Kendra and Phil

Thank-you to Kendra and Phil! We enjoyed meeting you and look forward to your wedding in May. Hopefully the weather in Red Deer treats you well before you return to the island.

Online Shopping

When you live in a smaller city like Nanaimo your camera shopping choices are pretty limited. Tomorrow I'm heading over to Vancouver for work so I plan on hitting a couple of their shops while I'm there, but usually I'm shopping online as the selection of camera gear locally is pretty dismal.

Anyway, online shopping has its ups and downs. Customer service is usually pretty bad, but recently I've had great service from a small company called Flash Zebra. Great meaning they promptly sent me what I ordered for a fair price, it was high quality that's it. This company specializes in off camera flash solutions, so if you are in the market for the Strobist stuff I can't recommend them enough.

Meanwhile I ordered a few things from one of Canada's biggest online camera retailers a month ago. On their site they listed everything as in stock, but four times they have emailed now saying the items are back ordered. Now they've completely stopped emailing. Now I've bought from this company before and I know they will deliver, but the fact that their emails always end with "Thank-you for your business, customer service is our number one priority" has me irked. The last time I ordered from them they promised free shipping then promptly emailed saying that the item was too big and I would have to pay over $100 for shipping. I'm not going to say which retailer it is (starts with a V, ends with a K and I'll let you figure out the four letters in between), but honestly I would have been better hopping on the ferry and going to Vancouver. It would have saved me time and money.

Anyway, service is what gets you remembered and has customers coming back time and time again. I hope Vivid can always live up to that motto, it will certainly be my intent. I've added a link to Flash Zebra for anyone that wants to check them out.

Fun with Cameras

Who says a camera can't be a model? While playing with a lighting setup I was using to photograph bottles for Island Spirits Distillery I decided to take a break and shoot some of my cameras. Great fun and easy to do, easier than bottles anyway! Shot on black plexiglass with a black backdrop made of foam core board bought at an office supply store. Throw two lights up to cross light it and boom, done. Easy peesy.

Kids With Cameras

My kid took a self portrait with her Fisher Price camera. I really think kids should have cameras. They are cheap nowadays and we all replace our point and shoots fairly often, so why can't they have the hand-me-downs to play and create with. I think she is ready to inherit my Pentax Optio M30 which will give me an excuse to upgrade my small carry around camera.

Well That Was Fun

Well, we are done. I just finished uploading and editing the last of my U17 World Championship Hockey photos. I think Adam is plopped in front of Photoshop right now editing his shots. I learned a lot and we have done a lot of hockey photography this past few months. This was a big tournament and I'm glad to have taken part. We met some great people, like Chris at the rink (the man in charge between the benches) and witnessed some top notch hockey. Yesterday afternoon I was standing beside a former NHL player and didn't know it I'm not big on knowing about celebrities outside of baseball players, so I can be pretty clueless. The guy on the other side of me was quite enthralled though and kept saying "thats, thats, thats." Pretty amusing. And of course I was hit by a stick in the first game I did, but this Saturday I was ducking and dodging like crazy to keep out of the way.

Anyway, a great time! Thanks to Andy for hiring us and to Mitch from the newspaper for the referral. I look forward now to our next project as we recieved our samples of Phrog Gin and Vodka for product photography. It is snowing again and we are getting burried again, so it might be a good time to stay indoors and work.

Finally, stay tuned as we have a big free offer coming out. If you know anyone getting married you might want to have them check the Nanaimo Kijiji photography ads.

Game 1 Done

I just finished editing my images from the first game I did in the U17 tournament. I ended up with 122 keepers which takes a lot of time to get through! The gallery can be found here. These kids play good hockey. Better hockey than me, but then again most people do. I found myself very entertained by the game and the high level of play on the ice and am looking forward to January 3 when I get to shoot two more games.

Now, my tip of the week for any photographers out there. Whether you just do photography for yourself or as a pro you need to backup your photos and this is the time to do it. As I type this, Lightroom is busy moving all my photos from 2008 from my computers hard-drive to an external hard drive. In addition I have burned all my final edited images to DVD this morning. For me that was 250 gb of images to an external drive and 9 gb of images to DVD. That is a lot. I might have to get myself a Drobo if I keep this up. I've only been working professionally for two months now so I can see how photographers get nervous about drive space. Anyway, for me I've taken the precaution of uploading photos on the internet, burning them to DVD or CD and putting them on an external drive. Now if my computer fails (and I'm hoping it does so I can have the excuse to by a Mac), then I'm covered. I've also recently been in the habit of backing up photos from each paid job on CD after I've finished editing. I need to bring those CD's and DVD's to a friends house or my office so that should my house have a fire, I still have hard copies. Anyway, burn your images to a CD. Do it now. Take all of them from 2008 and put them together. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Now as a way to wrap-up 2008 I wanted to mention my favorite photography websites of the year:

• Dpreview: If you are buying a new camera, this website is THE place to go to find out everything about it and to compare different products. The forums are also helpful, very very active and if you can stand the ridiculing you often get from the trolls there it can be a wicked resource for getting answers to any photography question.
• Four Thirds Photo: I'm a 4/3rds camera user. This website is populated by the friendliest group of photographers I've ever encountered. They have helped me more than I can say and if you happen to own a Panasonic or Olympus or Leica 4/3 dslr this is a place you should become a member of.
• Kodak Gallery: There are lots of places to get photos printed, but not many that do a great job consistently. I won't say which labs I think do a poor job, but I will say that for colour prints and photo gifts I've had consistenltly good prints from Kodak online. The fact that they deliver free to any Best Buy or Future Shop doesn't hurt either. It does take about a week to get photos from them, and I haven't had much luck with their black and white prints but I highly recommend them. If I am in a hurry in Nanaimo for prints I use London Drugs. They do a top notch job though they are pretty expensive.
• Strobist: I've known about this website for a long time, but only recently started reading it everyday. I'd say that it is the only place to go for information on lighting with small strobes. Warning, it is addictive.

And a list of my favorite photographers of 2008:

• Marco Grob: I am amazed.
• Dave Hill: I have no idea how he does what he does. But one day I intend to figure it out.
• There are many others that have blown my mind with their images here, but I won't list them all or I will be here all day. Flickr and Smugmug are great places to find some. With the popularity of photography nowadays there are millions of great images out there.

Off now to shovel snow off my driveway for the 30th time in the last few weeks. Hope everyone has a great start to 2009.