Kerr Photography - Victoria, BC, Professional Photographer » picture

Old Town

Matthew — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 14:53:42 +0000

When I was in Sydney this past October, I spent one afternoon wandering around The Rocks. It’s the oldest part of Sydney (or Australia) in terms of European views. It was also the day of the Melbourne Cup. The streets were crowded with people celebrating the race, and they were all dressed to the nines. Below is one of my pictures from this afternoon.A simple door that led to a patio. It used to be a General Store, now it’s a museum. The door doesn’t work (I tried), but I’d like to think that the deliveries came through there from the back ally.

Photos By…

Matthew — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:00:22 +0000

One photographic aspect of my life that I’ve been struggling with for the past couple weeks is my editing. That is, narrowing down which images are the best, worst, alright, etc. I have been trying to decide on a couple of pictures for the “Photos By…” competition that the Victoria Boulevard Magazine hosts each year. It’s purpose is to focus on more personal images, rather than professional work. In that case, I’ve chosen to go with some images that speak as to what I’ve done over the past year.
The first image (shown above) is something that I worked on very early in the year. I was inspired by my 4×5 work that I had accomplished in school, and having a 4×5 film holder with no camera was getting me down. So I made a camera and produced the above image of the Victoria Skyline. The next two images were taken while I was in Australia and New Zealand respectively.
The first image is from Cape Byron, on the east coast of Australia. The picture was taken looking southwest from the most easterly point of mainland Australia. The closest we were to home (via longtitude) since we arrived in Cairns. It points at the journey ahead; beautiful, rugged, and raw. The second image is from South Island, New Zealand. In an area known as Fiordland. The view is of Eglinton Valley and the Earl Mountains. A peaceful serenity. It was the end of our trip and in less than a week from taking this picture, I would be back home in Victoria.

(click on images to enlarge)

Graduation Photos!

Matthew — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 09:22:26 +0000

Are you graduating this year? Know somebody who is graduating this year? If it’s high school, college, university or kindergarten, pictures of this special occasion are becoming more and more popular.Booking starts now, and it’s as easy as emailing contact@kerrphotography.ca and requesting a quote. Prom package pricing starts at only $60, packages can be found here. Don’t want a package? Not a worry, just email with the pictures you want. It’s my belief that your pictures should be fun! Not a boring, sit-in-front-of-a-lame-library-backdrop shot, but rather an expression of who you are! Among the prom and grad promotional pricing you’ll also find wedding packages for spring and summer of 2010 and family portrait packages.

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.

Vancouver Island Logging Camps

Matthew — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 05:10:44 +0000

Last year while I was in school, a couple of my classmates and I went up to Jordan River for a photo day. This weeks Tasty Tuesday picture is from that trip.
After this trip I was inspired to go out and photograph other logging camps, working or not, around Vancouver Island. I haven’t made this trip yet, however, when I do I will be sure to make it a wonderful experience. The goal is to document the whole trip and get it down on paper in the form of a book.

Missing Pictures: Why A Workflow is Necessary

Matthew — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 03:30:23 +0000

I’m not sure why but for whatever reason the pictures that I took of the production of my 4×5 Pinhole camera didn’t go through my usual workflow. They are now missing. This is why a workflow is 100% absolutely necessary! Personally, my workflow is typed out, printed off, and I have a bunch of copies so that every time I have a shoot, they are next to me so I don’t miss a step. I also have it posted on my wall next to my monitor.

This is going to be a fairly long post by the sounds of it.

Ingestion
You may call this importing, getting the pictures from the camera or, collecting. I call it ingestion because that’s the program I use for the task. It’s called Image Ingester Pro 3. It’s a fairly straight forward program with an amazing capacity to be expanded to your specific criteria. You can download from half a dozen cards at the same time and upon import, all of your files get metadata and tagged so you don’t have to go in individually.
Metadata is the information stored in your picture like creator, location, copyright information, etc. Your camera adds metadata such as camera model, lens, date, time, aperture, shutter speed and so on. I can choose where I import to and what it’s called as well. I rename all of my files on import to Kerr_YYYYMMDD_0001.nef. I use my name, followed by the year, month and day, to easily find the images by date and then the original file number used by the camera. You might notice that I also use the original RAW extension as well, I convert to .dng later in the process.

Outtakes
After the Ingestion I open up the folder that I ingested it to (see the file structure above) in Bridge and start checking out the pictures for the first time. I have 5 ratings that I commonly use. The first is the green label. It tells me that this photo can be deleted and is no good. Second rating is blank, nothing to the label. Not a good shot, but something that I might use or could use. The third, fourth and fifth are star ratings 1, 2 and 3 respectively. One star is cool, two is edit this and three is wow. I don’t use the 4 or 5 star ratings because I’m using them for client choices or just when I need to expand my ratings. Once I’m done rating I add keywords backups of my ratings so that I don’t lose the rating. I do this in the form of MK:One Star, MK:Neutral (Initials:Rating). The initials just keep everything together in the keyword clouds.

Conversion
Here I’m just opening the files in Camera Raw (ctrl or cmd + R in bridge) and re-saving them further down in my workflow as .dng (Adobe’s Digital Negative format). I don’t change the filename other than the extension (.nef to .dng). The files get saved to the archive portion of my hard drive and stay there.

