Ill-Fated Attempt at Aerial Photo of Downtown Toronto

Toronto at dusk October 2014

Thanks to one client in particular I have been challenged a number of years in a row with coming up with a new view of Toronto that includes the CN Tower. Two years ago I had the brilliant idea of taking a helicopter tour during the fall season to try and get a lovely view of the city from above, enhanced by the beauty of the fall foliage. Because I was doing this on spec I had no budget and no official mandate with which to impress the tour operators, so I quickly realized I wasn't going to get any special treatment.

The weather in Ontario being what it is in the fall, that is, fairly unstable and unpredictable from day to day let alone long term (we just endured this irritating reality on a job that had us getting up at 5:00 a.m. multiple days in a row to be faced with forecasts that had changed overnight, and skies that changed even as we drove to the locations), I had a difficult choice to make: either book a flight well in advance at the risk of unphotogenic weather, but at a somewhat guaranteed time, or wait until a good looking day and hope for an available last minute spot at a decent time. I decided on the latter. (Again, on the actual job we just did, we knew from location scouting exactly what times would be best and we committed to them. I have to admit I was a little/way off when I booked the helicopter tour.)

As it turned out, after cancelling one 2:00 p.m. flight, the earliest afternoon flight I could get on the next decent looking day was at 5:30. Way too late if I'd been paying attention. However, as per my usual MO, I arrived super early for my flight in case there was any way I could get on an earlier one. As I waited, I watched anxiously as the sky got cloudier and cloudier and darker and darker until there was almost nobody left in the waiting room except me. Every flight had to have three passengers, and apparently the couple that was booked to fly with me had got lost, or something. I don't know. Regardless of the reason, they showed up at about 6:15 just as the sun was setting. I was beside myself. 

The light was actually incredibly dramatic, and I was not unaware of the irony that a lot of people would have been thrilled at the vivid orange sunset and stormy sky. I hated it. And I was so disappointed I never even showed the photos to the client. And after leaving the raw files untouched on my working hard drive for two years (!) I was finally archiving them, possibly never to be seen again, when I thought I'd just have one last look. Stepping away had maybe given me a chance to return with a fresh perspective, but even after more than 700 days, they still looked grainy, dark and way too sunsetty. However this time I decided to give one of the least awful frames one last try, so I blasted it with some extreme processing, and lo and behold, got a result that actually doesn't look that bad, at this size on a computer monitor (no way would I print it). I'm still not going to show the client. It's not the right picture at all, and it's just not good enough. But before I put the files away forever, I thought I'd share this one picture, now that I've had almost enough time to get over it.  

www.hollinrake.com
kathryn@hollinrake.com 

Underwater Photo Fun in Turks and Caicos

Hi there,

It's been a while since I posted here as I got totally derailed this summer by a combination of lots of work (thank-you!), followed by a pressing family situation back in Vancouver (my hometown). All this time I struggled with whether it would be better to delay posting entirely, or share something current, interesting and available but "off brand."

At this point, I've come down on the side of abandoning strategy, and throwing consistency to the wind, so I'm going to write about a holiday, with, of course, a slight emphasis on the photo part of it. Two summers ago our son joined his already certified parents in becoming a PADI certified scuba diver, so this July we booked a one week trip to a dive resort called Bohio, on the island of Grand Turk. Bohio is run by Tom and Ginny Allan, a lovely, friendly Canadian couple, along with their son Scott and daughter Emily. We loved it there so much we are already booked to go back next year. 

The beach at Bohio, Grand Turk, TCI

With the package we booked, you (can if you want) get up every day for breakfast, do two dives before lunch and then spend the afternoons doing whatever you want, or working (if you are far too important to go offline for a whole week at a time ;)...

My ulterior interest with the diving part is always, of course, getting the opportunity to do some photography. Unfortunately, although I own a full sized DSLR underwater camera housing system, we haven't dived much since our son was born (that's changing now!) so my set-up is no longer anywhere near state of the art, not to mention huge and cumbersome (requiring its own large, rigid case). As a result, for this trip I borrowed a much smaller four thirds format camera with a much smaller underwater housing. And I hoped I wouldn't be too disappointed with the image quality from the smaller sensor.

As it turned out, I was kind of disappointed. But I kind of liken the experience and the results to using my old smart phone camera with a funky software filter to take fairly low res but fun pictures (which I sometimes do). And now I know that next time I want to take serious underwater pictures I will need to buy a new Aquatica housing for my full frame Nikon and suck it up and lug the big case.

