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.

STOLEN IMAGE

This past week I was watching a hockey game on sports net and a commercial from the “Albertans for Change” came on. About 5 seconds into the commercial I noticed that this TV spot used a portrait I took of Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach for an upcoming photography exhibition.

The problem with this TV spot was that it was very slanderous towards the Premier and his government. So here was this organization using my image without my approval, in an TV spot I did not agree with. Not only did this organization infringed on copyright laws, but here is an organization which is a collation of the Alberta Building Trades Council and the Alberta Federation of Labor. These organizations preach equal labor laws, and yet here they are taking a photograph and not offering the photographer the adequate compensation.

To be honest I would have never licensed this image to this group as I do not agree with their message.

I have met Premier Stelmach in several occasions and I have to say he is a very honest and sincere man who is doing his best to make Alberta a better place to live for all of us.

Needless to say I informed my lawyer right away about the copyright infringement and we moved forward with the necessary steps to solve this problem.

The issue has since been dealt with. If you are wondering what image was used I have posted it to this blog.

Take care, C

Dominican Republic

Here is a series of photographs I shot in the Dominican Republic while working with Jamie Coutts at original video http://www.originalvideo.ca/. We were both shooting a documentary travel project in the Dominican, which revolves around labor laws.

The shoot went very well, but I decided to stray a little from my normal style of shooting and use a lot more of my 70-200 and shoot wide, rather than my wide lenses and shoot close, which I prefer. I chose to take a photojournalistic approach to this project as opposed to a more commercial feel, which I am accustomed to.

Hope you enjoy.

Union Billboards

Well I have decided to try to have a blog section on my website. I think its great to see a photographers work, but I also think its kind of cool to see what was going on behind the photo shoot. So I will attempt to keep up my blog at least once a week.

Moving on a couple weeks ago we shot some new billboards for Gateway Entertainment, venue The Union Hall. These billboards will be featured thought city of Edmonton. Gateway also owns The Ranch and Hudsons Tap House. I have been shooting for Gateway for along time now, going on 5 years.

We shot these images in two sets. One on white seamless and the other set on location. Both worked very well.

Anyways the design for these billboards was from Tim Hanas and his group at Ignition Media, while Jeff Mclean oversaw the art direction for the shoots.

I have worked alot in the past with Tim, which is always a pleasure because he just allows me to roll with whatever I feel is right, once he has let me know what his design concept is in pre production.

It was my first time working with Jeff as an art director. Jeff is based out of the city of Edmonton but works with photography talent across Canada, so I knew his name and seen a lot of his work. I have to admit it was alot of fun with Jeff. He was really clear on his vision of what he wanted but let me have my play on the work as well.



I have worked with all of these models before (Ashley, Ashley, Shilo and Christie) so they really followed direction well.

My assistants Trevor and Nick were as always great, when not chatting it up with the models.

Take Care
C