Van City Trip

A couple weeks ago I was able to spend a few days in Vancouver with my wife and some friends. We had a great time and although I didn't focus on photography that much, I did manage to grab  a few decent frames as we wondered the city.

The above image is of a captive Bald Eagle at the Vancouver Aquarium. They do a regular show with a number of different birds performing demonstrations of flight and other things that birds do (yeah, real scientific stuff, I know). I was standing about six feet from this guy and grabbed a shot with my 70-200mm. 

 

We also spent some time wondering Stanley Park after the aquarium visit. We went and checked out the Totem pole display. There were way to many people there for me to interested in trying to get any good shots of the totems, so this is all I came away with.

Sunset on English Bay from my hotel room at the Coast Plaza.

And finally a pano type shot from the 33rd floor of the hotel. Shot with my fisheye, with some minor distortion correction in Lightroom, and then cropped to a pano aspect. All in all it was a quick trip, but it was fun. We ate some great food, tried some great beer and I enjoyed a much needed 5 days off! Now I'll be working on another little vacation before winter comes. I'm really hoping I can get down to California for a few days this November, but I'm not sure if I'll be able to get the time off. Guess we'll see!

Tunnel Girl..

While walking the dog and shooting a little from the hip as I walked through town the other day, I decided to snap a few images of the new underpass in Jasper. It was built for pedestrians so that when trains go by (which is quite often) they can pass under the tracks and make it to the other side instead of having to wait for long periods of time as 11,000 foot trains go by at 15 mph.

So when I started shooting the tunnel, just as an experiment to see if it would look cool for future portrait projects, there was no one around. Then people started showing up and walking through and this image of the woman walking through sort of caught my eye. Of course it had to be in black and white, the color version has no punch and looks shitty in the tunnel, less color takes my mind of the rest of the clutter. Maybe soon we'll get some actual summer weather and I can get out shooting more often? Only time will tell.

Oh yeah..I joined Twitter and y'all should follow me..... @JeffLewisPhoto

My Favorite Images of 2010

So it only took me half a month to get this ready, but in reality it took me 20 minutes to get it ready and 14 days to remember to post it! Oops! So in absolutely no particular order, here are my favorite images from the year of 2010. I tried to get it down to ten pics, but in the end a few spoke to me as much as the others, so you get 15! Happy viewing!

The power of Mother Nature. This was a powerful summer storm that passed over in August after a beautiful summer day.

We had an awesome display of fall color this year. I was happy to be out shooting most days as in previous years I seemed to miss the best of the color.

When I first shot this image I didn't think it was anything special. I guess in terms of great photos it's not that spectacular, but I absolutely love the contrast of cool and warmth in the image. The blue in the ridges of the right side of the tree just pops out at me and it's a great contrast to the whole left side of the frame. I like it.

This one is more for me. I have never taken a self portrait that I was proud to display until I rented the Nikkor 24mm PC lens and shot this image. I think it's a great representation of myself and how I view my photography and what I have learned in the past year. Kudos to me!!

This is just a pretty image, plus it was the first one to sell from my gallery at Coco's Cafe, I don't think it lasted a while 24 hours there.

Ahh, Maligne Lake in winter. It was cold, and even colder when I fell through the river after shooting this image. Good times. At least I came home with a good picture AND a story!

This one just screams Fine Art Photography in my opinion. I am amazed how simple the image is, but how powerful all at the same time. Most likely one of my favorite Black and White images of the year.

Sunrise at Medicine Lake, that was pretty much happening when I got out of my van. I almost missed this one, and this was the second frame of the morning. Glad I got out of bed on this day.

A blistering cold winter sunrise over the Athabasca River in early January, just an overall nice picture.

I really don't know what to say about this one. I find it's different from most of my photography, but at the same time it really represents me as a photographer. I don't know if it's the composition, the processing, or what it is, but I really like this image and up until now I don't think I have even shown it to many people.

An image I have been chasing the past couple of years, but finally captured to my pleasing this time around. Definitely one of those trophy hunting shots, but I'm happy to go hunting every once in while.

The colors in this one make me smile. Fall was nice this year.

There is something peaceful about this one that just puts me in a calm state of mind. Maybe it's the thought of sitting on a calm quite mountain lake in a boat that puts me at ease.

The Edith Cavell road was closed for a while this year, and this was taken the second day it was open. I didn't spend as much time up there as I had anticipated, but I'm happy with the images that I came away with.

This was sort of an unexpected image. I went to Maligne Lake one night in search of a completely different image, but after walking around the shore of the lake for a while and not leaving when I was feeling unmotivated, the sun began to set and this turned out to be one of my top images this year. I love the color and the composition a lot.

Hopefully this year will prove as fruitful for my photography as last year, guess we'll have to wait and see......

365 Days... thoughts, comments, and where to next

Just over a year ago, a few days before the 2010 new year, I made a haste decision to try to take one picture everyday for a whole year. Why? For a few reasons... let's talk about it.


