Kerr Photography - Victoria, BC, Professional Photographer » Projects

Jewelry, Tethered, Photography

Matthew — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 18:15:24 +0000

The last couple of days I`ve been working on a few test shots for some product photography. More specifically, jewelry. I was inspired to start working on this after attending a Photoshop Seminar on portrait photography. I know, how does portrait photography inspire you to shoot product? Well, it doesn’t, it just inspired me to shoot.
These pictures were all shot tethered from my D3 to my laptop and imported straight in to Lightroom so that I could touch them up immediately. I love it.

To see more pictures that I took, visit my Facebook Page or my Flickr Photostream.

Another 4×5 Experiment

Matthew — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 02:16:45 +0000

These are the “lost” images that I was referencing on twitter the other day. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they eventually made it home. The thing is, I loaded the film in hopes of shooting it in the summer of 2010. I then traveled down to Australia and New Zealand without the film, came home, made it through the rest of winter and then rediscovered it. I couldn’t remember what I had loaded. ISO, film type, colour, black and white, negative, positive, none of it was ringing a bell. Since I only had 2 speeds of film I averaged that it would be about 300 ISO and started my guessing there. You see, with my 4×5 camera that I built out of wood, I don’t know quite what the field of view is. So I have to guess. I do know that the aperture is somewhere around f/216. I also know that my light meter works, so I can tell what the exposure time will be at f/16. Taking that into account, I use this handy chart that I made to calculate my exposure time for the pinhole.

As you can see, as soon as it’s about an f/8 day, I’m up to a 5 second exposure on the camera. Approximately, that is. I also find I have to be a lot more selective with my choice of composition because of that whole guessing my field of view thing. It worked out well in the end. And, not to toot my own horn, but they were pretty well educated guesses.
What are your thoughts? Comment below.

Tasty Tuesday #20

Matthew — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 05:41:04 +0000

A little late on this weeks Tasty Tuesday. I just got a new coffee grinder for my Espresso machine on my birthday and remembered when I did some shooting at a local coffee shop.

Tasty Tuesday #19

Matthew — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:48:24 +0000

This Tasty Tuesday is from a very long time ago when we chopped a few trees down for some power poles. This was shot on film using my mom’s old camera and I found the film about a year ago. I scanned the pictures and then forgot about them again until recently when I found them on my hard drive.

Bouldering

Matthew — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 16:30:16 +0000

One thing that I enjoy doing in my spare time is to go climbing. When I was in New Zealand, my girlfriend and I stayed with some friends who were really in to climbing. Almost every evening they would head out to the Jardines Boulders (just below The Remarkables mountains) for a couple of hours. The boulders were rocks that had fallen off the adjacent mountains and rolled in to a sheep paddock. You really had to watch your step while walking around. The sheep were everywhere.
Reese (pictured left) was working on this for quite a while. The crux being the third move, he’s pictured in the starting position and his first move is to reach up to the crack seen at the bottom of the picture. The second move is to get his legs out and the third is to get his other arm over. He did eventually send the route after a few attempts. If you climb, let me know. I’d love to hear your stories.

Editorial Photography

Matthew — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 15:17:05 +0000

Textbooks define editorial photography as interpreting the facts of a magazine article in a creative way. For me, it is all about telling stories. Editorial photography should engage viewers and interact with them. It should prompt the audience to imagine how the story unfolds, who the person is, and how they can find out more. That’s partly what my little project called “Who Are You?” is all about. Using photography to tell the viewer a story. The story is you.
This is Eve. She has a dog named Elsa and she loves cooking and photography. What else can she tell you?

Have a story to tell? Send me an email and we can do it together!

Fine Art Vision

Matthew — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 14:56:14 +0000

This past fall, my girlfriend and I took some time off work/school and traveled for 4 months in the southern hemisphere. Specifically, Australia and New Zealand. I won’t go in to where we went and what we did (if you’re curious, visit msquareddownunder.wordpress.com) but I will give some details about what I saw and how it affected me personally and professionally.

