Saturday Night – Chinatown

June 26, 2011 | Filed Under Personal Project | Leave a Comment 

Downtown at dusk hoping for the late evening sunlight slanting through but clouds drifting in ended that. Settled for the bright colours of the umbrellas and the neon signs coming on in Victoria’s Chinatown district.

Rain

June 26, 2011 | Filed Under Personal Project | Leave a Comment 

Another damp west coast day, crossing the Alex Fraser bridge .

Artist Rachel Berman – New Project Featuring Environmental Portraits

February 12, 2011 | Filed Under Arts, Personal Project, Portrait | 2 Comments 

Every year I like to start at least one new project. I like to have a number of projects going at the once as I find that due to my full time shooting job my time for personal shooting is limited in both hours and time of day. Having a number of projects means I can usually shoot something in the windows that I have.

So, this year, adding to the mix is a series of environmental portraits of artists. I’ve done a large project featuring images of writers but hadn’t really worked on that much in the past couple of years. I wanted to introduce a new portrait project and figured focusing in on visual artists would be both interesting and challenging and would also have the side benefit of not only meeting new people but I’d get to see a lot of art.

I’ve started off with artist Rachel Berman who is local again after a couple of years in Toronto. I’d never met her before the session but had admired her work so called her up, explained what I was doing and we set up a time to meet.

Rachel works out of her apartment studio, a great place in an older building with bay windows that let in a ton of light. She was busy working on two projects, illustrations for a book and a show at her Toronto gallery.

A bonus at this shoot was the presence of Karl Spreitz, a long time local artist, photographer and member of the Limners, a long time Canadian art collective. It was my first time meeting Karl as well and I took the opportunity to enquire about photographing him at some point. Karl, as mentioned, is a stills photographer as well as a documentary filmmaker and he was busy shooting and filming during part of my portrait session.

I spent about an hour with Rachel, taking photographs, but also chatting and getting to know each other a bit.

I took Rachel a couple of prints last week and she seemed pleased with the images. It was, from my viewpoint, a successful shoot, I had a few frames I’m happy with. I got to meet two new creative people and I’ve got another project underway.

Rachel is represented by the Ingram Gallery in Toronto and Granville Fine Art in Vancouver. Toronto artist Sara Sniderhan has painted a portrait of Rachel that you can see HERE.

Claire Martin and IndieGoGo – funding her Haitian Life project

January 12, 2011 | Filed Under Funding, Personal Project | Leave a Comment 

About a  month ago I wrote about crowd sourcing to fund photo projects and Victoria photographer Mike Andrew McLean and his use of Kickstarter to fund his project The Range.

Since then I’ve come across another good example,  Australian photographer, and Oculi member, Claire Martin is currently photographing in Haiti and she’s using IndieGoGo to create a funding program for that work. You can follow her work in Haiti and see some of her images on the accompanying blog.

I hadn’t heard about IndieGoGo before but the site is easy to navigate and certainly has a punchier front page than does Kickstarter.

Crowd sourcing does seem to be a viable way for photographers to raise funds (and for fund contributors to get books, prints, postcards or even a personal call from the photographer) and it’s interesting to see that not only younger less well known photographers are using this method. Magnum photographer Larry Towell has a Kickstarter site up for his Afghanistan work.

Tim Van Horn & The Canadian Mosaic Project

December 31, 2010 | Filed Under Interview, Personal Project, Photo Studios and Work Spaces, Road Trip | Leave a Comment 

I met up with photographer Tim Van Horn for a coffee today but forgot to bring a mug so I was out of luck. When you live in a small camperized van, room for everything, including extra dishes just isn’t there.

I don’t know how you’ll be celebrating the new year but for Van Horn  Jan. 1, 2011 will mark 27 months on the road for the Alberta photographer and he’ll celebrate that milestone in Victoria. The 41-year-old photographer has been traveling across the country in his van photographing Canadians, 5000 so far, for his Canadian Mosaic project. His plan is to stay on the road until he captures 25,000 portraits that he will use to create a giant Canadian flag mosaic in time for the country’s 150th birthday on July 1, 2017. Van Horn, who has travelled from Newfoundland to Nunavut for his project, expects to spend the next few weeks in the greater Victoria area.

You have to admire Tim as he is doing what so many of us talk about but never get around to actually acting on,  hitting the road and just working on a project, taking photographs everyday.

His work can be seen at http://celebratecanada.wordpress.com/.

Omen of Bones

December 6, 2010 | Filed Under Omen of Bones, Personal Project | 1 Comment 

I’ve been working on a project the past few years, shooting every fall when the salmon return to spawn. These aren’t the images you always see of scarlet bodied fish fighting their way upstream but instead are images of the dead and decaying bodies of the spawned out fish.

