Calgary Wedding Photographer Blog – byDesign Visuals

Last weekend was not a very good one for me, technology wise.  Friday evening I went to play a DVD on my laptop, and I discovered that my laptop had died. 

Then Sunday afternoon, I turned on my main computer, only to discover that it too had perished!  I’m not even sure what happenend, it would just keep restarting once it started loading Windows.  Yes, that’s right, a photographer that uses Windows. But I am ambidextrous, I am equally capable of using a Mac.  Eventually I will make the switch, once my pocketbook catches up to with my big dreams! Don’t worry though past clients, I have all images backed up, safe and sound:)

My iPhone also gave me a real scare on Sunday night, trying the white screen of death trick.  She came back to life though, once the battery died.

So needless to say I am still recovering from the loss, and trying to get things back to normal.  As soon as I do, I will get back on track and post a picture as soon as possible!

Mark

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So all this week I had been trying to think of what to do, and I actually came up with a great idea early on!  However, I woke up this morning and Calgary had turned very foggy and all of the trees were covered in hoar frost, so I had to switch things up and try and capture some of the wintery goodness! 

I wanted to get more fog in the shot, but it wasn’t that foggy when we finally got around to shooting so I had to switch things up a bit.  I also wanted to experiment a bit with off camera flash to highlight my subject, and it worked pretty well, except it wasn’t quite as bright as I wanted.  But for a single shot, I was pleased!

I realized I forgot to add the technical goodies to the last post, so I’ll go back and edit that.  For this shot I used my Canon 5D on a tripod, set at ISO 1600 for 1/10th of a second at F2.8.  I then used a 580 EX II on camera to trigger another 580 EX II that a friend standing to my right was holding.  His 580 had a CTO filter on it, as well as a grid and some gaffers tape to lessen the spread.

But without further ado, here it is!

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Wow…this challenge is shaping up to be quite a bit harder than I anticipated!  I found it hard this week to come up with an idea of who and what to shoot, and I left it to the last minute (as you can tell by the timestamp on this post!)

I met my friend Selena about two years ago, when her bridal shower was held at my house (I was living with her mutual friend).  I was minding my own business, trying to stay out of the way of the numerous wedding crazed girls downstairs when I hear someone shout up “Mark…do you have a camera?????” 

So of course I came trundling down the stairs with my very large and impressive SLR, and we had a good laugh.  Then I took a picture of Selena in a toilet paper wedding dress.  I could post it here, but I think that might be a little bit cruel.

I must admit though…this isn’t actually the first picture.  I made a teeny tiny mistake, and forgot to put the actual trigger on my camera to trigger the lights, so my first shot came out completely black!  Argh!  It’s actually ok though, because from the wee little bit of information that was there, I can tell she blinked – majorly! 

After meeting her that day, I have always wanted to take her portrait as I think her freckles are pretty sweet.  She says she is shy in front of the camera, but I don’t think so – in fact, we had a really great conversation while I was waiting to get the perfect shot.  It only took about 20 minutes!

Then of course my addiction reared it’s ugly head, and I couldn’t just stop at one picture.  So Nathan, her husband, came over, and we had another great conversation!  He’s a gamer like myself, and while I was prepping he was playing xbox, so of course we had to play a little bit before I took off.  It was good fun!

Thanks guys for helping me out, it was great to see you again and I look forward to our Avatar date!

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Just a quick update to let you guys know that I have added a new gallery to the main website – Mark & Kemi’s wedding!  Their wedding was so much fun, the weather was perfect, and it was  outdoors!  Looking at these images again made me realize how in love they actually are, there were tons of images of one of them stealing a secret glance at the other!  Mark and Kemi’s families were also awesome, they were so supportive and welcoming to their new in-laws.  Anyways, here is one of the shots from the big day, go and check out the rest at the main website at http://www.bydesignvisuals.com (and yes they are different shots from ones I posted here earlier!)

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Today I took the plunge and started on my ‘one shoot per week adventure’ for the next year!  I wanted to start off with something fairly simple and fresh, and I had this idea in my head for a while.

Let me tell you though, it is hard to line everything up so that you nail it on the first shot!  I am fairly happy with what I got, I think my composition could have been a little bit stronger, but overall I am pleased.  I did discover one flaw in my plan though - it’s impossible to stop after just one shot!  So hard!  I did take a few more after this shot, but as you can see by the file number, this is #1!

Thanks to Kristen for coming out and helping me out with this idea – you were great!  At one point during the shoot she said “I don’t think that I’m very photogenic…”  Of course I heartily disagreed!

My setup for this was a Canon 580 EX II Speedlite to my left, fired through an umbrella and triggered by another 580 EX II on camera..  On my right was a 42″ white reflector, held up by a Studio Titan on a light stand, and Kristen was standing about 3 feet in front of a white wall.   I was shooting with my Canon 5D and a 100mm 2.8 macro lens.  I just realized that both my camera and lens have a 2nd version now…upgrade time?  Nah, I’m happy with what I have.

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