In any case, one of the trickiest things I recall about underwater photography (and I did not miraculously get better at this after not practicing for an extended period) is balancing the output of the flash with the ambient light, something I do (very well) literally all the time on land. I think part of the problem is that I can't seem to judge distance underwater to save my life (I'm not the only one...the visual distortion caused by the water makes judging size and distance underwater challenging), and unlike shooting a job (I've shot the odd underwater job in the past), when on holiday in the underwater wild, one does not have the opportunity to make the subject "do it again!"

Anyway, partly thanks to the miracle of processing software, I was able to capture/create a few fun images, and some of them I wouldn't have been able to light anyway, so here goes:

Our son rides side saddle on his father

Here's a (not) fun fact we learned the day we watched our divemaster spear a lionfish and feed it to Jorge the mutton snapper, a friendly fish who turned up on 80% of the dives we did. As explained in an article in Scientific American magazine: " Lionfish arrived in the South Atlantic in 1985, most likely released by private aquarium owners,  and have caused native fish populations there to decline by up to 80 percent. In the Bahamas between 2008 and 2010 they reduced biomass of 42 other fishes by an average of 65 percent." And further "The invasion may be “one of the greatest threats of this century to warm temperate and tropical Atlantic reefs and associated habitats,” wrote National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist James A. Morris, Jr., in Invasive Lionfish: A Guide to Control and Management (pdf)." Apparently another successful predator of lionfish is the grouper. So if  resorts, cruise boats, hotels and restaurants stop overfishing grouper and serve lionfish instead there may be hope.

L - Jorge the friendly mutton snapper, R - Divemaster spearing lionfish for Jorge (yes, I know you can't really see what's happening in this little picture, but an overview is what I was able to shoot. No do-overs, remember?)

On a happier note, I got to see and photograph several of my favourite underwater creatures, as well as some pretty scenes. 

Grunts

Southern stingray

Stingrays at Gibb's Cay

Ray with fish companions

An elusive spotted eagle ray

Hawksbill turtle

Although being and breathing underwater is rewarding in itself, and visually it's always interesting inasmuch as it differs so much from our terrestrial experience, it thrills my heart to be in the presence of turtles, rays and sharks. (Not a lot of sharks around on this trip.) Still, even a mutton snapper can make pretty art:

At the end of every day, we had the great pleasure of sitting down to dine at Bohio's lovely Guanahani Restaurant. Executive chef Jorika Mhende's reputation is richly deserved: it's not surprising that visitors come from other dive resorts to enjoy her culinary creations. Bohio's website even publishes their wine list which is not that usual for a dive resort, and was a huge selling point for someone in my family. 

Guanahani Restaurant and the view at dinner

As always, thanks for reading and if you need photography of anything in southern Ontario, please contact me at kathryn@hollinrake.com. 

www.hollinrake.com

An African Pygmy Hedgehog in the Garden

Khaleesi in the "garden"
Click here to see this image bigger.

In April of 2015 we adopted my son's class hedgehog as he had pretty much been elected her primary caretaker, being the only kid who could confidently handle this grumpy little ball of spikes. Since then I have often wondered what her life would have been like out in the wild, and I like to imagine her scuttling about in an English garden at dusk, even though, it turns out, she is actually an African Pygmy hedgehog, not a European. Regardless, I envisioned a beautiful hedgehog portrait/still life: somewhat along the lines of an Old Master painting (a common theme in my personal work).

I thought we should give her lots of time to get used to her new home before we subjected her to modelling in a photo shoot. I also worried about the flash possibly stressing her out and/or bothering her small nocturnally optimized eyes. But after a significant period of observation and familiarization, I decided to give it a go, with my son's blessing and commitment to wrangle.

I constructed the basic set a week ahead of time to give myself the chance to be with the foundation of the image. And I made sure our schedule could accommodate a flower sourcing expedition the day before a few hour long period the following day during which we would shoot. So the day before the shoot I headed over to flower shop central: Toronto's "Ave. and Dav." and bought a pile of flowers, not, unfortunately, including peonies which I really wanted, because I gather they are not in season.

