Photography Studio 1

  For this post I want to reflect on my process when posing Leah and the process behind my work. In my technical post I will include my lighting setup and how I achieved my look once I have the film scanned from that day.  Leah and I checked out a few books to reference and here are some of the photos that I liked the most and wanted to reference. Avedon's way of allowing the subject's personality to bleed through into the portraits is what I wanted to replicate. (Also taking a page of Karsh's book in subject) My goal was to reveal Leah's attributes and how I few her everyday in the studio. I wanted to demonstrate how she is always listening to music and is the hardest working painter I have ever met. I liked how her painting smock contained fractions of all of her paintings and each stain tells a story of progression. She always comes to my studio with one head phone off specially that ear as well to the point where the headphone has damage from pulling it off so consi...

Sean Tucker Youtube Sean Tucker is easily one of my favourite YouTube channels to learn about photography. He mixes technique and philosophy effortlessly in his videos about photography. In this video he breaks down Karsh's famous portrait of Ernst Hemingway. 

Here are my selected favourite images I took during the most recent protest that happened at the University of Lethbridge in regards to a controversial speaker being invited to campus. When I arrived to campus that day I couldn't believe I forgot my digital camera, I had never had to shoot an event on film or specifically something that fast paced and with that much tension involved. Another issue was that I didn't have have high iso film and was forced to push my images to 3200 to get useable images. I think this forced push adds to the intensity of the images and demonstrates the panic that I felt as an artist documenting this situation trying a technique that I wasn't entirely comfortable with just yet. The energy at this protest fuelled every frame I chose to take and dictated what I chose to capture. The possibility of completely destroying the film I shot due to poor development and bad exposure was an adrenaline high I hadn't felt from photography before. It was ...

  This selection of photos is in response to my creative rut I have felt recently. I really love what I have taken in these selects and think pursuing more of a street approach to photography will fulfill me far more than what I have been doing as of late. There is something magical about just going out and shooting and letting the world find you then rather trying to manufacture it. I shot two rolls of film on the weekend shot on HP5 pushed to one stop over in development. Some of the shots worked out really well and some not so great. I think slightly more development time would have helped as I feel their is a loss in detail in a lot of the shots. The water in the development lab was running very cold and I don't think I compensated for that as well as I could have. I also think my metering whilst on the street is still very poor. I want to learn to shoot street without a grey card which is what I do as it is so annoying to pull one out every time. Better judgement of what I am ...

  This project brought me a severe amount of frustration. I did a lot of reflection during this time period and felt incredibly uninspired to do anything after working on this project. I got lost in the complexities of chasing narratives that don't exist. Trying to make connection that are not there and adding useless elements that confuse the image did no service to myself at all. I chose to strip back all of the superficial elements of this image and focus on my original idea mixing in some elements of experimenting when it came to my development and improving on my technique. So often I get lost in the narrative when creating work that I end up creating superficial things that don't actually mean anything to me. For this exercise all I wanted to do was put a skateboarder (myself) jumping onto a rail down a stair set that is protruding out of my mouth. Purely for the joy of creating and thinking this is funny was so much more impactful than any other iterations I tried to mak...

  This series is very personal to me as I wanted to look at the connections of mental health between my father and I. I wanted to display the contrast between us too and the similarities so the viewer can understand how we are different but the same. The piece lends into self vaguely to performance art as seen in the photos are very deep conversation was being had about our main issues in life and how we should talk about them more. Both of us did a written piece at the same time as the conversation was going on posing question and trying to connect with eachother on a deeper level. I feel as this piece isn’t just about the similarities in mental health but the fatherly hood realization that their kids aren’t okay all the time, and that they are real beings with real problems with real issues same as them. It’s a project with lots of love involved even though the concept is difficult to address.

Final Project Reflection  My final project was aimed to analyze the similarities and differences between my Father and I's mental health. I wanted to represent this project in an obtainable way to an gallery audience that would enable the content to relatable and fairly easy to interpret but also to be personal enough for me that it has deeper meaning. The style of photos I chose and created relied on heavy contrast which was achieved by using the red filters to get the perfect amount of black but maintain the highlights. In class we spoke about how happy accidents are real part of this project specifically looking at  how the photos of me have a lot more white and the photos of my dad are have a lot more black. I find this unique and could portray a deeper meaning not obtainable by the audience member but open to interpretation.  For this project I did a lot of testing in the dark room and fell in love with the enlargement process. This is the first time I have actually ...

