My Private Tokyo

I'll let you guys in on a little not-so-secret secret I have stumbled upon as of late. When you take the photography community and help them out, treat them as your friends and family something interesting happens: They help you right back.

You begin to learn, you begin to move forward faster than the alternative. Day by day you find ways to build upon each other as a team and put together projects and ideas with the support of those around you, things that we all push towards but sometimes can't bring ourselves to create under our own strength. You spread the responsibility between people and with it you can create much more.

Through it all you learn so much. You gain a different perspective, a different style and a different view on all you do and it helps you gain so much. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, others help us realize those, others also help us build on those.

In the end, for me this sort of a project, like in the video, is a chance to learn. It is a chance to experiment and build a community. The image itself comes second, I find the knowledge from the experience and the people you meet to be of much greater value. We all get a lot out of it at the end of the day.

Photographers
-Mariusz Sikorski
-Sandy Phimester

Makeup Artists
-Lydia Yapp
-Felicia Gow

Models
-Becca L
-Angela H
-Hannah L

Assistants
-Leroy Schulz

Shot on location @ studio-e.ca
Video shot and edited by Jason Fan @ Pixelknife.ca

This past week we got a chance to view a lunar eclipse on the night of the winter solstice. I had before that day not seen a lunar eclipse to begin with and aside from getting out of the city to get a glimpse of the celestial event I had brought along my camera for the sake of doing some photography of the night sky.

It was not something I had done before, a learning experience through and through and although it involved a lot of cold feet and frozen hands it was well worth the effort dealing with our Canadian winters to not only get a beautiful view of the eclipse itself but a lunar sea to gaze upon.

I will definitely be looking to make a few trips farther up north, away from the light pollution and city lights in the hopes of getting some truly clear and scenic shots of our countryside in the night sky.

The past few days here in Edmonton has seen some beautiful weather, at least for this time of the year. With temperatures hovering around 5°C and a little free time I've finally managed to explore the area around where I live. Being quite close the North Saskatchewan River it's a little surprising I have yet to find a way to the river since moving here.

It's not exactly accessible on this side of town, most of it is still under construction so there are no parks or bike paths that run along side it as other parts of town. Regardless, there turns out to be a residential area, of the country variety, that runs not far from it. A testament to the serenity of the area, I spotted a couple of deer grazing near the forest as I arrived. It had only been about 5pm. Unfortunately, they ran off by the time I got out of my car. Not that I was equipped for the shot anyways, having only brought with me the 105mm f2.8 Macro lens.

I had wanted to test this lens out for a series of shots in a similar vein to ones I had taken the past fall. At the time I was experimenting with using dried or dead leaves in a variety of environments. I had wanted to continue this through out the entire year, capturing the leaves in the different seasons and states.

I got a few shots in and definitely want to explore the area a bit more this week. There's a lot of beauty to be found there.

As for the lens, I'm really starting to warm up to it. The pictures I was shooting in Fall of last year were done on the 16-35mm f2.8, mainly on the 35mm end of the scale but even though the lens had a really small minimum focus distance the length of the lens limited the amount of out bokeh I was able to get. With the 105mm lens it is a lot easier to isolate the elements, maybe even too much so.

For those interested in black and white photography / post processing I would highly recommend checking out the Nik software packages, specifically Silver Efex Pro. You can get a trial run from their website, check out the lessons and give the add on package a go. It's well worth it.

I can't remember where I heard the slogan but it gave me a good laugh.

So this past weekend my cousin had asked me if I could do some shots for her of her baby, which she had about a month ago. Normally taking pictures of kids is not my cup of tea. I prefer something a bit more cooperative but it's always fun to give it a shot.

I ended up spending most of the afternoon at her house taking shots of the newborn. Ironically enough he ended up sleeping through most of it, even to the mother and fathers attempts to wake him up for the majority of pictures. I imagine this will probably be the most well behaved kids shoot i'm bound to have in my career.

Luckily though, I had my trigger finger ready and got a few shots of his big blue eyes and smile.

I think a big part of shooting children is having a lot of patients You're working off their clock, not the other way around. I've also found that it helps put a fresh perspective of things when you get down to their level and see the world through their eyes. It's a much different perspective down there.

Aside from the fairly obvious easy to organization another important part of it is when you're using sites like flickr.

Plain and simple: It will help get your image seen.

Last year I had someone contact me via flickr asking if a particular shot of mine was available in a larger size and am I willing to sell usage rights for the image. After doing some research on the person/company making this offer it turned out to be a group working out of British Columbia. The company was actually pretty prominent in the advertising world.


To make a long story short I ended up selling the usage rights to the image to them, twice to be exact. They had wanted the image to be a part of promotional material being put together for the Government of Alberta promoting the province of Alberta. The second time they had contacted me was to extend the rights to posters and billboards, something that was not mentioned in the original usage rights.

Companies watch sites like flickr and do contact users. Tagging your photos with appropriate keywords plays a key role in having your photos seen on such sites.Spent the extra few seconds to tag your photos properly. It might make you some money or bring you attention in the long run.