I have to tell you something...

I have to tell you something...
Originally uploaded by flyingboy9

A great friend let me borrow this fantastic Lensbaby Composer Lens that has all these neat attachments that pop in. I have had SO much fun playing with this thing. You should be jealous. Check out the website: lensbaby.com

also check out my new flavours page!
http://flavors.me/sethgabriel

Is this still kosher?

Is this still kosher?
Originally uploaded by flyingboy9

Rejoice

Rejoice
Originally uploaded by flyingboy9

Work was a little slow today. So I unhooked the pocket wizard from our studio camera (which has a fantastic 24-85mm NIKKOR macro/portrait lens) and took a little walk around. This is what I found.

Check out my flickr photostream to see more.

What I'm Reading

Here is a great post by one of my favorite blogs, Digital Photography School. Full of great tips and ideas that may or may not help you in future photo shoots. I'll be printing this off and sticking it in the book of knowledge at the photo studio I supervise.

Darkroom!

One of my favourite rooms in my high school is the darkroom. It's old equipment, chemicals, and enlargers. It's dealing with emulsion, light, paper, and negatives. The first photo I started working on was a shot of a Converse All Star, one of my favorite.
My first test strip was over exposed by far. (The blue numbers indicate seconds of exposure) The second one turned out not too bad. I decided that half-second increments were the way to go and it turned out that one second to one and a half-seconds had just what I wanted: a good contrast between light and dark.

My school is supplied with (as Mrs. H puts it) "middle-of-the-road-average-all-around-paper" which gives a lot of midtones and not much else (low contrast between light and dark). So with a little photoshop I got the final product to look a little nicer.

My second photo, as you can see, I started by one second increments and moved down to half-second increments and finally settled on a 1.5 second exposure.

Here's what I brought out of the darkroom today.

Here is my final product.

Silkscreening!

This week is silkscreening!
It's pretty fun and it goes a little like this:

We start with our designs

and burn them onto a screen. using this:

and then it looks like this!

The final product!

I had issues with the black text. Turns out, I was using too much ink and too much pressure. After a few hundred tries I gained enough confidence to try it on my shirt. It looks great!

Mount Baker's People's Choice Awards Winner

So here it is: My Little Pony. This is a photo I took a while ago at Butchart Gardens. There's this beautiful indoor carousel nestled in the gardens, and for a twoonie you can be a kid, canned circus music and all.

At first I tried hard in the dim light to get dynamic shots by freezing the action. That didn't work - the plastic animals were just moving too fast in the dim light. So I decided to try exploring the blurryness of the light.

 After school started up again, I entered the photo in the Wild About the Arts Gala at Mount Baker. The gala was held to raise money for a youth art center to be included in the new school. This photo ended up being chosen for People's Choice. That ment it went on the the Rotary Art Gala where it was auctioned off with a load of alcohol and catering for a party of the bidder's respective choice. The final bid? $1,750. So the way I see it: my photo was the main piece in the bid, so it accounted for the first $1000 and the alcohol and catering and stuff accounted for the remaining $750. Am I wrong?

 Even if the buyer never hangs the piece, it's still a good story.