The Photo Genius That Is Weegee Weegee (Usher Fellig) was born one day before me on June 12, 1899 102 years before me. His work is absolutely incredible and I can't believe how he took so many incredible photos with such unique style that is so dominate in mainstream photography today using photoshop but he did it all with the camera. His experimental distortion photos are some of my favourites I have discovered as they have such a unique beauty to them and I would absolutely love to learn how to do that all in camera or in the darkroom potentially. HIs street work is also facisnating with his approach on capturing events right as they happen by having a police radio in his car for his work .  Here are some of my favourite photos of Weegee's.  All photos and information from:  https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/weegee?all/all/all/all/17  

Self Portrait in the bath with wet hair and soft lighting By: Kort Woycheshin I wanted to discuss this photo more in depth as I discovered something really amazing when editing it in Lightroom. I shot this photo in uncompressed raw with a file size at about 66mb in one photo which is honestly insane but so nice when editing. I originally though black and white editing was boring, just up the contrast and you are good to go. Oh boy I was wrong.... The coolest thing I learned was about dealing with the colour sliders and how they were effected my skin tones when changing them. Red was predominantly my face and orange was the rest of my body. I found if upped the exposure of the reds you could soften the skin really beautifully and take a different approach to getting rid of blemishes compared to using a clone stamp or a gaussian blur to get rid of blemishes. Instantly when upping the red my pores became less pronounced and this gave a very classical Hollywood style beauty portrait look t...

 Contact Sheet This is one of my contact sheets for this final assignment and for this post I want to talk about the meaning of my piece and thought process going into this final project.  Men's mental health has always been an interesting topic to me being someone who has suffered throughout my life and has seen how detrimental men's mental health is in my family. The original idea was to explore the lineage between mental health and family and how certain things are passed on and some are not. I wanted to capture myself, my father and brother during an interview discussing some fairly heavy topics and photograph moments from this conversation fairly sporadically. My brother was unable to be apart of it due to time constraints which changed a the project narrative a bit but this did allow me to explore my Dad's mental health more as well as my own. So far I have a few favourite images that show uncomfortable moments, high contrast, emotions and more. I did my interview wit...

Exposures f11 2000 f8 2000 f5.6 2000 f5.6 1000 f5.6 500 5.6 250s (Perfectly exposed)  f5.6 125 f5.6 60 f3.5 60 f3.5 30 f3.5 15 This assignment was really interesting to me as it have me a new outlook on the exposure triangle. Last summer a photographer friend of mine gave me shit for not knowing the exposure triangle and how to use it. I then devoted quite a bit of my time understanding how it worked and the principles behind it. Once we did this assignment I had developed a huge new understanding of the exposure triangle and its effects to the point where I barely even need to think about it anymore. It's so useful to actually do this test showing how you can achieve plus and minus 5 exposures by tweaking things and how there are different ways to achieve this dependant on your needs. As a sports photographer outside of school knowing this by heart is unbelievably useful as I am so often using 4000/s shutter speed and often the lighting in places I am shooting is terrible and need...

 Some of my favourite shots all captured on the Fuji Film X-100v by Austin Knibb  Technical Assignment (behind the scenes) My thought process behind my photos in this project were a little bit different then typically what you would expect in a still life. In terms of objects I didn't have a lot of very colourful things/interesting things in my home as lot's of my items are camera gear and tech stuff that is very metal looking. To analyze the way colour modulates images I wanted to go downtown Lethbridge and use the buildings to test how different colours would react in film. Also being downtown gave me a nice grungy style that I appreciate with the dead planters and leaves all over the place.  Shooting the city was really exciting and interesting with film especially on the day we chose as It was very overcast and moody outside. I love how the detail looks in the final developed film, the grain in the buildings and the contrast is so different then digital noise. We went...

  Pinhole Photography Assignment Reflection Overall I enjoyed the assignment and felt that I learned a handful about the photographic process and gained a new appreciation for photography. My mind was blown by how simple yet complex a pinhole can be and that essentially anything can be a pinhole camera. The photos you get when using a pinhole camera have such a unique look, and I think that's what I like most about pinhole. The grunginess of the photos really leans itself to my style of photography; people often will use photoshop to get this look, but though trial and error, pinhole just does it for you. In conclusion, I would happily do pinhole again and think I could vastly improve upon my previous designs and photos with the knowledge I gained during this assignment.  "Where my eyes cannot go"  For this photo, I was inspired to try and replicate what it might look like if you could see through the world and everyone walked on glass. I had my subject on a ledge with on...