Spring break

This past week has been a nice break from the norm. I spent it all with my son as his daycare was closed for spring break. This meant not really getting any work done but it also meant a lot of quality time that I will hopefully never forget. I did take some time for myself on Sunday to sneak out for a ride and play with my camera a bit - trying some motion blur shots (see above and below). And I really needed the exercise!

It is a bit unnerving riding and trying to take pictures at the same time. The risk of crashing is high as you're not really looking where your going so much as your trying to take a picture. The risk of dropping the camera is high. I was sure to have the strap around my neck to prevent this. But I stayed upright and kept the camera and myself safe from harm.

I did bring my Olympus OM-PC film camera out for some fun too (see above shot and below). It was needing some love and I thought why not. I was dying to play with it some more. It really gives some character to the shots with it's warm tones. And the 50mm, f1.8 lens allows some really nice shallow depth of focus (see above shot). Kole and I had so many little adventures together over the span of the week I could do a huge, mega-blog on that alone. But I won't. :)

Today was the last day of the spring break in my eyes. I'll be busy the rest of the weekend and then life goes back to normal next week. So today we had a family outing and since I'm fighting a cold, Nina drove us up to Nanaimo. I used the opportunity to relax and play with my camera. Why not play around and have fun?

For the shot above, I just manually set the focus by guessing, put the camera on timer and placed it on the dash. Fun. I think I was having more fun than Nina...

A shot of the cockpit.

A shot focused on the windshield with shallow depth of focus to give a more interesting look.

I was so tempted to give some tech info on these shots but I digress. Maybe one day. For now this blog is for entertainment purposes...

Product photo art...

Product shots are sometimes boring to look at. For this reason I was happy to work with local potter, Hilary Huntley, of Trial By Fire Pottery. She's an artist who wanted an artistic way to show her fine pottery in print form. I was interested as I had an idea of what she wanted and how to go about doing it.

First consideration was to have the pottery look natural. Not floating in space like lots of product shots give the impression of. Hilary showed me a book with photos of creative teapots that had backgrounds that were really not flattering. Sure your eye was drawn the the subject but the background was so artificial looking. OK, so a black or white backdrop was not going to work here. We needed something more organic. A nice woven material worked just fine!

Then I had to ask - what level of detail to show? A shallow depth of focus looks more artistic but shows less detail of the whole product. Hilary chose shallow depth of focus. Cool!

I got to play around and arrange the items as I liked and it was fun! I've never dabbled in still-life shots but now I can see how it could become interesting. Some of the shots I got, in my opinion, looked like a print you might hang on the wall, more so than a product shot. This made me super happy and Hilary was happy too.

Another nice thing about product photography is the ease of taking the shots once you have the camera, lighting and other stuff set up. You basically put the product on the table, focus, shoot, and repeat. Well, it may not be that easy, but it's a lot easier than catching portraits of frisky dogs! :)

I could have gone into more detail of how the lighting and camera was setup but I'm not sure if that's what people want to read. Shoot me some feedback if you'd like more tech!