First, ever since I started with photography only a few years ago, I have been totally consumed by it. I have that sort of personality I guess. Years ago I was a snowboarder, then I got into climbing, and sold all of my snowboard gear in search of the endless summer, so I could rock climb as much as possible. With climbing I traveled North America a fair amount, and even made it to Southeast Asia for a while. During my travels with rock climbing, I always found myself in these exotic places that, when trying to describe them to family and friends, I just couldn't do justice in words alone. There begins my photography roots.


Fast forward a year or two, and I purchased my first DSLR, a Nikon D40x with two kit lenses. That summer I barely climbed as I tried to learn as much as I could about photography. I read books and searched the web endlessly to try to absorb as much info that I could, all the while progressing a little bit every once in a while. Now this time I didn't drop climbing like I did snowboarding. Climbing and photography seemed to go hand in hand for me. Generally the places I go to climb are extraordinarily beautiful, so all I had to do was take my camera with me on my outings. For a while it was hard to find a balance, I either climbed and didn't touch my camera, or shot images all day and didn't climb. That doesn't bode well for my progression at either activity, so I had to choose. After a decent summer of climbing, and very little photography, I took a turn to take more images the following summer.


Fast forward one more time, it's the end of 2009, which was a busy year for me. I did a fair amount of shooting, and also got married and worked two jobs for most of the year. When the dust settled after the wedding, I decided to spend a little more money on camera gear, and really make a commitment to becoming a half decent photographer. This is where I decided that to really make a difference, and to try to make something of myself I needed a project, or a goal. That goal turned out to be the 365 Project. I know it's not original, and tonnes of people do it every year, but everyone has different reasons and approaches to the whole thing and I would be no different.


At first I was going to try to shoot images that were outside of my strengths like portraits or using lighting gear. Shortly after starting I found I felt my best and in my prime when I was out shooting landscape images, so that was the direction that the project went, which I had no problem with. Why would I bother spending a whole year trying to shoot stuff that I really wasn't that interested in? When I am out in the wilderness I feel at home, and the images just flow out of my camera and I absolutely love that state of mind that I have when I'm out alone shooting with only the sound of the river, or wind in the trees, or just no sound at all.


Maybe that defeated the purpose of the whole year, but I feel that my landscape photography progressed to a level I didn't think it would get to. I can now go to a location and set up and I don't think about my camera settings, or technical stuff at all. I just walk around and shoot. Sometimes the images flow like the river in spring run off, other times it's like a dried up lake bed and I couldn't find an image if I tried, but that's the nature of landscape photography, or all photography for that matter and we learn to live with it and in the end it makes us better photographers.


You may be thinking, "Yeah Jeff, you just shot a bunch of pretty landscape images...good for you, but did you really learn anything?" I can tell you right now I have learned tonnes. Even though a vast amount of my time was spent romping around Jasper and Banff National Parks, I became so comfortable with my camera system, that whenever I moved into a different type of photography, be it weddings or portraits or anything, I felt so comfortable and confident in my abilities, that those aspects of photography became easier just from my comfort level!


Another major thing I learned was how much my attitude in life affected the whole project. The year started off really well, I was out shooting a lot for the first three months, and felt great. Life was good, I loved my job, things were just all around good. In April I moved into a new apartment (only up 1 floor, but still a move), and with the move I had to paint, pack and transport stuff for a few days. I was tired, cranky and this lasted about two weeks and at that point I almost abandoned the project thinking it was "stupid" and I could do better if I just went out and shot when I wanted and not everyday. Bad state of mind = poor photography. That was my first downturn. After another week or so the weather got better, we settled into our new digs, and I was on a high again. This time the high lasted quite a while. The spring season was great, work was good, photography was awesome, and I made effort to get out every single day...awesome. I also found a good balance with climbing this year. I started to shoot as much as I climbed and it worked out well. My life was great and things were going well. As the summer stretched on though, I became sort of stuck in a rut in my job at the time. I felt I was just hanging around and not fulfilling my full potential as an employee. I filled that void with some photography work, it's always nice to make some money from your hobby, so that helped a bit. Each day at work though, I became more unhappy as I couldn't see a bright future in that position. Even though I had the best co-workers and boss I have ever had, I still continued to realize that I needed a little more opportunity in life. There was my second big downward spiral of the project. I didn't even want to look at my camera after a while.


So if you're still with me now, thanks, and sorry to bore you, I'll wrap this up now and you can stare at some pictures for a while. Fall season was awesome, great color, I'm very motivated to shoot. At this point I can see my photography evolving and I am right where I wanted to be as a photography, making a little money shooting the images I choose. Very cool. Over the summer I applied for a job with CN Rail, and come mid October I got the phone call, "are you still interested in the Conductor position?". Of course I was. I took the next two weeks to shoot as much as I could as the next two months I would live in a hotel in St. Albert while I trained to be a conductor on the railroad. Those months saw very little good photography, but I was okay with that as I felt I had my life on track and I would make time for photography when I was home, which I did.



Lots of lessons learned over the past few months, got questions? send 'em my way and I'll do my best to answer them.


Lastly I would like to thank my extremely patient wife for sitting at home, or in the car, or where ever we were while I shot pictures. This project would not have been finished without your support, thank you so much. And to my friends and family who either went shooting with me, or followed the project through the year, thank you for your support as well! Stay tuned for a "Best of 2010" post shortly.



All the best in the new year to everyone!