Gonna be some changes around here

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I’m pretty beat, having spent a good portion of the day traveling again. The flight from Montreal to Vancouver, with the strong head winds, was almost six hours long – thankfully it was extremely bearable up in business class, thanks to my hot towel and my tasty meals. Despite all the perks associated with business class (and there are many), I think the main one I enjoyed is that the flight attendants and people you encounter all automatically treat you with respect. If you have a problem, they’ll help you solve it. If you don’t like your seat, they’ll help you move. Worried about your ...

Time Warp

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A few years ago, I was the best man in my friend Jeff’s wedding. One of the responsibilities of the best man, as you probably know, is to organize the stag and to get the groom insanely drunk. I didn’t do anything amazing crazy for Jeff, but I did organize a big drinking pub crawl with some of his friends around town. I also bought a bunch of disposable cameras and distributed them to all the people attending, hoping that we would get some great shots of the event. After I got home that night (and I can’t honestly remember how I got home), I ended up with a plastic bag of disposible cameras, ...

Photoshoot

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About two weeks ago, I was contacted my Puma in Montreal and asked if I was willing to do a quick photoshoot for them for a female Team Canada player here in Vancouver. Apparently a friend of mine gave them a link to my Flickr photos, and said if they needed a photographer to help out sometime, that they should contacted me. Obviously, I was pretty flattered when they called me up, since up until now I have kept my photography completely informal and non-profit. But, with a $2000 Camera body that will need replacing within the year, and about $3500 worth of lenses, it really would be nice to make ...

Photo of the day theme for the week — Reflections

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My dad suggested that it might be a cool idea to have a theme every once and a while. So this week, I’ve decided to make the theme: REFLECTIONS The idea is that you should take photos of the world that show some type of reflection. Be inventive, but some ideas are puddles, lakes, mirrors, glass, spoons, anything that casts a reflection. Send them in and I’ll try to put them all in a group somewhere to reflect everyone’s efforts! While not a stellar example, I took a shot today of some buildings with some cool reflections of other buildings in them. However, I’d encourage people to be ...

Creative Commons, Flickr and You

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A while ago I attended a small function and snapped a pile of photos at it, putting most of them into a Flickr set so that others could view them and use them. While sitting at work today, I did a quick Google search to see if there were any other photos from the function, or any write-ups about it. After a few clicks, I came across one site, and immediately noticed that they had used a bunch of my photos in their blog entry. Unfortunately, not only did they not link back to the original photos, but they also did not mention the source at all. After looking at the image links in the HTML, it was ...

Photo of the Day

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So I just checked, and 17 people have joined my photo of the day flickr group, which is totally awesome. If you know of anyone else, please invite them, because I’m pretty sure I’m going to get some prizes going, and it’s a great way to have fun and learn off each other. I did a bit more work on the site tonight, so check out the photo of the day website to see what has changed. Today’s photo of the day is below, and it’s by Keira. Keep those photos coming everyone. If you have a blog and want to throw some link love to the photo of the day site, that would be awesome. I actually have ...

Know your rights as a Canadian photographer

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I stumbled across an article tonight about a student who was trying to take a photo of a building and ended up on the group being harassed by some rogue security guard. Obviously the security guard claimed that the building could not be photographed and took it upon himself to intervene. I read about stuff like this all the time, and as a photographer I occasionally run into things like that too. I was in Pacific Center a while ago playing with a lens when a security guard came up to me and threatened to take my camera way unless I stopped taking photos. While at Harvard a few years ago, I had ...

Photo of the Day

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After talking it over with a few friends, I think I’ve finally decided to do a photo of the day on my blog. I plan on contributing a lot of my own photos to this, but I’m also calling on any readers to submit whatever photos they want and I’ll grab a few of those from time to time. If you are on flickr and want to join the group, you can find the group link here. For now, I’m going to include the photo of the day in my main blog stream as well, but I also created photooftheday.duanestorey.com that has a custom, photo-centric view of the photos which I think is a nice way to view them. This ...

