The Schweigen Trio

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Last Saturday I spent a very enjoyable afternoon photographing three talented (and charming) music students at Wilfrid Laurier University. They were Heidi Wall, Jeremy Bauman, and Miriam Stewart-Kroeker, who together call themselves the Schweigen Trio: All three of them exhibit a wealth of expression in their playing, and it was truly fascinating watching them play. Miriam, playing the cello, was perhaps the easiest to photograph since the size of the cello lends itself to a more varied range of movements, hand positions, and expressions. Camera: Canon 7D Lens: Sigma Ex […]

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Portraits with the Canon 7D

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It’s been a busy week this past seven days: a shoot of a mortgage broker on Tuesday night; photographing the Schweigen Trio of Wilfrid Laurier University musicians on Saturday; and then shooting a subset of the sales and marketing teams at Sybase iAnywhere this past Monday. Here’s an example of the portraits from the shoot at iAnywhere, one I was particularly pleased with. The glass blocks at the entrance to the firm’s cafeteria formed an interesting background, with the glass exhibiting an olive-green hue from ambient light in the late

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Moving to split grade printing

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On the way home from our most recent trip to Burlington for a Burlington Photo Art Group meeting, my friend Jim Blomfield convinced me to try split grade printing (see also this tutorial) rather than using the mixed-filter settings on my Devere 504 enlarger. The Devere supports filter grades from 0 to 4 (not 5) in 1/2 grade increments. Jim suggested that with split-grade printing I’d get better results since the light colour that is exposing the paper matches exactly the emulsions within it: magenta and yellow. So, on this

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Qu’Appelle River, Round Lake

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Over the last two months I’ve spent my darkroom time developing film taken during the summer – 15 rolls of 120 and nearly four boxes of 4×5 film taken in and around Grasslands National Park on James R. Page’s Wild Prairie workshop. This week I started making work prints of some of these images on Ilford RC paper; here is one example. This photograph is of the Qu’Appelle River, looking west (upstream) as it flows from Round Lake in southeastern Saskatchewan. It was taken from the old, abandoned Highway 9

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Fun and games with colour calibration

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Increasingly I find myself shooting more digital images, mostly because of web publishing – though there are a few occasions, certainly, where shooting digital makes a lot more sense. One example is my son’s hockey games. Arena lighting – at least those where my son’s team plays – is too dim for a decent (1/300) shutter speed with a fast (f2.8) lens, even at ISO 800. With film, the shots are so grainy that it’s hardly worthwhile. My new Canon 7D, however, with its highly improved noise reduction, means that

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Within the Frame

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My friend Jim Blomfield recommended David duChemin‘s book Within the Frame to me in November, and now I’m just getting around to reading it. In a nutshell, this book is a great read because duChemin writes about the whys of photography rather than the hows. The book is similar, in a way, to Freeman Patterson’s Photography and the Art of Seeing in that the craft of photography rarely enters the discourse – the concepts of aperture, exposure, depth of field and so on are tangential subjects. In both books, the

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Post-processing Canon 7D images

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Recently I acquired a new Canon 7D camera from BJ Photo in Waterloo and I’ve used it in two projects just in the last two weeks. Fantastic images, superb auto-focus, substantially improved image quality compared to my (now supposedly ancient) Rebel XT. Here is one example: Canon 7D camera, Canon 24-105mm IS L lens at 73mm, f/8.0 at 1/250 sec. One problem: the Canon 7D is so new that my recently-purchased copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 8.0 doesn’t recognize the new Canon 7D raw format. Thankfully, on 19 November Adobe

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Finding the right development times

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I ran out of Ilford ID-11 this week. I have lots of Perceptol, but looking both on the box and on the Ilford website, Perceptol isn’t rated for developing Kodak 320TXP. I knew that ID-11 was Ilford’s formulation of Kodak D-76 so I ran to my local Henry’s store to see if I could find either – and found two 1-litre envelopes of D-76. Cheap. Now the question was: what developer times to use? While Ilford makes some attempt to document how their chemistry works with films from other manufacturers,

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