April Special!

April Special!

Surprise Mom with great pix of the kids!

We're happy to offer special Mother's Day portrait rates April 1-April 15.

One mini-session (15-30 minutes) and one 11"x14" print for a record-shattering price of $199.00!

In our studio or a favourite park or beach. Or? You name the place.

The Sweet House

I've spent a chunk of time working on my fine art site the last couple weeks. Not that it's finished yet, by far, but I'm pretty stoked to have gotten a longterm project called 'The Sweet House' presented. It's a multi-media presentation with a slideshow and an accompanying pdf of a short story I wrote with the photographs in mind, and I'd love to present it sometime publicly--reading the story, showing the slides.

I have to give thanks to Daphne Bramham who writes about the polygamist community of Bountiful for the Vancouver Sun; without her articles, I doubt this project would have coalesced. The images were, after all, originally unconnected to this subject matter, and were, in a real sense accidental. I was shooting in a ramshackle old house in New Brunswick, Canada, a house a thousand other photographers have shot in as part of Freeman Patterson and André Gallant's spring workshops. The walls were coming apart at the seams; there was daylight showing through the roof; there was debris everywhere; there were plants growing inside through the windows.

I wanted to photograph a person. I had spent nearly a week shooting my way through landscapes and old cars and running streams, and I longed more than anything to set my lenses on something or someone with a heartbeat. And secondly I craved a ghostly influence in that house of forgotten stories. A sort of half-seen presence flitting from room to room and shot with tons of motion blur so her edges vanished and melded with the background.

Kayla, wearing her auntie's old wedding gown, was an astonishing model; if she lived nearby, I would ask her to pose again and again. She has a sternness of purpose in the photographs that spoke to the issues that would, by mid-summer, be consuming me as I wrote the accompanying piece of short fiction.

In the end, the house represented the ruination of a young girl's childhood.

Gads, life just does get ahead of me

Around this time of year, I always start trying to tug time back. If I can turn this into mid-February, then I won't be so far behind on all my spring tasks. Hmmm...wonder why that never works?

Canon has a new puppy. Come to mama, girl.

I can't remember being this excited about new gear since...well, since the 5D. No, seriously, it's waaayy better than the 5D. It's got great burst, and I need great burst to capture the fleeing expressions that brides and babies and even elephants seem to have, high ISOs with low noise, less weight, and about a hundred other groovy specs that can get a girl's heart going. I love and am hooked on the 1D series which have been around the world with this photographer, shooting in heat, humidity, sandstorms and even flash rains, and have come through like the tanks they are. What other idiot would spend four hours on dune buggies on the northern Namibia sand dunes with their Mk II bouncing around their chest instead of protected from the blowing sands inside a camera bag? The MkII was up to the abuse. The lenses all need pro disassembly and cleaning afterwards, and the sensor needed a lick from the Arctic Butterfly, but man, the chamber of the ID--it stayed whip clean. And all that freedom from worry meant I could slam on the brakes when I saw the photo I wanted to shoot, and shoot it--instead of pulling a pack around, unzipping, lifting the camera out, replacing it, replacing the pack etc. In one instance where we ran into a desert hare about two feet away, that was a godsend. I would have missed those shots if I'd had to scrabble for a camera that couldn't handle the elements.

Check out the white pages on the Mk III at Canon's site and then...where shall we go? Thailand, anyone?


Here's what Canon has to say about it:

Entirely new 10.1 Megapixel Canon CMOS Sensor (APS-H size, 1.3x lens conversion factor), featuring the EOS Integrated Cleaning System
World's fastest digital SLR: shooting up to 10 fps, with a burst rate up to 110 full-resolution JPEG images or 30 RAW images
All new high-precision AF system with 19 user-selectable AF points and 26 additional "assist points"; superior low-light performance and faster operation
New lighter body with enhanced weather resistance and outstanding reliability: featuring a shutter that's durability-tested to 300,000 exposures
Dual "DIGIC III" Image Processors work with new CMOS sensors to produce superb image quality; new Highlight Tone Priority option adds control of bright highlights
Large 3.0-inch LCD monitor, featuring Live View function
Fully compatible with over 50 EF lenses and a wide range of EOS System accessories