I’ve been calling this project Omen of Bones and when people ask me what it’s about I tell them The End Of The World. You can almost see the eyes rolling, as I’m sure yours are right now. However, I’m not talking about aliens invading earth, all out nuclear war, or a giant meteor striking the planet end of the world kind of event. I’m talking about death by a thousand cuts end of the world. That’s the way I see it, we’ll go with a whimper not a bang. A little bit disappears here, a little bit there.

Most of us are familiar with salmon as a resource, a source of food for man and beast and we’re all (mostly) aware that salmon stocks have been dwindling over the past decades. Studies (private and government) and some steps at conservation haven’t stopped the trend. Some people got quite excited earlier this year when an early run of fish, which spawn in British Columbia’s interior, came through in record breaking numbers, an unprecedented event but that’s all it was, an anomaly, a freak show that won’t be repeated.

This year I didn’t get out to check the rivers until late and I’d  already heard the Goldstream run was way way down in numbers but even so I was shocked by how few bodies were on the shore and in the river.

What most people don’t realize is that it’s not just as a food source as living animals that make the salmon important but it’s their contribution to the general environment after they die that impacts the world as well. The bodies provide nutrients in the river water needed for the growth of other species. They fertilize the ground not just immediately next to a river but for miles around (animals and birds carry the carcasses).

That’s why I’ve been photographing the bodies, trying to draw some attention to an equally important part of the lifecycle of the salmon as well as their impact on entire ecosystem they inhabit.

We tend to view death as something terrible but for the salmon, it’s a needed part of their life cycle, they spawn and die, ensuring another generation lives on. Their death also ensures life goes on for a myriad of other life forms and without them we all die a little.

There’s also a certain bleak beauty in these images, images of death AND life,  if you know what you’re looking at.

Drinking With Photographers

April 25, 2010 | Filed Under Personal Project, Photography | Leave a Comment 

One of the downsides of living in a smaller place is that you have a tendency to feel isolated from the rest of the world. This week Don Weber was in town for a couple of workshops and it was a nice reminder of the wider world out there.

Thursday night I met up with him and a couple of other local photographers at a local pub and we had one of those great freewheeling talks over a few drinks that left me buzzing with ideas at the end of the night.

Don and I were joined by Deddeda Stemler, Sean White (the two just back from three months in the Philippines) and Duane Prentice, all local photographers although Sean is also a videographer, filmaker, producer etc.

We chatted about the basic (equipment and cameras) , we talked about travel, we talked about technical things and format but most of all we just talked about ideas.  Everybody had different viewpoints  but it was all agreeable and thought provoking. I don’t really know Duane, this was the first time I had had a chance to chat with him and while he was quiet (compared to the rest of us) he had some interesting insights and thoughts about challenging yourself as a photographer.

The next day I took a look at Duane’s site and was struck by the connection between his Remnants project, David Pollocks’s Sign, Symbol and Nature and my own Saltwater And Rain project. There are, of course,  differences, for instance both David and Duane are using large format and I’m not. All are about Vancouver Island though and are concerned with the impact of landscape. It would be interesting to see a show with all of our work together.

Good Friday Walk with the Cross

April 4, 2010 | Filed Under Personal Project, Photography | Leave a Comment 

For more than a decade now I’ve been trying to get out on Good Friday and photograph the annual walks with a wooden cross that some churches do. It’s a project I call Weight of Faith. It’s an event that’s great for a photo project, visually the cross is an amazing symbol. It’s also a rare example of mainstream Christians  showing off their faith in public. I started the project while living in Calgary and have continued in Victoria.  This year there was a good turnout for the Christ Church Cathedral’s Good Friday Passion Procession despite rain showers and really heavy winds.

Preston Is My Paris Photo Books

March 31, 2010 | Filed Under Personal Project, Photo Book | Leave a Comment 

I’ve been enjoying the proliferation of independent photos books being produced by a variety of photographers and promoted by sites like The Independent Photo Book and Little Brown Mushroom.

One series of books that I’ve been ordering and enjoying are those produced by Adam Murray and Robert Parkinson, the two English photographers behind Preston Is My Paris. I really like their idea that you need to take your inspiration from wherever it is you live. Each book is different in style and design and they all have little touches that really make them unique, like the see through sleeve on Your Negatives or wrap around band on I am…  Their newest book is the one shown first, You could be in London, You could be in Vegas, But you’re in Brierfield. It’s funny but so true for most of us. You can order their books through their publishing site here. They are sold out right now but will have more publications coming. Just so you know, Preston is in Lancashire, north of Manchester ( I admit, I googled it) An article on the pair and their projects here.

UPDATE ______They have a new book out Tokyo, check their site and see photo below.

Cherry Blossoms and Residential Parking Only

March 21, 2010 | Filed Under Personal Project | Leave a Comment 

Spring is here with cherry trees in full bloom and boats still parked in yards and not out on the water.

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