Some photographer's feel one has to specialize in order to be successful. Other's feel you need to be able to shoot a variety of genres to give oneself a chance to be profitable. It is a question that can be debate long and hard with both sides making strong arguments. Having been a photographer since I was a small boy I can honestly say I have come full circle. When I picked up my first camera around the age of six I would take photo's of just about anything. The world was new and photography was a way to explore.
As I went through my school years, first high school then college I settled into different nithces. I started with sport's and journalism, then moved on to landscape and nature. At the art college people became my focus and I did portraiture and weddings for a number of years. Now that I am teaching I have found that I have gained a new appreciation for where I started and thus have started to explore once again. The last three day's efforts are a small microcosm of this.
September 11. I started the day walking my boy's to school with my wife and then heading out for a morning walk with her. Using my iPhone I captured some of the scenes as they presented themselves to me during this time. From our shadows as they appeared in front of us to a large flower in a vegetable garden and finally the reflections on a back of a truck, these were all subjects for my lens. It was reminiscent of my walks in my childhood snapping away with my twin lens reflex camera.
Later that evening as I returned from teaching at SAIT I noticed how low the moon was in the sky and how large it appeared. I took out my Canon 7D and put the 70-200 f2.8 with 2x teleconverter on it. Shooting at ISO 400 1/100 sec at f5.6 hand held I was able to record this shot of the half moon. I then cropped the image in Photoshop.
September 12 My boy's were doing a demonstration of there "Stomp" dances that they had learned during the first week of school. Using the 7D and 24-70 f2.8 lens I captured their moves and enjoyment of the dance. After I downloaded the files and picked the two photo's I wanted to use I combined them in my iPhone using an app called Pic Jointer. This allowed me to size them so I could show them entirely.
September 13. The Calgary Flames were holding public sessions of their training camp and I decided to head to Winsport Arena at Canada Olympic Park. When I first arrived I did not see anyone else taking photo's and since I was late I did not know if something had been mentioned about photography. While waiting I grabbed a couple of shot's with the iPhone the first of the arena and the second of the back of one of the Flames players t-shirt.
When the second session started I did notice a number of the fans taking pictures with their phones and compact cameras so I figured it must be OK. Now it has been 25 years since I last photographed the Flames and I don't think I had shot any other Hockey in that time. Back then it was film pushed to high ISO's and then overdeveloped. I shot 36 frames at a time and used prime lenses. Now I had my 7D and 70-200 f2.8 zoom lens and it was very different shooting. One of the big differences was I was not able to get by the glass and the second was that I had to shoot through the netting which I never had to do before. I experimented a little bit before settling on 1600 ISO at 1/400 sec and f2.8. This helped to throw the mesh out of focus that it was unnoticeable in most of the photo's. I managed to get a number of good photo's and share 7 of them here.
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