Another Sunset at Shirley's Bay

After yesterday's 3 hour zip-lining, every inch of my muscle was sore, including those on my "tummy". Therefore, I've made a new "by-law" at home, no jokes for a week... Although my muscle wasn't in ideal condition, I've managed to fix my garage door in the afternoon, installing reinforcement bars on the frame. Drilling holes on the metal was tough... At the end of day, I was so tired that almost felt a bit sick, a sign of lacking exercise...

Anyway, since I started photography, I find myself start to pay much attention to wired details, like the pattern of broken tree branches or stones lying on the ground, the shape of creases on Bo's or other people's clothes (or faces:-), the formation of clouds... especially the clouds, I am so interested that I always look forward to the sunset everyday. Today is the same, after dinner, I drove all the way to Shirley's bay. My favorite place for sunset (I believe I mentioned this before). It didn't disappoint me, when it started, it was beautiful and serene, worth every minute of waiting.

Golden hour, magic colors.

3 minutes later...

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Family Portrait with the Bekking's

Sunday night, I had a family portrait session with the Bekking's. Bill is a friend/colleague of mine. At work, his desk is right beside mine. Not sure if this is accurate, but the time we see each other probably is longer than the time he sees his wife since we started to work together back to about 5-6 years ago... :-) Bill has a beautiful family, 3 young daughters and a recent and new addition, Twister, a German Shepherd and Husky mix. 

Although I've started to look into this, my place is not set up for portrait studio. Not mentioning that I don't have any strobes, I don't even have big enough space for a proper portrait lens to be used, such as 85mm 1.4.  Therefore, during the whole session, I was using the Nikon 24-70, a remote speed-light, SB-800, triggered by the pop-up flash on the camera. Since it was at night, I needed all the lights that I could get. ( Note: most of the light sources in my house produce warm ambient light which created a lot of trouble during the post process later.) The speed-light was mounted on a Manfrotto tripod with white diffuse on. I pointed the flash towards the ceiling.

The following are some of the samples. Bill and Veronica Bekking.

Bill, Kristine and Twister. Note: you would think it's hard to get the dog ready for the picture, it was actual harder to get Kristine to pose... 

Veronica and Frances Bekking.

Kristine and Twister.

Frances Bekking.

Veronica Bekking.

Lyliane and Veronica Bekking.

Finally, many people asked me about my post process (with Photoshop). The following is a side by side comparison (some adjustment has already been made to the original one such as cropping, contract, white balance, etc). I hope you will understand why it usually takes me at least 30 minutes to process each picture, especially for portraits... Nevertheless, the lighting, the technical side of each picture(shutter, aperture,exposure,etc), composition and the models have already defined 70% of if it comes out as a good picture or not.

Sorry Bill and Veronica, I use your pictures as an example :-)

For more pictures, visit my flickr site at http://www.flickr.com/photos/haofeng/

Thanks for reading. The end.

Jerry, a Hard Working Feller

Summer is close to an end. Jerry becomes busier and busier. Like most of the Canadian families, Jerry is the one who brings home the food, takes care of the young and keeps eyes on everything in the family so that the kids won't go hungry, the house won't leak and there is a Christmas every year.

Jerry comes to my place all the time, takes whatever he can find, usually the food, but never greets or makes an appointment. Most of the time, he comes when Bo and I  are not in the yard. Sometime, he doesn't even care. Take a peek at us, then do whatever he wants to do. Only when we start to notice his existence and pay much attention to him, he stops and keeps an eye on us from time to time.

Jerry doesn't have good eyesight but very sensitive to the movement. I am not sure if he has a good sense of smell either, because sometime he couldn't distinguish the sunflower seed from my big toe. One time, he almost bit me.

As odd as he is, Jerry is a good provider, does what he is supposed to do everyday, never complained or took any sick leaves. Sunny or raining, day or evening. People were asking  why he works so hard. I was one of them. Then one day, I saw him with his kids, running around playfully, cuddling and scratching each other. Suddenly, I realized this is all it is about, the FAMILY.

Who is this Jerry ? How does he look like ? Ladies and Gentlemen, let me introduce, Jerry, a hard working feller.

Thanks for reading. The end.

Summer Fun at Steve's Place

Longer and warmer summer days allow us to get more tanned, spend more time with friends and families and be more positive, happier and healthier.The teams that I have been working with for the past 2 and half years did just that on Aug 13, 2010, our summer team gathering once again at Steve Tilley's place in Stittisville, ON. (click here to see pictures from last year's event)

Not only he has a killer backyard and heated, salt water swimming pool, but Steve's warm and charming charisma, (like a mom with beard, keep reading, I will explain why :-) made it an ideal location for such an event 2 years in a row.

As usual, I always brought my camera but this time I didn't want to take snapshots anymore because... you know, I am just not going to do that. That is why I packed one of Nikon's best mid-arrange zoom lenses (probably one of the best in the world), 24-70 F2.8 to the event along with my Nikon D700. Ok. Too much wordings, let's start the photographic journey.

