January 5th, 2009 by ryan
I’m back in the Canada. I have to go to work in the morning. It has been awhile. Anyhow I was just going through some images tonight. I stitched a panorama together of the grand canyon. It’s 18 images and the final image is 26000 by 4000 pixels! At 300 dpi I can make a 10 foot wide print with it. While photoshop was overloading putting all these images together I was going through lightroom and rediscovering old images and thinking about how poorly I used to do raw conversions so I redid one.
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January 1st, 2009 by ryan
So it’s actually my final day here in California. Was a nice visit. Spent new years in Flagstaff Arizona at the town square watching a pinecone drop. Not to be confused with the new years eve ball in new york city. This is a pinecone! Anyhow I have lots of shots to sort through. I got my new 50mm lens for my 645 bronica. Shot a lot of stuff with that.
So this is mostly shots out of the airplane window, my stopover in Atlanta and a couple from California.

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December 26th, 2008 by ryan
I have to leave for the airport in 4 hours and I still have some serious packing to do. By Serious I mean all the packing. I started then realized I had to dump this memory card before I could format. Then I saw on this card some before and after shots of my new hair cut. It’s not very often I get a hair cut. Every 6 months or so. So it’s kind of nice to show it off when I decide to become a respectable member of society. Speaking of society today was christmas and I obviously had to get some keys cut, but when I ventured out everything was closed. So I looked online and found out that the chinese mall in Markham was open because it’s a “tourist spot” (It’s the largest indoor Asian mall in North America) it’s allowed to be open. So I thought I’d drive up there to grab lunch and get my keys cut. It was a complete gong show! It took over an hour to park. There must have been 50 thousand people there.
I was reading through my friend Will’s blog which got me listening to this track, oh and for those who haven’t noticed I always name my blog entries after the song I’m listening to. Mystery solved!
By the way this whole album is incredible (portishead - third). Click on my well groomed head to see the gallery.

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December 24th, 2008 by ryan
More half frame crazyness coming at you. I’m at home in Toronto packing (or reminding myself that I should be packing at least) for my holiday to palm springs that I leave for friday morning at 5 am. Katherine is already down there I’m meeting up with her and her family there. I’m flying into LA then we’re going to drive to the grand canyon/vegas. I bought a bunch of film and a wind angel lens for my 645 system and am hoping to get some shots of the foreclosed houses down there. I guess there are guys painting the burnt grass green. I’m assuming that was more in the summer but it should be nice now with christmas in the desert. Anyhow should be a nice little trip either way. I guess it snowed in Vegas last week so I’m going to bring a coat.
I picked up some film a couple days ago at my Lab of choice “Toronto Image Works”. While I was purchasing some film Edward Burtynsky walked in. He is the owner of the lab so it doesn’t seem that odd that he would be there but in the 5 years I’ve been going there (sometimes for 4+ hours in a night to use the darkrooms) I had yet to encounter him. I felt a little star struck (which makes sense he’s easily my favorite photographer) but I stopped him and struck up a conversation, he was extremely gracious and didn’t try to cut the conversation short and sneak out or seem rushed in teh slightest. I obviously volunteered my services if he ever needed an assistant, which he just as graciously encouraged.
So that’s pretty much it, there are some terrible photos through the link at the start of this post but they’re certainly nothing to be proud of. I’ll be back in a week and a half.
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December 16th, 2008 by ryan
I’m getting more images back from this silly half format camera by the day. I thought that I broke the usb port on my scanner, so I took the whole thing apart. Have you ever taken a film scanner apart before? It’s a complex machine, full of whirly’s and wizzy’s lots or wire and ribbons, circuits the like, it takes a lot of taking apart to get to the board with the usb port soldered to it. Anyhow I inspected the board and it looked fine. All the solder was intact. Now comes the hard part putting everything back together. Luckily when I was done there were no screws left. But the problem didn’t lay in the scanner at all but the stupid nikon software. Anyhow if anyone needs instructions for disassembling a nikon cool scan V let me know, I can walk you through it, right to the the part at the end when you realize you’ve risked destroying your precious scanner for nothing.
In other news Katherine and I just bought a 14 year old BMW wagon. It’s like driving a German tank I’m hoping to get many good ski road trips in this winter.
Oh right here is the nonsense gallery!

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December 14th, 2008 by ryan
A portrait I did for work last week. This woman is a consultant. This is for the home page of her website. I did a couple test shots first.

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December 9th, 2008 by ryan
So I got my first roll back from the olympus. The half frame is an interesting beast. The lack of focusing system is interesting. Most of the first half of the roll is out of focus. But I figured out about half way through that I was looking at the wrong distance marker. I think I’ll get better at guessing distances. There are a few shots that are pretty sharp. All and all I am very happy with the performance.
I should also mention that the integration between photoshop cs4 and lightroom is fantastic. It’s stitching ability is mind blowing. Very impressive. I bought Annie Leibovitz’s new book “at work” and was shocked to hear that most of her portraiture is stitched. She was saying that after she’s done a shoot her assistants will shoot all around the portrait area to make sure they have good overlap.
The first couple shots here are shitty flatbed scans of some 645 from september. as usual click on the image for the gallery.

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December 6th, 2008 by ryan
This post has been a long time coming. Goes back quite a while. Basically, a lot of me screwing around with my medium format 75mm lens hand holding it in front of the 5d with a sock between the body and the lens to create a tilt shift effect. Very sophisticated! There are shots at my parents place for my grandfathers 80th birthday. Family, cousins, etc. Then some more tilt shift from out the window of the office at work. Then there are a bunch of shots from the theatre, I was lighting a play for a week then some cast party shots. Oh there’s a washroom break photo in there somewhere too. The end! Very exciting. Anyhow I’ve put a couple rolls of triX through my new pen d3. I should have a chance to scan those this week. I also have a roll of 120 laying around from the summer that I should scan.
click on the image as usual to check out the gallery.

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November 26th, 2008 by ryan
check it out! New camera, half frame, I’m excited. Comes in a couple days.

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November 16th, 2008 by ryan
So Halloween was a couple weeks ago. I have one shot showing that event. Then I got sick so I had to buy some vitamins and a couldn’t choose which ones to get, so many options! Then Katherine and I hosted an election party. It was very nerdy and political, not overly exciting. We ate cupcakes. Cakes in cup size, so portable. So friday night Adrian came into town and him and terry and myself went to see the sea and cake where John McEntire (my favorite drummer) destroyed the whole planet. I tried to get a shot of him after the show but it was dark and all I had was an 85mm so it’s not exactly in focus. After the show my friend Emily was having a house warming party where I continued to shoot with the 85mm despite it being completely inappropriate.
I also found a very interesting black and white conversion plug in for photoshop made by nikon. It emulates all kinds of different black and white films. I did a few here with the TriX emulator. I have to say I’m pretty impressed. It’s like film but without my dusty apartment getting in the way.
here are some full resolution versions here here and here
Although I don’t think I’ll stop shooting film. I’m looking for one of these if anyone has one.
as usual click on the image to get to the gallery

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