Diyah Pera Photography

I had to dig deep into the archives to find this image of Wesley Snipes aka Blade the vampire hunter emerging heroically from a fire unscathed after setting ablaze to one of the undead in the film "Blade Trinity".  I had a lot of fun shooting the stills on this film back in 2004 as the sky's the limit for visuals when dealing with the supernatural. There were a lot of stunts, pyrotechnics and blood of course.  The dark and dreary winter weather of Vancouver was a perfect backdrop for this script. I barely remember shooting with film stock as it was such a long time ago but I do  remember the stress of waiting to get the film back when shooting  irregular fire light.  There is a lot of guess-work in determining your exposure when shooting fire,  especially at night because it does not balance with the ambient light.  The strength of the fire light hitting your subject could vary by a few stops depending on how the special effects department wants the ...

In September, the area around Bella Coola BC, has an onslaught of Grizzly Bears catching the parade of salmon swimming upstream to breed before dying.  The Grizzlies are trying to put on as much weight as possible to survive the oncoming winter.  The salmon and the bears are so plenty you may see a few bears at once eating only the extra rich salmon eggs and throwing the rest of the fish away.  We made a special trip into the BC wilderness to capture this phenomenon.  The bears are so intent on the task at hand that the humans wielding cameras at them are not even a small curiosity to them.  I love this shot of the Grizzly eating his salmon because of the minimalist quality of the dark shape against the green water.  I used a  few photoshop techniques to bring out the details in the water ripples and the course fur. 

In September

I have been enjoying my heavy duty work outs taught by the fit  man you see featured here in this photo. He approached me about getting some promotional photos for his business and I was happy to oblige.  I wanted to come up with a signature look for his company.  Something that echoed the intensity of his classes and the blood sweat and tears required to survive a session.  I chose a very hard edge  light coming from behind and a somewhat directional light from the front to show off the contours of his muscles.  I used HDR in photoshop to bring out strong detail in the image to heighten the potency in this image.  I let the shadows in the BG fall as they may to add more grittiness. 

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 spe...

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 ke...

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...