Syncrude Fort McMurray AB

Things have been going really well, to the point where I have to focus my direction a little more. A good friend of mine and somewhat of an unofficial mentor is reshaping his career to shoot only the jobs he wants. I think this is great because you only focus on the development of a specific area of a craft, and ten truly excel.

One of the areas I believe I excel in is industrial work. I'm not sure why, but I have no issues with working in places like Fort McMurray (for a few days). I am posting some work here that I shot for the Alberta Government at Syncrude just 10hrs after James Cameron left the site.

It's truly amazing how the aftermath of a visit from a Hollywood director can cause such a ruckus at an Oil sands plant that turns out 10milliuon dollars a day.

Because of the negative publicity the Cameron brought with him Syncrudes PR people were hyper sensitive. "You can't shoot this way.. oh no....you can't shoot in that direction either"..

Anyways the shoot worked out and here are some of the finals.



Enjoy!



C

shooting in studio

 Since the holidays just ended I thought I would post some new product photos, and of course a tear sheet of the West Edmonton Malls Holiday gift guide.


When a photographer shoots product on white, you really have to hope you work with a good designer to blend your work together well in the final project. I have shot in the past product on white only to have the images surrendered to subpar designers, resulting in a less than eye popping final product.

In the case of 2010 West Edmonton Mall gift guide the first good sign was I was given the opportunity to shoot some heavy brands like Burberry, Fossil, Coach, Armani and Boss. Then my images were turned over to their great designers who worked their magic and made solid collages of all the product. The final book ended up being a 20page guide.

I also decided to post some photographs of a new perfume from Issey Miyake. It's a reflective black bottle on a black background, so it presented a lot of challenges in studio.

I ended up lighting it with 5 light sources. Soft boxes, a snoot, and one of Trevor Schneider's fiber optic kits that attach to my elinchrom heads. Trevs work can be seen here. http://www.actionfigurecollectables.com/

This image is pretty clean out of camera, just slight post to clean up dust specs and a slight thinning of the reflection lines.

Enjoy!



C

Shooting fitness people

Hope everyone had a great Xmas and spent a lot of quality time with your family. I have so much to post in the next few weeks so keep checking back.
I was real busy with pre holiday shoots leading up to Xmas so a lot of different stuff with that, plus a lot of proprietary commercial and editorial works have been released.

One of my main goals for 2011 is to shed some pounds (18 to be exact) to regain my weight of my ideal playing shape when I played hockey (10 years ago).

Now that we are on the topic of fitness I have decided to post photo series I did for Lori Passmore.

Lori is a fitness trainer who specializes in Yoga and the hard core Kettle Bell training. She visited the studio in December and we knocked out some clean photographs that will be suited for her new brand.

Enjoy.




C

White Balance, Gels and Cell Phones.

Today we shot some real fun photographs for CWB. The one part of the shoot took us to the 24th story of the of the CWB building. We were shooting some office culture photographs in a lunch room when I looked out and saw a corner of the building that peaked out at a 90angle looking out into the distance.

I asked our art director what he thought about putting some employees in an office and shooting them from the other part of the building.

(this is pre post production... want to know why? because you can see the messy desk and the Quadra in the bottom right, we just couldnt move it ant further to the right)

The AD went for it so I sent Aaron (my assistant) around the building to set up the lights. Because the windows on the CWB building are tinted green, there were some color issues shooting through my window into Aarons window.

I really wanted to have an over the top" blue" exterior with a warm glow lighting up the office. To do this I white balanced to tungsten and doubled up the light with full tungsten orange gels. Once I nailed the warm look, we shot a few images with a custom white balance and the naked light with no gels.

(dosent Aaron look happy? No? Its ok, because we started this morning at 8:30am)

To make this happen Aaron and I were communicating via cell phones with Aaron relaying my movement directions to the employees.

I shot this with the Canon 1ds mark 3, with a 50mm 1.2 and a circular polarizer to minimize reflections in Aarons window. I triggered the Elinchrom Quadra (one) with pocket wizards.

This set up was more complex than I would typically like (I tend to like more realistic photographs), but I think this rendered some interesting results.

C

Edmonton Oiler Jason Strudwick

Since getting back from shooting in Hawaii thing have been pretty crazy, so I haven't had alot of time to post anything really cool. I am wrapped up in planning a shoot for an annual design contest editorial spread, which is taking a bit of time with the test photos. I will be posting more on this in the next few weeks.

This series I am posting right now is of Edmonton Oiler Jason Strudwick shot for the stollery children's hospital, as he and his wife are the honorary family. The stollery is a fine organization that is dedicated to children in need of medial treatment.

Here are some images of Jason. I have met Jason on a few other occasions and really think he is your average real nice guy first and then hockey player second. Jason actually came in on game day for this session. Which if you have ever met a pro athlete is saying a lot. Pros are extremely focused on game day and have very strict routines, so coming into Curtis Comeau's studio definitely qualifies as breaking routine.

North Shore DAY 2

Day 2 of shooting went very well, however that was 2 days ago. Why didn’t I post anything?

Well because I came down with a case of Campylobacter better known as food poisoning that side lined me for the past 2 days.

Although all is well now I will not be visiting the KAHUKU Shrimp Van ever again.

The fact that the “roadside” eatery was a decrepit van with flat tires and covered in graffiti should have scared me off.  But when I saw the word FAMOUS spray painted on the front of the van, I thought to myself “What the hell what’s the worst that could happen???”

Well, about 6 hours later thanks to the KAHUKU shrimp van I experienced hell… for about 36 hours straight.

Anyways here are a few editorial images shot of day 2.

Enjoy.

C

North Shore DAY 1

Despite the off and on rain, today proved to be an excellent day of shooting which produced a nice series of photographs documenting the culture of the North Shore.

I began my day shooting a family at their fruit stand. They specialize in deep fried bananas, selling every kind of locally grown fruit and bbqued pork kebabs. Most of the visitors to the roadside stand were locals, but there were several members of the Hawaii 5 0 TV crew visiting as well. Tourists stayed for the most part away from the stand, which suited the locals just fine.

Next I spent a good half of the day at the pipeline shooting portraits and candid’s. I didn’t even shoot any surfing, because the waves were only 4 feet tall. 

After that I hit up Ted’s bakery for a banana chocolate cream pie. Again a place recommended to me by almost every North Shoriean I met.

While eating my slice of pie, an unshaven guy with no shoes, no shirt and a half-baked look walked in and got full service.  He ended up sitting at my table and we struck up a conversation. I named this guy The Angry North Shoriean – TANS.

TANS was about 40 years old, smelled of pungent weed and sported an sketchy unkept beard. During our conversation TANS ended up complaining about everything in life, but he revealed his real pet peeves were tourists. When I asked TANS why he hated tourists? His response was because they always stole the good waves. 

(this is TANS posing for a quick portrait) 

After meeting TANS I headed back to the house, download and waited for the sunset.