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Showing posts from August, 2015

Thing

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Gotta a love a large orange humanoid-looking creature amongst all kinds of urban rubble.  This is “Thing” in the movie “Fantastic Four 2, The Rise of the Silver Surfer”.  I had a lot of fun shooting stills on this film because super heroes and stunts and explosions make for a very interesting day at the office.  We took over a couple square blocks in downtown Vancouver and made quite a mess to film the climactic ending.  It looked amazing with all of the neon lights!  There was so much light coming off our set! Everything was so lit up from sunset to sunrise that I doubt any neighbouring condo dwellers got much sleep.   Because there was more light than usual when filming at night, I was able to shoot at an ISO as low as 800.  The light that was hitting “Thing”, was at a high enough level that it balanced out nicely with the neon signs, I did not have to worry about them blowing out.  Light bounced of of the smoke particles blown in by the special effects department so that the low

Antelope Canyon

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Antelope Canyon is a slot canyon located in Navajo territory in Arizona.  I am one of many people to be drawn there to shoot the shapes carved out of sandstone by rushing water.  Flash flooding and erosion created these narrow passageways to the delight of many photographers including myself.  From the ground level looking down, it looks like a wide crack in the the landscape;  however when you shimmy through the causeway, the beauty of light and shadow playing over the textures and contours is awe inspiring.  I was fortunate to have arrived at this geological phenomenon on the perfect overcast day.  The medium cloud cover was perfect for diffusing the light coming from above.  If it was a sunny day, there would have been and overly extreme contrast between the shadows and the illuminated sandstone.  Instead, soft light bounced around the canyon walls leaving some detail in the shadows.  I wanted to have a lot of depth of field so as to keep all of the graceful lines sharp in my pho

Ian McShane

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One of my favourite villains of all time is Ian McShane.  He was the super villain on “Agent Cody Banks” that I photographed the stills on back in 2002.  I would later become an even bigger fan of his watching him play the town bad guy in ‘Deadwood”.  He has has that wonderful British charm that translates well into his nasty characters.  His charisma and sense of humour on set always made the crew smile despite the abnormally long hours we worked on this particular feature.   He has a very characteristic expression with the raised right eyebrow and slight snarl on his lips.  I wanted to capture this exact expression nice and close with him looking right at the lens.  When filming on set you are photographing while the actors are performing so you must set it up later if you want to get a shot of them looking at you.  We were filming in this very futuristic bad guy lair which was an ideal spot to get the perfect portrait.  Ian was happy to accommodate my wishes and I got the desi