Kerr Photography - Victoria, BC, Professional Photographer » Uncategorized

Photobook Give-away II

Matthew — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:52:48 +0000

And the winner is…

Adriana Durian

Even though no one who entered the contest followed all of my rules, I’m a forgiving person. Adriana was the first to hop on the bandwagon with a photographer and although he may not be my favourite guy out there, His work is inspiring.

I’ll be giving away one of my books to Adriana and I have one more to give away! (That’s why it says Give-away II…)

This time, I’ll ask you to send an email to comp@kerrphotography.ca and I’ll take your submission of favourite photographer/picture and post it to twitter and facebook for all of the followers to see. If you’d like to re-enter an image or photographer, go ahead, I’m not going to say “no”. The contest for the second give-away of Kerr Photography begins right now and will end sometime around February 14th.

In the meanwhile, please keep coming back to check on posts and subscribe to my twitter feed so you can keep track of all the entries!

Quail having a snack.

Listen up.

Matthew — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:59:52 +0000

We can all do without some things in life. So, if you’re going the movie theater this weekend, or perhaps out to a fancy dinner, skip on the desert, or the popcorn and pop. Use that $5, $10 or $15 dollars and donate it to something. Perhaps, the disaster relief in Haiti. Because if one earthquake isn’t enough, they have now had a second (6.0) earthquake that has rocked them again!

If you’re in Canada, and on Rogers, Fido or Bell, text “haiti” (without the quotes) to 45678. Then respond with “yes” and $5 will automatically be donated to the Salvation Army for help in Haiti. Let’s send an aftershock of donations.

Thanks for bearing with me.

–UPDATE–
Apparently it wasn’t a 6.0 quake. It was a 6.1. And for more donation options try this:

The American Red Cross is accepting donations by phone. You can text “HAITI” to 90999 to donate $10 to the Red Cross’s efforts, or call 1-800-Redcross or 1-800-257-7575. Visit their Web site to find out more.
Interaction, the largest coalition of U.S.-based NGOs focused on the world’s poor, has set up a Haiti relief donation page, listing several participating organizations where you can donate.
UNICEF is also accepting donations for the relief efforts in Haiti and the Caribbean region. Visit their Web site or call 1-800-4UNICEF to donate.

(via)

Incentive

Matthew — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 01:34:36 +0000

Since not a lot of people are entering This competition of mine, I thought I would provide some incentive to win. Here are a couple of quick snaps I took of the book.

Here’s how to win:

Visit this post here
Comment with a photographer/picture that you like and why
Come back and comment on a post that someone else commented on
Keep coming back to keep commenting!

Simple. Right?

Competition Time

Matthew — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:48:39 +0000

Competition is closed

visit this post for the winner and new competition details

As I am sitting here at my computer, Herbal tea within reach and Justice in the ears, I am realizing, I should have got this post out a couple of days ago. If not weeks ago. I’m going to be holding a little competition in the next week. It’s inspired by a fellow photographer, Reuben Krabbe who put out a competition a little while back. In the spirit of the times, I’d like to do a small give-away! I’ve put together a small collection of my images and had it printed by an online printing company. The link for the book has been in the sidebar of my blog for the past couple weeks (go ahead and check, I can wait…) with a little preview.

Check out the details

Requirements:

To receive the prize, you must reside in Canada. (I just can’t be shipping this all over the world, sorry!)
You should be a fan on facebook, subscribe to the RSS feed, or follow on twitter. (I have no way of knowing this, so be honest!)
Participate!

The Goal:
I’m trying to get more people involved in photography. Post in the comments section of this post a link to a photographer or a picture that you like and explain in your comment why you like it.
Here’s where the participate thing comes in to play. You need to check out other peoples pictures/photographers and read their reasons, react and comment on their choice. Use the @ style interface to point at a certain user (example, Johnny wrote “Ipsum Lorem….” and you comment “@Johnny…”).
I will be monitoring this when I decide the winner and announcing it on Twitter and Facebook.
If you are reading this in an RSS reader or if you are reading on Facebook, please comment directly from my blog.

The Prize! (and how I decide)
I will be giving away 2 copies of my book to 2 lucky participants. Deciding will be tricky, it will be a combination of how many of the community like your choice, your explanation of why you like or dislike it and my own personal interest (to a point). I know I shouldn’t have to say this, but, please keep it clean.

The competition starts now (07-01-2010) and will end in two weeks (22-01-2010). If there are any questions, please email comp@kerrphotography.ca

Pumpkin Graveyard

Matthew — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:30:32 +0000

A pumpkin graveyard that I found on the side of the road the other night. This was weird. I was driving down a side road and there were some pumpkins, probably around 10 or 15 of them on the embankment. I thought, “Cool, I should take a picture of that”. I proceeded to turn on to the highway where I found more pumpkins scattered on the rocks and in the ditch. I came back with my camera and, perhaps, next year I’ll bring my pumpkin.

