Pin Up Photo shoot

I took a workshop at Vancouver Photo Workshops, to inspire my workflow and get some studio time. I had the pleasure of working with 4 models over 2 days.  The instructors were great at pointing us in the right direction for the feel and look of pin up, then letting us be creative and work with the models to create the shots we wanted.

This is one of my final edits from the shoot, Model Lincoln Electra:

Panning Action

I took a trip out to Mission Raceway to See the Westood Motorcycle Racing Association's Fifth Round of racing on July 1st, to take in some action of the races, and do some more work in the "Action" photography realm. This was a great place to hone some skills, as the riders are flying by lap after lap all day, so you have a consistent model for your shooting all day long!  I've read up on the subject of panning action and motorsports and its reccomended that you shoot as low as 160 to get the background really blurred out. While that may be a great place to be, it turns out its not a great place to start!!!  I had acceptable results panning as high as a shutterspeed of 400, with aperture at F4.   I found I could get decent results as low as 250, but I think it'll take some practice to get any lower.  This is a great technique to practice, as it really comes in handy for when your trying to capture the feeling of motion in your shots. Your kid riding a bike, a dog jumping for a frisbee, wakeboarding, or other sports where just a fully freezed subject is going to loose the sense of motion in the photo.  And if you spend some time practicing the art of panning you'll be ready to capture those get it before its gone moments!   One tip, REMEMBER to adjust your shutterspeed to a higher value when your not doing a pan, otherwise you'll get motion blur in highspeed subjects. I had a quite a few fuzzy shots after forgetting to adjust the shutter speed after my panning sequences!!

From a recent portrait session

This head shot was taken for a head shot for a local business.

I set up 4 flashes to get this shot, 1 shoot through umbrella, 1 small soft box, one for back lighting, and 1 for rim lighting the subject a little.

I love experimenting with light and tweaking it bit by bit to get the shot!  I recently got a remote trigger, so I can do this on myself before a client shows up, to get a base line.  However all models/ customers/ clients are different so its important to be prepared to tweak your set up a bit when the portrait session begins!

Portrait shoot from today.

Ok so I picked up a new lens recently and here's a one of the candids from my test shoot with it.  I'm pretty happy with the shot and so is she!

Recent Wedding Shoot

Here's a couple recent photos from a wedding I got to shoot down in California.  Great Couple Great Trip!

Drive Days

Yesterday was the first Italian Drive Days on Commercial Drive in Vancouver.
It was a pretty cool scene with Street vendors selling soccer jerseys, sausages, pasta, hats, clothes, well a pretty diversified mix, which shouldn't surprise anyone as it is Commercial drive.  I think its great that the city closes of the street to vehicle traffic like this. It obviously attracts a lot of people, and business.  Here's a few shots from the crowds.

The coolest pizza delivery car in town:


A little girl dancing to the beat:


The guys making the beat!


A fiddler on the Drive

T-Bird

Shot at the Grease N Grind Show and Shine on the weekend. It was a little Soggy out, but it made for some nice moody photos. View the rest of these at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cb750r/sets/72157624043647967/

Blue Heron Fishing!

This shot is part of a sequence I got on the weekend. We went to North Van to check out the North Shore Mtn bike Associations, Bike swap www.nsmba.ca . Met up with my friend James http://www.jameshealeyphotography.com/ and as it was a crappy wet Saturday decided that coffee and doughnuts in Deep Cove were the order of the day.  We went down to the Wharf to check out the crabs and critters on the shore as it was low tide and we had this Blue Heron land right next to us to look for a snack.

Yosemite Valley

This photo was taken on my recent trip to California, and is a mild HDR compilation.

California Trip

I took the first two weeks of May off as a Vacation, my Fiance's cousin was getting married in California, so it was a great excuse to take a road trip! We Drove Down the Coast, Mountain bikes on the roof and our goal was simple, see the coast,ride bikes, see some wine country, make it to the wedding, see Yosemite, and make it home! Oh ya and take some photos!

Our First Morning had us waking up at our Campsite on the Oregon Coast. It was a pretty Grey Day but the huge flat beaches were very impressive. We walked around as the tide went out.



We Made our Way further down the Coast and Pushed on to California in our first full Day of driving.




More to come!

Malene Show Pt 2

Here's one of the models posing for me at after the show. Very happy with the result.

Malene Grotrian Designs, Ice Water Fashion Event

This is Jenna Fortin business partner of Malene Grotrian, hosting the Ice Water Fashion Event.
Malene is a Vancouver based Fashion Designer. Malene Grotrain Designs

Cupcakes!

Here's a product shot I did of Clever Cupcakes, little mini cupcakes.

GPS photos!

Well I got to enjoy three of my hobbies today! I went for a mountain bike ride with my Camera, and my new GPS! So if you have a GPS that saves tracks, (a digital breadcrumb trail of where you went). there are a few options that once back home you can run a program that matches the EXIF data from your photos, to the closest time stamp on your track and saves the GPS coordinates into your photos EXIF file!