The one on the left is Steve Tilley with Lise Going, right.  Steve's wife was not at home yesterday and Steve appeared to be very charming yesterday...

Steve with ladies (from left to right, Veronica, Lise, Keira and Valentina) in the pool,

And others (Anne and Veronica).

I have to be fair to Steve that ladies were not the only type he's close to. Guys with him too. In the following picture, the one on the right is Chad. Chad, we all know what you felt at that moment. Being with Steve was so easy and relaxing, you can just close your eyes and drop your pants... just like being with Mom, except for this one, comes with beard...

Enough about Steve, let's take a look at others. In the following picture, Valentina won the best swimming towel competition once again this year. To our surprise, the towel design was so similar to the one she wore last year. (click here to see her towel design In 2009)

In addition to the dressing effort, Valentina was one of the organizers of the event, along with Mike and Steve. Thank you all for your effort to make this happen. Valentina and Mike were in the following picture. Something that I have to mention about Mike. Very versatile personality, professional, dedicated and calm at work but a quite different one during parties :-)

Continue with others. Steve Turner,

Deirdre Doherty,

Fred April,

Marie Godon on the right and the shy one was Galina Goussava,

Newly joined PM, Robert McRae

That's ok, Mandy, we don't mind ... :-)

Newly joined PM, Ellen Grove

Willa Kruger

Bill Bekking

Joe Martino

After convincing, Tracey Schenk finally agreed to share a picture of her.

Willy and Keira

Newly joined, Farideh

Margaret Sysack

Chris and Sany were playing the national game of Newfoundland, metal ring throwing... It's much harder than you think. Believe me, I tried, 40 tosses, only one within the range.

Veronica Giggey,

Wet your feet if you don't want to go into the pool, from left to right, Louise, Mike, Mandy, Ellen and Willa.

BTW, now that I look at all the pictures again, almost everyone was smiling and showing their teeth. This is quite like a dental commercial.

For more pictures (or original image files), please visit my flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/haofeng/.

Thanks for reading. The end.

The Trip, Firework and Ethan's 100 Days Old

It was a busy weekend. Bo's church (Wesleyan) organized a field trip to their Silver Lake resort on Saturday. This was the second time I went to this camp site. Last time was about 6 years ago. Time flies... 

Silver Lake is about 1 hour west of Ottawa. People usually take highway 7 going toward Perth. This was what I was told. I was quite reluctant to receive directions from a church elder since I was armed with a GPS(Garmin 265WT), but I was wrong. After we passed Perth, I started to follow Garmin. It led me through a one-lane, seasonal, dirt road. 10 minutes highway drive became 30 minutes dumpy "discovery" and I almost hit a dog. Nevertheless, it was fun and relaxing. We had potluck lunch, Bo swam and we played poker which was something I hadn't played for a long time. We left the camp site about 5:30pm.

I came home about 6:30pm, had a quick dinner and packed my Nikon 24-70 and tripod heading towards the next activity on the agenda, fireworks competition at Casino du Lac-Leamy.  

This is an annual event attracting many people from overall the city and rural areas. Traffic was jammed. Parking spot was hard to find but I managed to secure a nice spot in the park lot. Tonight's show was from Portugal (the winner of last year's competition). I am a rookie in terms of shooting fireworks. I tried my best to snap some but I wasn't really happy about any of them later. Here are 2 that I am "reluctantly" ok with. (I have a Facebook friend who is a real master of such events, Remi Laprise. Much to learn from him yet.)

One of our friends, Wei Li, who has just had a baby boy 100 days ago. There is a Chinese tradition to celebrate when a baby reaches 100 days. I was asked to be the photographer of this event. Never done baby pictures before (if I don't count my wife as one of them:-), I packed my Nikon 85mm 1.4, Nikon 24-70mm 2.4, two speedlights and a reflector.

Before today, I was reading a lot about how to take baby pictures and I downloaded many samples to my Blackberry so that I can use for reference but it didn't go as exactly what I planned. It was actually much harder and tiring job to take baby pictures than landscape and adult portraits... because babies don't care and they move ALL THE TIME !  And I have to align the shooting with their schedule. I tried use natural light plus reflector to achieve natural looking images. It ended up with 5 adult involved in this task. Father and Mother took care of the baby and be in the pictures, my wife and Wei's father were holding the reflectors. At the end, I took about 250 pictures and it was an very interesting experience. The following are some of the shots during the session (while I am keep processing others).

As per Wei's request, I was trying to take some pictures of Ethan's feet. It turned out to be most difficult task. 20 pictures later, only one turned out to be OK. This is the one ! The tasty foot. Wei, enjoy :-)

And, of  course, Bo wouldn't miss such an opportunity.

At last, thanks to those people working behind the scene.

Thanks for reading. The End.