as a classic method in photography, but its added light so in a way the scene is not natural anymore. I think these purists should stick to their guns and only use pinhole.

There is much debate going on these days on how far we can go in photoshop. Some say its complicated but I don’t see it that way. Its simple as long as you do not add something to a frame from a completely different frame it’s a photograph. Otherwise it’s a photo illustration. In both instances it can be art.

There is a great article on Luminous Landscape about a photographer dealing with accusations of falseness in his photographs a good read.

Just a note, I have gotten some feedback on this and have to clarify that I am not talking about Photojournalism, clearly there are other rules and considerations in that field.