We had decided to celebrate my birthday by signing the whole family up for a ‘Breakfast with Wolves’ event at the Montreal Ecomuseum near our house. While taking pictures in a zoo seems to really be against the whole ‘wild life’ photography image, I brought my camera to practice. Carrying your camera everywhere is one of the top five rules to improving your photography, so I packed a few lenses (longest focal lengths possible). We arrived early and were welcomed […]
Once a year Montreal has a winter event called Celebration of Light. It gets cold here, so we celebrate what we can. One of the highlights is the Montreal Ice Hotel, and the local photography meet-up group planned on attending one very cold night. I arrived a little early after taking shots of the Montreal Underground, so I walked around a little with a friend before meeting up with the group. We talked a little, compared gear and then headed […]
So here it is! 11 years later with 1 month of planning, a whole bunch of miles & money, and a lot of new learning – all for this picture (more or less). I left Grenoble pretty early with my new camera all set up and ready to go. It was dark as I drove, and I could see the clouds turning red as I got closer. I was stuck behind a slower car on a curvy road that was […]
So my big planning session for the Trip to France has been going on for a good few months. I am pretty much finishing up, but I thought I would share the process I went through. Finding the Stops: The first thing I did was decide on the places I wanted to stop for the night. My wife had convinced me not to go all the way down to Nice as it was two pretty long drives in a row. […]
While making a purchase on Amazon.com a while back, I found a set of extension tubes for 15$. Because of the price, I really wasn’t expecting much, but bought them to give them a try. They were pretty hard to use, but I had a lot of fun with them. There is no automatic focus with them, so I found the easiest way was to set everything manual and move my camera back and forth the focus. It didn’t work […]
I am starting to realize how in camera composition is so key. While there is a lot you can do in post-processing, you can loose some strength in the image if you leave it to later. If you look at the picture below, you will notice that my alignment with the sign/horizon is off. If I had noticed it while looking through the viewfinder, I could have easily leveled off the sign edge so that it was parallel with the […]
I have wanted to use a Graduated Neutral Density filter for a while. To be honest, it is mostly for the cool factor, but I can definitely see what the benefits would be. I have a good amount of photographs where the sky is blown out, with the most recent ones happening when I was photographing the falls in Rawdon. This week I finally went out and bought one. With that said, I am writing this article based on researching […]
During my first few months back into photography, I was a king of camera shake. It wasn’t really something I was paying too much attention to, but my images were definitely suffering from it. The ‘way back’ area of my brain remembered a shutter speed vs focal length method of calculating how fast you can handle a camera hand-held, so I dug a little deeper to find answers. The rule of thumb is that your minimum shutter speed should be […]