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.

Incentive

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

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?~~

The competition that I had is now closed. If you would still like to check out my book, visit my blurb page to find details and how you can purchase it there.

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

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.

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.

Portfolio

Matthew — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:56:04 +0000

The time is now upon us at Western Academy of Photography, to complete our school year and hand in our final portfolio. An accumulation of all that we have learned at the school summed up in 12-15 images and 50% of our overall diploma mark.

That’s aproximately 6% per image. Wow, never thought of it that way though. Although, as I was fretting about getting enough images to even edit down to 12 shots, I recieved a tweet from Chase Jarvis. “chasejarvis: Escaping your portfolio http://twurl.nl/ggyilz” is all that the message stated. It was enough for me to find the nearest computer, sit down, read the entire thing twice and then come to a conclusion. He is absolutely right. I have done almost nothing on my portfolio since the last day of class up until that text message. It was time for me to stop thinking of this as “portfolio time” and start thinking of it as “where-are-my-clients-now-that-I’m-done-school-and-need-work-to-pay-for-said-school time”.

I had a photoshoot today. I told my old co-worker and his girlfriend to meet me down at Bastion Square, a local area with plenty of backgrounds to shoot. When I arrived there it was packed. Three cruise ships had arrived for the weekend, tourists were flooding the streets. In fact, they seemed to control the roads as sidewalks seemed to lose borders as pedestrians spilled out on to the road in front of traffic. Not only that, it’s also Swiftsure weekend here. A very large, international sailing regatta hosted by the Royal Victoria Yacht Club. It was busy, to make a long story short. Thankfully, Robin stated that there is usually a quieter area down by the water that we could start at. It was quiet, nice and in the shade. The background was so over lit that I had to use my flash (with already dying batteries) to fill for almost all the shots. Everything turned out and it was a great experience. I had never really taken pictures of people I didn’t know that well that were outside of models or people hired by the school. It was different and well worth it. Tomorrow I have two more projects, one in a coffee shop and a forest, the other in a railyard.

Posting here, getting these words out, regardless of whether people read it or not is surprisingly helpful. It makes me realize, that I’m not completely useless, and I’m making progress.