TEST SHOOT with the TIGER Taekwondo Team

Hey Gang,

I have some pretty cool news. On February 22 I will be off to Beijing China for a week or so with the Canadian Olympic Taekwondo team. The team is heading to China in a preparation tournament for the Olympics this August. During this time I will be photographing their press kits as well as a photography documentary on the team itself to be exhibited across Canada.

I am pretty excited but thought I needed to work on my timing before I leave.

So I decided to shoot a training session with the Tiger team of Tiger Taekwondo in Edmonton. These images you will see here are basically shot in two hours of training at our dojang.
I plan to shoot the Olympic documentary in high grain black and white for dramatic feel. Here are some of the "test" images I shot today. The training session was as usual very intense, so I got some pretty cool images, close to what I think I will see at the tournament in China.

I will be updating the blog of the Olympic images while in China.

Take care.

C

Edmonton at 2:54am

Here are some photographs of Edmonton, tonight at 2:54 am on Sunday, February 11, 2008.

I was watching the first season of Studio 60 (a pretty good TV show) around 1:3o am when the wind literally shook the windows of my living room. I looked outside and there was this eerie snow blowing in the wind, so I grabbed my camera got in my car and went out to shoot a few frames.

No reason, just for fun. It was cold. Damn Cold. With the wind it must have been in the minus 40s.

Although shooting these images in harsh conditions kinda sucked, my week was very good. I got some great printing on canvas done by Klyment Tan, shot a very cool billboard campaign for Hudsons with Jeff Mclean and some interesting industrial images for Chris Bolovar over at Optamedia. And got confirmation that I will be off to China on Feb 23 to shoot the Canadian Olympic Taekwondo Team for a photography exhibition.

C

Denise Lefebvre

Last week I had the please of shooting artist and painter Denise Lefebvre. www.deniselefebvre.com A talented artist Denise specializes in the areas of drawing, murals, portraits and paintings. It took a bit of time to organize a shoot with Denise as she always had something going on whether it was a mural unveiling or finishing up jobs for clients. Finally however we managed to set something up.

Since I pretty much had free reign on this shoot, I wanted to shoot Denise in black and white. But when I arrived at her studio I couldn’t help but shoot in color. I dont know why but I just made the move to color.

One thing I really enjoyed was being in Denise’s studio. It was very inspiring, paintings were all over the place, rows of oil and acrylic paint were accessible, canvasses, easles, paint brushes all of it was all there, in a messy organized manner.



I have always felt that photographers have been artists. Although while watching Denise work with paints and a brush, I suddenly felt unfortunate that we as photographers have somewhat “lost touch” with our craft. In the past we used to develop our film on our own, develop our own pictures, work on them by dodging and burning them etc… back in film days we were very much "in touch" with our creations... and now we just tap keyboards, and look at pixels on a screen. As a commercial shooter we often never actually print our own work... there’s something sad in that.