I don’t often get a chance to photograph children, so it was fun recently to get a few images of the younger son of a good photographer friend of mine. He likes to move around a lot, so the manual focus was a challenge!
A few light leaks on the film 😦
Contax IIIa (35mm rangefinder from the 1950’s) 50mm/2Â Jupiter 9 lens
Svema 125 Colour Film (C-41)
Today’s image is a colour version of a subject I also captured in black and white. This time around my 75-150 Nikon Series E zoom lens allowed me to get a bit closer, at least optically speaking.Â
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Nikon F4, 75-150 Nikon Series E lens
Svema 125 Color Negative Film
I had the fun of working with a new model named Holly earlier this week, doing a retro pin-up genre shoot. The key ingredients for pin-up are personality, personality and personality! 🙂 And Holly had all three, a great sense of humour and a true understanding of the pin-up genre on her part made for a fun, productive shoot!
Nikon D7100, 50mm/1.8 D Nikkor lens
Post work with LightRoom and Nik Efex
I’ve been holding onto today’s image for a while, waiting until my good friend Katherine Matthews had released the knitting pattern featured here along with my other good friend Jennifer. I am normally primarily a black and white shooter but I just love the vibrancy of the colour Katherine chose for her pattern here, and of course Jennifer completes the image :-). If you’re a knitter, you can get Katherine’s lovely pattern here.
Nikon D7100, 18-200 Nikkor lens
Taken at the recent Matsuri Japanese festival in Toronto, this is an image of a performer backstage, preparing to perform. The bright sun made her visible behind  the backstage screen.
Nikon D7100, 18-200mm Nikkor lens
Alice Degan is a friend of mine who also happens to be an author of urban fantasy fiction. What I like is that her fiction is set in Toronto’s Kensington Market (one of my favourite places to shoot) so when she needed some photographs it was the natural choice of locations. As we moved from spot to spot it was fascinating to hear  how they related to the stories. A fascinating shoot which gave me added insight into her great stories. Highly recommended!
Nikon D7100, 18-200mm Nikkor lens
Post processing with Lightroom and Nik Color Efex 4
Another image from my Ottawa shoot with Maggie recently. This is a film image on Kodak Portra 400. The sun had hidden for a moment behind a cloud, creating some lovely light.
Mamiya 645 Pro TL, 150/f3.5 Mamiya lens
Kodak Portra 400 film
Today another image from my photo shoot with my friend Maria Rozynska this past weekend. This is one of the colour film images, taken using Kodak Ektar 100 colour negative film, using my Mamiya 645 Pro TL medium format camera. I really like Maria’s expression here (this may be my favourite), as well as the slightly retro look of the colour film.
Mamiya 645 Pro TL, 80mm/s.8 Mamiya lens,
Kodak Ektar 100 C-41 Film
Around 30 years ago in the early 1980’s I shot a roll of Kodak Infrared Ektachrome E4 Slide film (you can see an image from that roll here). It was magic, but I never got around to shooting more of it.
A couple of weeks ago I shot two more rolls of Colour Infrared Slide film, purchased from the Film Photography Project online store. They have a limited supply of an equivalent E6 process infrared slide film, expired but cold stored. Here is one of my favourite images:
With the proper filtration (in this case a yellow-green filter and a polarizing filter) you get some really interesting colour effects, with foliage coming out red in a lot of cases, and blues tone becoming very vivid. The world becomes a different, alien, fantastic place.
I wish I could shoot this film stock all the time, as I don’t feel digital infrared (either post-processed faux infrared, or specially converted digital camera) gives the same magical effect. But I must be realistic: this film is not cheap, it is no longer made, and E6 slide processing is getting rarer, except by mail order.
A magic, but transient moment, and I mourn its imminent passing.
I had the pleasure of working with two very talented women recently. Katherine Matthews designs knitting patterns, and readers of my blog will recognize model/musician Jennifer Santos Bettencourt from previous posts. A lot of the photos I took for this shoot were close-up, in order to showcase the detail in the knitting pattern, and the level of detail in the shawl being showcased was quite impressive — I could learn a lot from Katherine regarding attention to detail! (Note: You can see Katherine’ pattern, and more images here.)
And of course working with Jennifer is always a pleasure — she understands that posing/modelling is like acting and choreography, and requires a lot of focus and awareness. It is certainly not a matter of just standing there waiting for the shutter to click.
It was also great to see how well the Jennifer and Katherine collaborated, and there was talk of future work together, so stay tuned!
Nikon F2, 85mm/f1.8 Nikkor lens
Kodak Portra 400 film, post production with Lightroom and Nik Efex
My Third Eye 