close your eyes and hope for the best

Cuban Taxi (click image to enlarge)

We finally arrived in the middle of a Cuban slum where we thought we were supposed to meet our models. Mangy half hairless dogs and an old guy name Luis kept us company while we waited for our models to show.

A working holiday, that’s what I told my wife and family. It was to be 7 days in the Caribbean sun. That didn’t mean that I was to have a camera permanently slung around my neck like some surveillance collar. There would be some downtime, but my primary purpose was to get some stock photos that I could potentially make some money off of.

The red eye flight left me sleepless and bleary-eyed . I knew something was amiss when I noticed the local airport workers were wearing pants and jackets. When we arrived in Santa Clara the island had been battling a week of tropical storms and the sunny skies and warm temps I had expected were no where to be seen. Still, for my brother and his family who just came from Winnipeg where it was -30° C it seemed positively balmy.

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Bill Frymire’s golden Tabby Cat (click image to enlarge)

this shot of Mocha is one of my better selling stock images…
even though she has turned all of our wooden furniture into her personal scratching posts, she has more than paid for them…

In keeping with the pet theme, I thought you would like to meet the house cat who put an end to our pet goldfish. Her name is Mocha. She’s not really mocha coloured, but according to our kids, she gets her name from the “M” marking above her eyebrows. Actually, judging from the fatty paunch she is covering up, the golden arches of McDonalds seem more appropriate. After scratching at the screen window, her belly swings and bounces to and fro when she trots in and makes a bee-line for her catfood, only occasionally venturing off course to water and fertilize our houseplants.

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Goldfish in a blender. (click image to enlarge)

… I was off to the Pet store to pick up my unsuspecting model. Finally I saw him, he wasn’t afraid like the other fish, he was trusting… I could identify with the little fellow, as we all sometimes feel that we have lost control of our lives.

Some shots just happen; you are in the right place at the right time. Though the reality is that for most of us these shots seem to be few and far between. Sometimes you just can’t afford to “wait for the light”. Other times, you can plan all you want, but then mother nature likes to crash the party. Another way to create some magic is to plan a shoot out ahead of time and see what you can come up with. These images rarely end up exactly as you envisioned, and in fact can take on a life of their own, but somehow they are more gratifying in that you have put some thought into it and have made a concerted effort to create something special.

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Macro photography, crescent wrench. (click image to enlarge)

It’s not quite as fantastic as having Raquel Welch course through your veins but when you get REALLY close, ordinary household objects take on an extraordinary appearance… I’m not going to go all “Zen” on you but you’ve got to admit there’s some crazy shit going on in there if you look close enough.

Why is it we always have to look so far away? Why don’t we take a look at the things that are right in front of us? Perhaps it’s because man is an exploratory creature, always wondering what is over the distant horizon. Sometimes we take for granted the things we have right where we are.

I found it surprising that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the seafloor of our deep oceans. The recent interest in global warming is an encouraging sign of a renewed interest in maintaining a healthier planet. Let’s hope this trend continues.

Bringing the distant up close is a marvelous capability of modern optical science. What a thrill it must have been for Galileo to first look through his first working telescope model. Later with the development of photography, the magnified image could be enjoyed by the masses by capturing those images for all to see.

As photographers, we know the farther away you can be from your subject and still get the subject to “fill the frame” can be a very expensive endeavour. Still, there is something special about a razor-sharp image of a distant animal or scene, details that elude the naked eye pop out. Anyone who has ever poured over a giant panoramic cityscape or landscape and said, “I never knew that was there” or checked out a crowd scene and thought, “man there’s some weird-looking people out there!” can surely agree.

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Peterbuilt truck shot for calendar. (click image to enlarge)

This last fall I was asked by a client to come up with an interesting image that featured a transportation company’s truck for a yearly poster size calendar. We talked about some nice scenic shots with fall colours and waited for approval. Well, things got busy for everyone and unfortunately there was no groundhog to tell us that winter was to arrive early this year.

For a minute, I thought of the possibility that the camera and I could somehow bounce out the back of the van and into the path of the tailgating semi…
I only had enough seatbelt for either the camera rig or me and in the end the $6000 camera got the belt. I could hang on to the camera if needed…

Before we knew it there was snow on the ground and the fall foliage was long gone. I didn’t think they were going to go for an 18-wheeler with chains on following a snowplow so I needed to rethink the original idea. The shot needed to have empty space reserved for the actual calendar (Damn!) so I came up with a sketch that showed a dynamically blurred road with a truck coming forward. The client liked the idea so we arranged to shoot a truck the next weekend. Time was running out. My idea was to drive my minivan ahead of the truck and shoot out the open hatchback at a high rate of speed to get some nice motion blur.

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