Portrait: Children With Pet

Yes, I also do formal photography work

Black & White: Looking Out Over the Bay

Looking out over the bay during – Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

Ah, but it feels good to process in black & white again 🙂

Life

You know …. that thing that keeps ya from posting on yer blog sometimes, mines been full and somewhat hectic of late.

My son and his family were down for a bit last week, people like me use the phrase “down for a bit” to describe a visit from people who live up north. His youngest daughter celebrated her 2nd birthday while they were here and I was able to get a bunch of pictures from her party Friday afternoon.

People keep telling me that my images of people are “too close” and they don’t get a lot of context so here’s the context – it was taken at her birthday party, there were many of her little cousins in attendance, they had a blast playing, and then ate cake 🙂

The Canadians in the readership know that our government announced major cutbacks and downsizing in their recent budget – many thousands and thousands of government employees found themselves unemployed, many thousands of others who were not employed by the government also found themselves unemployed as a result of funding cuts to NGO’s. Aboriginal NGO’s have been hit particularily hard, some (myself included), would say that they were specfically targeted, and I found myself unemployed as of 3:00PM Monday afternoon.

Many have described themselves as “victims” of the budget cuts, I consider myself as having been liberated. I’ve wondered for a while whether or not I could do anything with my photography and now I have been given the opportunity to find out …. as was suggested by a very special friend a few days ago it’s probably the universe giving me a gentle nudge in the direction it thinks I should be going.

Friday morning me and the camera are jumping on a plane and heading for British Columbia to do some shooting in Vancouver – I’m hoping to spend some time in the downtown eastside doing some street photography – the reviews say “don’t go there“, so that’s where I’m going. Then it’s off to Prince Rupert for a few days with at least one urbex shoot in the planning, followed by, with any luck, a trip to Haida Gwaii.

After I come back there will be the inveitable hours and hours of post-click processing to do, I’ll start planning for a series of images I want to shoot of each lock in the Rideau Canal system, and I’ll also be trying to figure out what would make good subject material for a shoot in Iqaluit, Nunavut, where I’m headed a couple of weeks after I get back from British Columbia.

So basically, if you see nothing here for a while it means that me and the camera are still gone – but we will return, and there will be images of where we’ve been.

He Played The Blues

I had the pleasure of hearing and shooting Inuvialuit/Gwich’in blues man Dennis Allen at the Tungasuvvingat Inuit spring equinox celebration here in Ottawa yesterday afternoon.

In case you’re wondering, he put on an awesome show.