First off, my gear. If I am ever to do it again, and there is a high possibility of more traveling, I will, without a doubt, bring more gear. Regardless of what all of the travel books, offices, and the things people might say about traveling with stuff you don’t want stolen, forget it all. It may have applied 10 or even 5 years ago, but not anymore. We would be staying in hostels where people would leave their laptop, camera and mobile on their bed in a 6 person dorm and leave. For the night. Not saying that it’s very smart, but stuff doesn’t have a lot of theft appeal when there is so much around. It seems like everyone these days is backpacking with their laptop. And to think that I was worried about taking my iPhone. The camera that I did take down there was the Panasonic DMC-LX3. A decent “high-end-point-and-shoot” camera. It’s on par with the G11 variant from Canon. In my opinion, it performed admirably and to its credit, within its specifications. As soon as I tried to use the camera as I would my Nikon D3 (obviously a higher level than a point-and-shoot) I found that it lacked, immensely. I also, in my glorious spat of wisdom, didn’t bring a tripod. Why? Maybe you can answer that, I just don’t know. I did however bring a flash and a wireless transmitter for the hotshoe. I used it once. Okay, twice, but the second time was only to see if the thing was still working after three and a half months of shoving in to my backpack (it didn’t work). All said and done, there are reasons why I went with a push-here-dummy camera and why I didn’t bring my SLR and lenses: size, weight, insurance, theft-o-meter, and the massive files my camera produces would have caused me to go for broke on memory cards (they’re really expensive down-under). The camera worked for why I wanted it but there were times when I was kicking myself for not bringing a bigger camera. It would have let me take so many shots where I simply stated “I wish I had my…” but then held my tongue for fear of my girlfriend actually kicking me for bringing up that ‘issue’ one more time.

Second, I found that my vision changed quite a bit in the 3 months of Australia and 3 weeks of New Zealand. At first I was in awe of where I was, taking pictures of palm trees on beaches, which for obvious reasons we just don’t get on Vancouver Island. Halfway through the trip my vision switched from flowing water over rocks in the middle of a jungle to skyscrapers, buildings, bridges, architecture. It could be because north of Brisbane (about halfway down the coast) there aren’t any cities, unless you count Cairns (which, you can’t really). I think it was also because I was tired of that, time to move on and try something else. It changed again a number of times as we traversed the country but the thing that really stuck was the landscapes. I took those throughout the whole trip, something I wasn’t fully expecting. Obviously I was thinking that I would really dig the views but something kept me seeing them differently every time. I liked it. I started taking pictures of people on the street by the time we got to Melbourne (the end of our Aussie trip) and, unfortunately, didn’t have enough time to fulfill that genre on my trip. It’s something I’d like to do more. By the time I got to New Zealand, I figured I would enjoy my time there, but it was the ‘end’ of my trip and I was thinking of home.

New Zealand is an undersold resource of raw natural beauty. Now I know why so many photographers go there for their personal work. (By the way, I know this post is long, but thanks for sticking through it if you’ve made it this far. I won’t rant much longer.) In a quick fit of math I deduced that of all the pictures I took in Australia I only ‘like’ 18% of them. On the other hand, in New Zealand I’m in the range of 23%. I think this is due to the landscape and pure visual inspiration that NZ pukes in to your lap (note: visual inspiration, not literary inspiration).
My conclusion to this atypically long post, I like being a photographer and I liked that I was so limited with my gear while traveling. I grew in terms of my personal vision and as to what I can do professionally. Although, I wouldn’t want to do it again in the future, but if ever I were to get trapped in a spacial rift and be sent back in time, I would (more than likely) do it the same way again.

The pictures (shameless plug: for sale in print) that I’ve published with this post are a few of the fine art versions of my travels through Australia, all shot on the LX3 and converted in Bridge/Lightroom/Photoshop/Lightroom. Yes, they went through Lightroom twice.

Thanks for reading, please feel free to leave comments below, I won’t bite.

Who Are You?

Matthew — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 03:06:20 +0000

I want to show you who I am.
I am a photographer, I work on the west coast of Canada, and I wear suits. I am connected with nature and technology. And I am ready to show the world who you are.

So, who are you? What drives you? What do you do? What do you love? These are the questions that I want to answer for you, a slice out of your biographical pie. What do you think? No harm in getting your picture taken (I promise I won’t steal your soul with my camera).
If you are interested in some story-telling images, whether for your business cards, or your facebook/twitter/linkedin/myspace/??? profile, contact Kerr Photography here (facebook), here (email) or here (contact form) to find out about how you can be involved. Get more news about Kerr Photography and promotional imaging by subscribing to the blog here.

No Excuse

Matthew — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 06:14:25 +0000

Only a picture for this post. It only took me about 2 months to scan this in from the 4×5. The day was actually quite stormy and the rain was just starting to come down.

Project: 4×5 Pinhole Camera

Matthew — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:53:28 +0000

Complete! Almost. I just have to finish off the varnish on it. It’s done as far as sealing it up from light, functionality of the shutter, and the tripod mount. The first shot is pictured above. Shot at 40 seconds at f/216. A little under exposed as the shutter speed was a calculated guess. According to Mr. Pinhole dot com, the ‘actual shutter speed’ should be around 48 seconds. Nothing a curves layer can’t fix.

In my next post I’ll be putting up some production pictures as well as a shot of the final image (next post because I misplaced the production pictures somewhere on my computer). I’m going to try and do some night shots with it and some portraits. I’m also trying to figure out a good way of shooting strobes with it too. I might blind my subjects before I get them exposed, but it’s probably worth it.