smackdown

just blowing off some steam.

oh crap.

i totally forgot valentine's day.

glam / business

photograhy looks pretty glamorous, who doesn't dream of being able to say they're a professional. but it turns out that like anything else, if you want to make money at it then it's a business. all the factors are there:

- equipment
- materials (storage/transport media, internet)
- labour (getting out in the cold and preparing shoots)
- logistics (transportation)
- talent (models)
- quality control (image crispness, data histogram)
- legal (contracts, releases)
- marketing (cultivating a reputation)
- sales (somebody has to want your images)
- accounts (everybody needs to be paid and finally, hopefully, so do you)

..not to mention having to pour your heart out creatively. it's hard. yeh boo hoo me, but it is.



but sometimes though, if you're lucky as hell, maybe the model will bring a bottle of wine, the images will come out okay and you'll forget, for just a moment, that you're a month behind with the rent.

smoke composites

i composited some of those smoke images and got these. easy. all you do is duplicate the image, flip or rotate the layer over the original, flatten, levels, done.

smoke

i've been up all night playing with some incense (fantasy garden black magic). my apartment's smelling a bit spicy, but man i'm happy with what i got. to do these i set up a 5-8 second exposure then, when the smoke looked good i flashed from the side with an old vivitar 2600-d.

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update
in print. a full-page ad for Stock-Archive.com in Applied Arts Magazine's 2009 industry guide:

traffic loops

so i've taken this longer exposure idea, shot some traffic and made a handful of animated loops. i showed them to a client and got an order big enough to keep me busy for a month. thanks t.

a couple of these were used in a promo video for the new Westin Hotel in Montreal (at 0:23).
(i shot them in Toronto.)