I whipped up a photo slideshow of the recent wedding photos I took of my friends Brent and Rowena, and it turned out pretty good (make sure to go full screen and click the HD button if you watch it – the regular version looks sorta’ bad). The music is “To Show You My Love” by Mike Schmidt from the album The High Cost of Living (A Love Story). Slideshow created in Proshow Producer.

On June 19th, 2010, we were honoured to attend the wedding of our friend Rowena Hennink to Brent Sellers in Kaleden, BC, on June 19th, 2010. It was a great wedding! Although the breathtakingly talented dynamic duo, Dave & Quin, were there shooting as the official wedding photographers, I still wanted to snap a few pictures for myself. I figured this was a good opportunity to field test a Tenba Messenger Photo Bag I had been sent for review months earlier, so I lugged along my Nikon D300 with a battery grip, 70-200mm Nikkor lens, 24-70mm Nikkor lens, 35mm Nikkor prime lens, Panasonic GF-1, Dell Vostro V13 laptop…and a few other small things. The review of that bag is coming soon to Laptop Thoughts and Digital Home Thoughts. But back to the wedding…

Sort of funny story: on our way there, we used my GPS to find the town (village? hamlet?) of Kaleden. It was easy enough to locate, but the wedding was being held at a place called Ponderosa Point, and that place wasn’t on the GPS. We didn’t get any directions before going there, and there were no signs, but figured since it was such a small place, and we knew it was on the water, we wouldn’t have any trouble finding it. Was that ever a mistake! When we drove up to the waterfront area, there were a bunch of cars parked, so I got out to see if it was the place. An elderly lady said there was a wedding going on nearby, so I walked around the corner to check. There was a tall man in red and orange robes raising his hands and talking about the blessings of the sun, the love of Mother Earth, etc. – surrounded by a bunch of people. It was a wedding – of sorts – all right, but not the one I was looking for! We drove up and down the waterfront area, eventually giving up and looking up a phone number for the resort (and getting more stressed out by the minute). They tried to explain where they were located, and even then it took us a couple of tries to find it. Thankfully, we arrived a few minutes before the wedding started, and we didn’t miss anything.

I enjoyed taking the pictures, and have published the full gallery over at my photos site. I tend to go for fairly realistic looks in my photos, but I had some fun with a setting I developed (based off a Lightroom 3 preset) that I used in the photos in this post…

Just when I thought that my boy couldn’t get any cuter, he went for his first hair cut (at a place called Beaners), and came back looking even more adorable! I can’t get over how fast he’s growing up – it seems like just a month ago he was still a little baby, but now he looks like a little boy. All those cliches about time passing so fast are quite true. I feel so very blessed to be able to work from home and get extra moments with my son throughout the day – something not very many dads get to do. My hope for 2010/2011 is that will be able to continue. A few more pictures of Logan’s hair cut are in this gallery.

Yes, it took me about two years to get this project finished, but I’ve been pretty busy over the past nine months figuring out the whole dad thing! I’m man enough to say publicly that I’ve always had a fondness for collecting memories in scrapbook form; not the frilly scrapbooks that come to mind when you hear the word, but collecting photos and objects from a time or place and putting them in book form. I have a dozen or so cheap and ugly scrapbooks from my teenage years that contain a lot of great (and not so great) memories.

I’ve been wanting to use FotoFusion to create a truly killer vacation book for years, but didn’t manage to get around to it until now. Creating Logan’s baby book was my first attempt at using FotoFusion to create a book that combined photos, text, and my green screen scanning technique for objects. FotoFusion isn’t the easiest program in the world to use, so creating Logan’s book was great practice – I managed to fly through the creation of the Japan photo book in about a week using the skills I picked up creating the baby book. That was after, of course, the months it took to edit all the photos I took, and scan all the objects I collected on the trip.

Below are a few of the pages I created for the book; the final result is 85 pages long, and by next week I should have the book back from Photobook Canada. As you can tell, I created square pages; I opted for the 11 inch by 11 inch book from Photobook Canada. Even after using a coupon code for a discount, after the $15 premium paper upgrade and $15 shipping charge, the book cost me around $120. Ouch! Yeah, kind of a pricey book; the good news is that I only need one copy, unlike Logan’s baby book where I needed several.

Comments welcome – you can check out the full gallery here (it’s easiest to view it in slideshow mode, or full-screen browser mode).

SUPER LOGAN!

Are we done with this photo shoot yet dad?

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On Saturday the 24th I attended the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo 2010 – I’d been to the event a few years ago, and back then it was much smaller. This time around, it was huge! It was also a little expensive – $25 at the door per person, and that didn’t get you anything more than in the door. It was a fun event, though it seems like they had too many people for the amount of space they had – it was crazy busy! It was really cool to see all the comics, action figures, graphic novels, famous people, and people dressed up as any number of different characters from comics, fantasy, and sci-fi. Lots of photographic opportunities if you were courageous enough to ask the people to stop so you could take their picture (sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t).

I took my Panasonic GF-1 to the event, but I really should have brought my Nikon D300. I thought I could get away with the nice and small GF-1 – especially after I stopped on the way to the show and purchased a 14-45mm lens (which is 28 to 90mm on the GF-1) – but ultimately I was really disappointed with the quality of the images from it. The GF-1′s images turn to crap noise-wise at anything past ISO 800, and I’m so used to shooting with the 20mm f/1.7 lens on the GF-1, it was an ugly transition for me to start shooting with an f/3.5 to f/5.6 lens. Picking up a new lens and having no practice with it is never a good idea, but at the time I thought I’d stand out too much if I brought my big iron (Nikon D300 + f/2.8 24-70mm lens)…there were plenty of others with big DSLRs there, so I should have just brought the damn thing.  The lighting was predictably awful, so more often than not my shots were ISO 1200 or ISO 1600 (since I abhor flash photography). Anyway, all those excuses aside, you can check out the gallery here.

(Yeah, that’s Brent Spiner, AKA Mr. Data, above)