I got a call from Canon today about my lens with water vapour in it. They verdict: completely unfixable. To be honest, I'm a bit pissed off. When I shipped it out to them, I followed it up with a call telling them it was rather urgent, and they needed to get to it first since it concerned water damage. The lady on the phone told me they were 5 days behind, and there was nothing she could do. Anyways, when they finally get to it, it was corroded inside and not worth fixing. The replacement cost of the new lens is around $1600, so I'm going to be submitting my first ever insurance claim. The shitty ...

I told myself before the upcoming wedding that I have to shoot that I would buy what will probably be my last lens for a while, Canon's EF 24-70 f/2.8L lens. I have a wide angle in my kit, and a medium telephoto (although mine is currently being repaired, it is absolutely great for flattering portraits), and a fixed 50mm prime lens. However, everything in my kit is fairly special purpose, which means I sort of have to know what I am shooting before hand and make sure I have the right lens on. Canon's best all-purpose zoom lens is the 24-70 f/2.8L. It's from their professional series line, and ...

Well, I've had a few sales on the photography website already, so thanks everyone for plugging it -- I really appreciate it. I'm going to canvas a few stores this weekend and see if I can get some of my stuff into the local markets. I've been racking my brain for a few out of the box ideas, so hopefully I'll be able to take the marketing a bit further. I'd like to get some of my work nicely framed and visible in a few areas with high traffic. If anyone has any friends or know of any businesses that wouldn't mind a few photos on the wall, let me know! For those of you expecting free prints, please ...

As I mentioned yesterday, I have launched a photography website at photography.duanestorey.com. I'm going to give the first 20 people who link to it with a small write-up a free 8x12 of their choosing from the galleries. So, if you're interested, do a quick blog entry and then post a comment here. Send me an email with which one you want and where you want it sent to, and I'll take care of the rest. Thanks everyone. ** UPDATE - Thanks to everyone for linking. With the emails and comments here I've received, I'm pretty sure I have more than 20. So while I appreciate all incoming links should you ...

I purchased my current digital SLR in December of 2004. It is a pretty decent 8.2MP SLR from Canon's prosumer line, which is sort of the cross over from the consumer to the professional lines. It's a really awesome camera, and it's been great to learn on. That being said, technology has continued to improve over the last few years, and my camera is becoming more and more out of date. The main problem (if you can call it that), is that my camera has a 1.6X crop factor. What that means is that the CMOS sensor inside is smaller that the size of a 35mm film, so part of the image falls on the area ...

I purchased my current digital SLR in December of 2004. It is a pretty decent 8.2MP SLR from Canon's prosumer line, which is sort of the cross over from the consumer to the professional lines. It's a really awesome camera, and it's been great to learn on. That being said, technology has continued to improve over the last few years, and my camera is becoming more and more out of date. The main problem (if you can call it that), is that my camera has a 1.6X crop factor. What that means is that the CMOS sensor inside is smaller that the size of a 35mm film, so part of the image falls on the area ...

One of the first things I wanted to do after getting back from my vacation was to finally put together an online place for people to buy a few prints of some of my better shots. I'm not entirely sure I'll make a dime, but lots of people have asked me if I sold some of my city shots, so now I can finally say that I do. If you want to check some of them out, you can check out photography.duanestorey.com. If you have a blog and want to help advertise, that would be awesome. I've put on some google adwords, so if anyone does a search for Vancouver specific photos, I should start coming up now. Since ...

Today I got paid for my first photo gig, which is pretty exciting. I'm currently setting up an area dedicated to photography, and it should be done sometime this weekend. I've set up a professional account at smugmug.com where I can put some of my better photos from around Vancouver and make them available for purchase. This will also let me sell wedding photos etc when the time comes. I'll post more information when it's all done. ...

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 luggage? ...

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, which ...

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 ...

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 a bit more ...

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 ...

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 some really ...

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 some really ...

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 is ...

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 ...

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 ...

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. ...

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