Expectations

We all have expectations of one sort or another and especially as photographers hoping that perhaps the next shot will be the 'one', for example as a staff photographer for the newspaper I work for( Kelowna Daily Courier ), my editor hands me an assignment and he has a reasonable expectation that I will come back with a decent image for publication, ( which I am capable of doing ! ) and I also have an expectation of what I think the image should look like , I want my editors to be happy with my work, so the image I make may not be what I would like so I use my photographic technique and artistic talents to take their ideas and mix it up with my own ideas and turn out a nice image that we can all be happy with.

As a young man starting out in life with a passion for the arts I had hopes and dreams of making my living as a photographer, which I have thankfully been able to accomplish. Once in the biz so to speak I felt compelled to find an artistic outlet for my personal endeavours in photography as I felt this was very important to keep my passion of creativity and interest in photography fresh and alive, over the years I have created what I feel is a fine body of mostly black and white work that I can claim to be my own, which is a surprisingly a hard thing to do. One of the difficulties that I have encountered in finding my own true path when making my personal photographs is not to get side tracked by what I think the photo should be like or what others might think the photo should be like. For example if I make a particular photograph that everyone loves, I try not to go out and copy my previously popular photograph. When I am out with my camera I like to see something different and new, easy to write those words but not easy to put into practice.

Ideally I try not to have any preconceived expectations but to just go out and make pictures of what ever I find interesting to satisfy my soul, that's what I find most rewarding.

The above image was taken at East Sooke regional Park in December of 1987, it was one of those lovely mild winter days maybe around 10C, very nice temperature for that part of Canada in the winter time. I liked the low level sun which helped silhouette the branch of a Arbutus tree, and no I didn't have any expectations that I would make that shot when I started my sea shore hike earlier in the day ( to the best of my recollection ). Image made with a 4 x 5 view camera ( made by Tachihara ) and a 120mm lens ( made by Schneider ).

Misty Taylor Lake

This is another view I made of Taylor Lake in Banff National Park , the beautifully aqua-colored Lake sits at an elevation of 2065 meters s surrounded by Mt. Bell on the left, Panorama Ridge on the right. The image was made with my 4 x 5 view camera and 120 mm lens.

The Storm & The Calm

I made this image of Taylor Lake nestled in Banff National Park while on a day hike quite a few years ago on a chilly September day. As I recall the day was one of thick clouds with intermittent rain and as I climbed up higher a few snow flurries, but upon arrival at the lake, the water was amazingly calm with hardly a breath of wind. The image was made with a 4 x 5 view camera and a 120 mm lens.

My Updated Website

I have been busy this past week tapping away at the key board of this computer updating my website, its the old story, I was just going to add a few images to may site that I made in 2007 which should only take me a few hours, but then I thought I might as well give it a newer updated look as it has pretty well stayed the same for the past four year or so, forty hours later after I basically started from the ground up, I had my new site finished.

I am by no means a web designer by any stretch of the imagination and there are professionals out there who can do a far better job than what I could ever produce, but in order to get my work on the world wide web web I needed a website, I couldn't afford to have one made for me, so one day a few years ago I discovered that there were some features in my Photo Shop 7 program which came bundled with ImageReady and this allowed me to create, links, roll overs and save them as HTML documents ready for the web. I basically created my entire website using the Photoshop program using layers, then exported to ImageReady where I created the the rollovers and links, at the end of it all I had myself a website that looked semi-professional, or at least people seemed to say it looked all right and I was on the world wide web. ( ImageReady was only bundled with Photoshop till CS2, after that it was discontinued but parts of it live on in other Adobe programs. )

With my new site I still have just as many pictures, but I have 'stacked' the images in each gallery group, such as 'Landscapes', 'Still Life' and so forth, when in each gallery by moving your mouse's pointer over each link at the bottom of the page, 'IMAGE 1' , IMAGE 2 it will bring up a larger size version of each image seen in the thumbnails versions. I'm always a bit nervous when going 'live' with anything and although my site is a bit clunky and slow ( sorry about that ! ), I hope people enjoy it .