Rocks at Thanksgiving

Matthew — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:37:03 +0000

Thanksgiving is a wonderful time of the year. There is no pressure to spend lots of money on each other. You don’t have to dress up in a ridiculous outfit. And there is pretty healthy food involved. Don’t forget about the turkey, ham, sausage, mashed potatoes, carrots, and all those other good foods. You can leave the little green balls in the grocery store though. They don’t belong at my table.

I always go out to my cabin on the Sooke River for thanksgiving and have dinner with my extended family. I like to go about the festivities and take some pictures. We have a cousin who always makes inuksuit in the river during the summer. Sometimes they are only one rock high (as seen above), she does get some 4 or 5 rocks up and they sit in the rapids waiting for the winter to wash them away.

Another common find at my cabin. Well, at any cabin are spiders. This spider has made a web in the skylight over our kitchen. Interesting creatures, and somehow, always photogenic.

Coffee Shop

Matthew — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 05:05:06 +0000

I was hanging out in a local coffee shop where one of my good friends works. He was closing up the shop and I was giving him a ride home. I used this opportunity to take my camera around the shop and take some more abstract pictures. After just watching a video about photography and using only one lens. I decided to get back in to that way of thinking. Clicking on my 50/1.8 to my D3, I went in search of something to stare at.
Here are a few things that I liked, there are a few more on my flickr photostream. Also, see if you can guess what a few of these are.

Add your guess as a comment below and I’ll let you know if you’re right. Don’t forget, if you like what you see, go to the 2009 Photoblog Awards site and vote for my photoblog.

Why is it so?

Matthew — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:52:02 +0000

I don’t know what my fascination with black and white photography is lately. I think it’s the contrast. Not the tonal contrast but the fact that black and white images are an interpretation of reality, not an image of reality. Merely representing shape, form and tone. It’s raw. I guess. That’s what I’m trying to say. I dig it. I was reading a blog about photography techniques. I came to the realization that “technique” is only one way of doing things. It suggests that you should use the lowest possible ISO when taking black and white images. The reason is because noise is evil and bad. Seriously. I like noisy pictures as much as I like noiseless pictures. It depends on my mood.

You may have also noticed an icon on the side of the webpage here. It’s for the 2009 Photoblog Awards (I know, you can read that). It’s a yearly competition that gives credit to Photoblogs from around the world. Awards go to: Photoblog of the Year, Best New Photoblog, Most Popular, Best Landscape, Best American, Best Black and White, Best Asian and Oceanian, Best Design, Best European. Voting is open until December 15, 2009 and at that point, blogs with a certain number of votes, the finalists, go on to be judged and the winners are announced at the end of the year, December 31, 2009. It’s run by the people at photoblogs.org which, by the way, is another really cool place to check out new and different blogs. Go check these sites out, and if you like my site, please vote for it by clicking on the link above.

Done?

Matthew — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:31:54 +0000

Well, I’m now officially done school. Sort of. I’m done with my portfolio, it’s been handed in. I’m done with classes, they’ve been over for a while. I’m done with paying money, printing pictures, assignments, and all of the other things that I’ve been doing with my life for the past 10 months. What’s the first thing I did after I realized all of this? I took pictures.

I was out in East Sooke, house/dog sitting and I was sitting on the deck eating an apple and there were about 10 hummingbirds buzzing around me constantly. I couldn’t resist. I got out my tripod, flash, syncs, 70-200 and camera and set myself up on the deck.

At first, I couldn’t figure out my sync speed for the camera. I was trying to attempt a very high sync speed by setting the flash to 1/1 and just blasting with my shutter speed in order to stop the motion. This wasn’t working. I had to have a wide open aperture and I just couldn’t keep the little buggers sharp. I dropped the flash power down to around 1/32 or 1/64. Possibly in between those. I also slowed my shutter to the cameras 1/250 sync speed. I was hoping to use the flashes shorter flash duration to freeze the action. It wasn’t perfect, but it was fun to play with it. This way, I was also able to shoot at a smaller aperture so that focusing wasn’t such a pain on the 3″ birds.

nine-thirty

Matthew — Sat, 23 May 2009 07:06:07 +0000

Today, as mentioned before, I had two more photoshoots. The first one was great, but it ran overtime by a bit. It started out at a local coffee shop where I had some outdoor shots and then went inside and did some interiors as well.

From there, we headed in to Royal Roads, hid out behind a building and played in the grass. Overall, it was a good location. Not satisfied with leaving it at that, we left there and went down to the entrance of Esquimalt Lagoon and stood beneath the bridge there and finished up. Almost an hour past when we planned on finishing, we drove back to the coffee shop and parted our ways. A good number of pictures, which will be on the site eventually, I just need to edit and put them through some post before they become internet worthy. Ten minutes late for my next shoot, I headed downtown.

It was downtown where I got to our location, the old railyards on Esquimalt Road, that the security guard there told me that we weren’t allowed on the tracks. I guess that was fair, we found our way around and hung out in the shade of the old locomotive shop. Great work from the model (and her dog) and some quick thinking on my part in order to get my flash up and running again. I think for the portfolio, there will be 3 images in a row for this photogenic model.

That’s all for now, I’ll be posting the pictures on Flickr around Sunday and then a new post here then.