Princess Cruise Photography

Good morning friends. Can you believe it’s already January 23rd? This month is just cruising by. Speaking of cruising, some of you may have been aware that my wife and I were lucky enough to spend this past New Years on a cruise in the Caribbean.

Today I would like to share with you some of the pictures that I took while we were on vacation.

Click on each image to see a larger version.

That’s all for today guys, I hope you enjoyed looking at some of the shots from my little New Year’s vacation.

Have a great week.

Train Station Commission

Good morning friends. Hope you all had a wonderful week, and a chance to spend some quality time with your family and friends over the holidays.  I am on vacation this week and I know what you might be thinking. “His first week back and he is already taking a break”. In fact I am, but that isn’t going stop me from following my new year’s resolution of posting weekly. I have saved this post for a little while, and figure now is a great time to share it. This post will be about my first contracted photography shoot.

Back in May of 2011, I was asked if I could produce a panoramic shot of the Kitchener train station that would be blown up and hung on a wall for a wedding rehearsal dinner. I immediately jumped at the opportunity. But, as soon as I had agreed to the job and hung up the phone the panic set in.

I had never had a picture go off to an actual print shop for production before. I now started to worry about things I never really thought of before. How many pixels does this image need to be? How many shots do I need to take to make the panoramic shot work? Do I need to acquire a permit to take pictures of the train station. All of these questions and more started running through my head. Thankfully I had some resources to help me out with these concerns.

I found out that I did not need to acquire a permit or a model release to take the picture because the image was only being used for personal use. I also figured out that to produce the image at the desired width of 10 feet I would need to stitch together 5 images. These are the images that I took.

I took these 5 pictures into Photoshop and stitched them together. After some cloning and touching up of the images I took them back into Lightroom and added some effects to give the image a little more of an old-fashioned effect. Here is what the final image looked like.

Kitchener Train Station

This was a great first commission for me to do, after I got over the initial stress of the project and figured out exactly what I needed to send to the printer. I would like to thank the Denstedt’s for allowing me to help them with their special occasion.

Here is a picture of the happy couple with the print.

Have a good week.

Creating a Photo Book

Good morning friends. Today’s post is going to be about one of my all time passions, photography. I was recently asked to create a photo book that shows the different rules of photography. I was very excited about this project because I love photography. This was a new challenge for me because until now I have never had to follow rules or direction when dealing with photography.

I selected a broad topic, being candid camera. This enhanced the challenge for me because I don’t normally take pictures of people. I find it harder to capture the right emotion in people than I do in capturing an emotion in nature.

Three different photo shoots were done to ensure a wide enough selection of photography was available to choose from. These shoots happened at Conestoga College, a friend’s house, and Waterloo Park. After enough pictures were gathered, they were narrowed down to the final ten selections. It was decided that the pictures would have more emotion behind them if they were printed in grey scale.

The next stage was to create captions that went along with each of the pictures. A poem was written specifically for this photo book. The poem tells a story about the memory of a trapped individual’s longing for freedom. Each picture does not correlate, but supports the emotion supposed to be felt.

Click Here to See the Photo Book

The final part of this project was to hand create a book to hold the pictures and captions. The cover pages were created using a black and white scheme to complement the grey scale photography. Japanese stitching bound the book together. The captions are printed on white card stock to match the colour scheme of the book, and to ‘pop’ off the black pages.