Why is this cool? With sites like flickr, you can click on the photo, see where it was taken on google maps. Great for trips, when you travel abroad and take a million photos. Now you can see that, that great sunset was in Madrid not Barcelona, or for mtn bikers with a few too many knocks on the head you can create maps WITH pictures of the trail head, so when the little map says take the third left and there's a picture of what the third left looks like, its pretty hard to mess up!

I am using a Lightroom plug in by Jeffrey Friedl as one of my trial methods for embedding this info. This is a donation ware product and I use his Flickr plugin as well.

The other is with GPICSYNC a freeware product.

I don't have much of an informed opinion to make about these two software pieces as I've just scratched the surface of this new addition to my toolkit. Stay tuned for more!

GPS embedded photo on Flickr

3rd Place!

its a short post but I just found out I was awarded a 3rd place finish in the Pentaxforums.com panorama photo contest. The image is the Vancouver skyline seen in the header of this blog! I'm pretty stoked!

Moto Photo

This photo was taken on a day trip up to Squamish on the motorcycle. Stopped at the local Starbucks to refuel and took a few snaps of the bikes in the lot. I used a wide aperture, 2.8 and focused on the side cover as I wanted that to be the focal point. I then desaturated the photo to give it the vintage feel. Enjoy!

So I've been having a lot of fun learning some strobe techniques with my new wireless triggers, but I've also been busy learning things with photoshop.  Here's a little something I created tonight after reading through a tutorial.

Neon Lighting and Field of View

Here's a shot taken with an old Manual focus 28mm lens. Really happy with it so far as its nice and small so doesn't weigh a ton, and its close to what a "normal" lens field of view is on a cropped sensor.  See back in the day, the 50mm lens was considered the De facto lens as its field of view was close to the size of the film diagonal length. (Just like we measure TV screens diagonally 35mm films "screen size" is 43mm)  So a true "normal" lens on a film camera would be 43mm but 50mm was adopted as the Standard lens focal length for old film cameras.

In Digital world the APS-C sensor is smaller, therefore to achieve that normal focal length you'd have to use a wider lens,  the diagonal length of a an APS-C sensor is 30.15mm so technically a 30mm lens would be a "normal" field of view. However 28mm lenses are pretty close just like the 50mm is pretty close to in standard film!

So there's a bit of science for you,  here's some eye candy!

Olympic Photo Walk

This is some more images from my Flickr Site taken while walking around the Downtown Vancouver area just before and During the Olympics

"Neon Totem Poles"


Robson Square at night:


Canada flag Reflected


Artistic Trees:

Olympic Torch Photos

My Blog has kind of turned a little olympic themed lately, and thats because there's lots of opportunities to shoot something thats interesting and lends to a lot of opportunities to capture some cool images. I don't take a lot of "street" or "people" shots as I don't find what I do turns out well. This HUGE celebration is a great opportunity to take shots of people on the street as EVERYONE has a camera so its not very intimidating for the crowds or yourself!

Enjoy!

Coquitlam Torch run, on Marmot St. One runner comes down the hill



The Kiss of the torches, as the one runner ignites the torch of the new runner.



The new Torch bearer takes off towards Mackin Park in Coquitlam

Vancouver Pre Olympic Photos

One week left untill Vancouver hosts the biggest party of its life! I toured the Downtown area to checkout how it looks. It was a funny vibe as Granville has been blocked off from traffic and it was really quiet and mellow, sort of like everyone is holding their breath in anticipation. More from this series can be seen at my:
FLICKR Site

The Bay on Granville St.

Deviant Art

I have posted some of my photos on Deviant Art, available for purchase. This is some shameless self promotion, here's the link!

cb750r.deviantart.com

White Rock Beach, BC

I managed to grab this shot today, while driving around on call for work. I got turned around in south Surrey, and found myself heading towards Whiterock. Since I know where to go from there I decided to keep on going and, well since it was sunny I decided to take a look at the "beach" and here's what I saw! I've been finding it hard to take photo's during the day to day routine, but I think I'll keep my camera with me, and make a point of taking a bit of time to frame a shot or two.

Image Size

Hey folks anyone else wanting to put larger sized photos like the ones I have on my blog, should do so by pasting the link from their photo hosting website (flickr, picasa...) and then edit the length and width numbers seen in that text too a width of 747, and height of 500. You need to be using a Stretch template in order to take advantage of the full screen, and giving you more real estate to show off your photos!

The text below is a an example of what flickr's link looks like, I had to hobble it in order for you to see the text not the image, but look for the height and width numbers in quotes, and just change them to the numbers stated, and enjoy.

"a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/cb750r/4314725307/" title="Xmas2009-83-Edit by CB750r, on Flickr">img src="http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4023/4314725307_699aeff173_b.jpg" width="747" height="500" alt="Xmas2009-83-Edit"

Emerald Lake Sunset

Mt Baker sunrise

Here's another Mt Baker Sunrise after some time in Edit within Photoshop

Its Been a while...

So its been a bit since I dusted off this site, but I've been really busy with life, holidays, and shooting photos! 

I  took some great shots over the holidays, but here's a little one from this morning! I'm pretty darn tired at the moment so if you'd like to see some from the holidays you can check out my first attempt at a web Gallery at: 

Grant Hancock Photography

blog on go