Catalog
Why don’t I use Lightroom from the beginning? All of the programs that I’ve used above were designed specifically for that function. Unlike Lightroom, which is designed to do all of the above, I find it doesn’t complete these tasks as well or fast enough for my liking. Although, it is possible to do most or all of the stuff above strictly in Lightroom. I use the program for cataloging only. I import to lightrooms catologs that I’ve created specifically for that shoot or that client or even as broad as the genre of the pictures. Once this is done the files never move on my drive again.

Export
I go through the final images that I’ve picked out (1 or 2 star rated) and pick a few here and there to do some post-production on in Photoshop. I export the files to a different hard drive so that my originals and my derivatives are on different disks. I export as a .psd at 300 ppi and add the new file back to the catalog so that when I look at the original file in Lightroom, a copy of the derivative is right next to it for comparison.

Post Production
Not much about post production can be said here. Save lots and always use a tonne of layers. I can go through in a future post about my workflow in Photoshop if there is enough interest.

Backup
I use a couple of programs and ways of backing up my data. First off is Microsoft Synctoy 2.0, I use this to duplicate my original files on to another drive. I also use it to copy all files to my networked server that’s running 1.5 terabytes of space.
All in all I have a 500gb drive for originals, 500gb backup of orginals and a 320gb for derivative. All of the originals get backed up to DVD and stored seperately from my computer. All of the above gets backed up to the server twice. Yes, it goes on the server on two different drives in case there is a drive failure there.

It may seem like a lot of steps and even more trouble than it worth. But believe me, if I had followed this workflow, I would have the images here in this post instead of somewhere in my array of computers, memory cards and hard drives. A couple of resources for more stuff like this is The DAM Book and the forum online as well as the Image Ingester site.

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.

Halloween: Zombies, Gangters and Rorschach

Matthew — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:32:10 +0000

Happy Halloween Everyone! Here are a couple of images from an early Halloween party that I attended. All of the pictures here were shot, amazingly enough, with available light. Editing was done in Lightroom 3 beta and Adobe Photoshop CS3. Be safe this weekend.

Don’t forget to vote for this photoblog at the 2009 Photoblog Awards!

Lightroom 3 Public Beta – Thoughts So Far

Matthew — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:47:29 +0000

When a software company releases a new version of a program that is used by professionals and amateurs alike, it doesn’t always make it to a public beta test. This is not the case with Adobe’s Lightroom series. Every edition of Lightroom (Lr) is put through a public beta test. That is to say that if you have an email address, you can test this beta, provide feedback and test run the new version.

I downloaded the beta on the first day it was available. When I checked the forums for it, there was one post. Cool. So far my impressions with the new Lr have been good. It’s fast at loading, the import function has been redesigned, and switching modules is a breeze compared to previous versions.

I tried some intensive editing the other day and it hasn’t changed much. The brush function has some new features added to it and there is the renamed post-crop vignette in the effects section. The only other effect is called “film grain”. Film must truly be dead if you now have to run your digital file through a noise reduction process and then add grain. I digress. While I was doing my editing as I added more bits here and there, the program itself got slower and slower and slower. Nothing really new here. I do most of my editing in Photoshop for this very reason (white balance and general adjustments aside). So, in terms of an editing software, it’s still not as good as it could be. Don’t get me wrong though, an update is there for a reason.

All of the pictures here have been edited completely in Lr and in my opinion look as good as they would if they had been processed through Photoshop. However, I would have had this post up yesterday if I did them in Photoshop. I guess, if you’re a photographer who doesn’t need/want to do heavy processing, this is a great program and I encourage you to go to Adobe’s website and download the public beta. It’s free and it won’t hurt you.

Something else I noticed while playing with the program, you can’t view your Lr 2 catalogs just yet. Adobe has blocked them in the beta for now. I like this, it prevents me from completely destroying my current catalogs. I’ll keep playing with the program for the next couple of months and if I find anything else that is super important, I’ll post it here. Here are a couple more images that have been processed with Lr 3. Go ahead and click on the image to enlarge it.

Remember to vote for this blog a the 2009 Photoblog Awards. Link is at the top of the sidebar.

New Laforet Movie Posted by Canon, Then Taken Down

Matthew — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:28:34 +0000

Canon needs to get their act together. They just released the Canon 1d MkIV. Or, just 1d4. Seriously how do they expect people to understand which camera is which? I still don’t know the difference between Canon’s 1d2 and 1d3 are.

You may remember when the 5dMkII or 5d2 came out with 1080p video that there was a video posted by director/photographer Vincent Laforet. It was called Reverie. It was quick, to the point and a very expensive short. I liked it. And it was the first video of it’s kind to be shot on an still camera. Now, we have hundreds of great videos out there all shot on SLR cameras. One of my favourite at the moment is by a photographer in Atlanta, USA. Andrew Kornylak did a whole series on bouldering and rock climbing where he shot interviews with the Nikon D5000 and then did still-video with the Nikon D3 by just blasting away and getting a cool, stop motion like feel.

Here is one of the videos from Andrew.

You can’t always tell when it switches from the 720p video of the D5000 to the D3 which tops out at 11fps.

Unfortunately, Laforet’s newest movie Nocturne isn’t available at the moment because there seems to be some strife between Canon Inc. and Canon USA. Hopefully it will be up on the web soon. Of course you can always find it on YouTube. Because everything is on YouTube. Laforet wrote on his blog that he has agreed to take the video down until Canon gets it together. If you missed it, here is Vincent Laforet’s Reverie.

Just so you know, Nikon isn’t sitting by with there video/still cameras and not producing movies. Bill Frakes did an amazing video with the new Nikon D3s. And yes, ballerinas in Austrailia.