New RSS Feed

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Recently I’ve written quite a lot about photography, and it’s a trend that I intend to carry on. So, I’ve gone ahead and created a new photography RSS feed over on the top right for those people who wish to only subscribe to photography related information. If you know of any photography-related aggregators, feel free to pass that information on. I have also added the photography subdomain, so you can view only the photography related entries by visiting photography.duanestorey.com. If you can pass some link love my way in the area of photography, that would be appreciated. Thanks everyone. ...

West Coast Sunset

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Composing Photographs from the Heart

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I’ve been meaning to write a post like this for a long time, so here goes. I’ve been into digital photography for around seven years now, but I would only really say I have taken it seriously since acquiring my digital SLR approximately three years ago. Years ago I would say digital photography is a hobby of mine, today I would say that it’s my passion. Truth is, I love taking photos. I love the challenge associated with finding a subject, figuring out how to best represent that subject, framing the subject, and then ultimately spending time on my computer later re-factoring the shot ...

English Bay Sunset in Vancouver

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Taken last night on my way home: ...

Stanley Park Photowalk

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I have a wedding to shoot in a few short months, so I’ve been asking friends if they’d let me shoot them to get some practice. Today I met up with John, Keira and Rebecca for a quick photo walk in the park. To be honest, after doing this shoot, I think I feel comfortable shooting outside now. I sort of always assumed my 70-200mm f/2.8L lens would be pretty useless in poor lighting or in a wedding environment, but when I used it today with my speedlight, it was actually pretty awesome. Every time I pull that lens out of my bag and put it on (which isn’t often enough I’ve decided), I’m ...

Photo Duane

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Kris Krug snapped a pretty fun shot of me at the last Gastown Photowalk. And the reverse shot as seen from my camera: ...

Ilford XP2 Film Shots

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I got my first roll back of Ilford XP2 back from development. My overall impression of it is pretty good – the grain is pretty light for ISO 400 (at least my memory of what ISO 400 was). It’s not as contrasty as I normally like, and I bumped the contrast up slightly before posting them, but it’s not that bad. The dynamic range is pretty decent, and the only shots that it struggled with were taken outside in the sun. All in all, I’m impressed enough that I’ll give it another go. Kris Krug snapped a few of these, so check out the actual flickr site for more info. ...

Shooting Film

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Today after work I dropped off my first roll of film to be developed. It was a 36 shot roll of Ilford XP2, and it’s probably the only black and white roll I’ve ever shot in my entire life, now that I think about it. The neat thing about this roll is that you can develop it in C41 chemistry (used for colour print film), which means you can basically get it developed anywhere in the city for next to nothing. I also have a few rolls of pure black and white to shoot, so I think it will be a useful comparison. I asked the ladies down at Custom Colour if the XP2 was noticeably different than the ...

My Photos on the Web

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As I was browsing the internet tonight and accidentally ran into a photo of mine on a website. So, while I was there, I figured I might as well see where else some of my photos have ended up. Chris Blackburn used one of my HDR shots in a blog posting [A shot of Boris used in a blog entry 2. My HDR shot of Kitsilano used on the Kitsilano.ca website My aurora shots on the NASA website A photo of Rebecca on her blog Las Vegas Travel Blog](http://www.buffmuthers.com/~midge/archives/2007_05.html) As I was tracking these down in Google, I realized how nice a feature it would be if Flickr had some ...

Seven Years of Digital Photography

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Back in December of 2000, while home in Chilliwack visiting my family for Christmas, I made the digital plunge. I was in London Drugs, looking around the electronics section for something bright and shiny to make me happy, and my eyes settled on the first real section of digital cameras ever to hit the market. For the most part, most of those cameras were nothing more than glorified webcams — they took grainy photos, and really didn’t have any options. However, one in particular stood out above the rest. It was the Nikon Coolpix 880, and it became my first digital camera. I shot all my photos ...

Cross-Processing And The World Of Film

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So, I gotta hand it to my pal Kris — he’s managed to get me interested in something I never thought I’d be interested in again — film photography. Kris is a really awesome fashion photographer here in Vancouver, and his stuff never ceases to amaze me. What’s interesting about Kris, and a variety of the local photographers I’ve met recently, is that they have started shooting film again. Which is sort of surprising, given the focus local photography shops seem to place on digital nowadays (I called several local stores recently to talk about film, and most of them didn’t even have ...

Sunrise

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