Once I got back to the studio I did an initial stem trim and staged all the flowers in vases so they could breathe and hopefully bloom a bit more overnight. Weirdly and disappointingly two hydrangeas I had chosen specifically for their unusual colour died shortly after I got them to the studio even though I trimmed and "smashed" the bottoms of the stems as instructed. So I had to go out again, and quickly hunt down new hydrangeas. I wasn't about to to drive all the way across town again, either to complain about the dying flowers I'd bought or buy replacement potentially also doomed ones, so I settled for more standard coloured blooms from a local shop. Ironically these lasted for days. Kind of disappointing...I wish I could remember which shop I got the dead ones from so I could be sure never to go back there!

Anyway, shoot day dawned and after collecting together a large set of much smaller glass vases and vessels to use in the arrangement, with some trepidation I set about the somewhat stressful business of building the "garden", stressful because trying to make flowers do what you want them to do is not easy...they are fragile and often uncooperative, as much as an inanimate object can be thought to cooperate or not, and you can break and kill them if you're not careful. When I do an arrangement like this I'm never totally sure I will "find the magic" I'm looking for, and on top of that we couldn't know if after all this flower arranging the hedgehog would even cooperate, as sometimes when she comes out of her cage she just curls up in a ball, puffs up her spikes and refuses to move.

We had actually sat her on the little pedestal bowl earlier in the week as a test and she seemed O.K. with being on it. I would love to have had her meandering though a more loosely arranged "garden" but because of her low profile and down-turned face I realized we wouldn't be able to see her properly if she was standing on the "ground". Furthermore, sometimes it actually helps to put animals on some kind of platform as it creates a bit of a psychological barrier to their just walking away. (I've used this technique with cats.)

Thankfully, she was in a  good mood, so after letting her run around, and pee and poo (which she does quite frequently and randomly when not in her cage) I got behind the camera, and my son gently placed her in the set, with the instructions not to let her crawl off the bowl, or to back-up (off the bowl), which she often does when she doesn't want to be picked up, because the set would not be able to withstand a rampaging hedgehog, or even a stiff breeze, really.

Khaleesi looking around

She sort of cooperated for a few frames, so we sort of had a shot, and my son figured we were done. We were not. While he's right that you don't ever want to cause an animal stress, and you can't make an untrained animal do anything she doesn't want to, it seemed to me, to my great relief, that she wasn't really bothered by the flash; she just wanted to explore. We think she liked the flowers. We just didn't want her to eat them for two reasons beyond the most obvious: 1) they might be poisonous to her, and 2) hedgehogs do this funny thing people refer to as self-anointing whereby they nibble on something and deposit a foamy substance onto their backs, presumably, some think, to blend in with their surroundings. It does not look good.

Once we had her back on set, after a few back-ups and attempted crawl-offs which E thwarted successfully, she finally stopped trying to leave and stood reasonably still for a bunch of frames. A great lesson for E regarding the value of patience and perseverance.

Because the flowers moved a bit whenever Khaleesi bumped them, I realized early on in the shoot that I was going to have to accept a little variation from frame to frame in terms of flower position. I could have shot a "plate" (the scene minus the subject) to facilitate later close-cutting (which would have involved painstakingly cutting around every single quill) and compositing the hedgehog into a perfectly arranged background frame, but I decided that as long as the set still looked good I'd let the slight variations happen, adjusting anything that moved too far as we shot. This project was supposed to be fun, not painful.

Ultimately I did do a few extra shots to capture elements for possible compositing, the main one featuring a rose in the left side of the bowl where I knew there would be empty space if we chose a shot in which she was off to one side, which she frequently was. It was impossible to shoot the rose in position while the hedgehog was in the bowl.

The whole time I was setting up and shooting I was conscious of the highly arranged look of the image I was creating. I have always, as a person and an artist, tended towards neatness and order, but the art that turns me on is often the antithesis of that...much more organic. So I have to fight against my nature to create work that surprises and delights me. Once we had the hedgehog shot "in the can", I gave myself permission to mess up the flowers, and paint with light (which doesn't work with moving subjects). Very quickly an image appeared that I really liked, looking much more like a moonlight dappled, more random and loosely composed "garden". 

As always, staring at the image later I started to notice things that bugged me, but I liken styling sets to styling hair, or baking, or painting...at some point when it feels pretty right you have to stop and walk away before you pass the point of no return and wreck it. As on-set prop stylists know, it really is an art to style a set to look random and accidental without creating a distractingly unbalanced mess or overcorrecting back towards too tidy.

Messed up set - I like it (click here to see it larger)

In the end, I have two different, stand-alone shots that I like, but that you can't view together because they look just different enough they actually clash. Interesting exercise. Bottom line, I pretty much always question the choices I've made in an image, and wonder what I might have done differently to make it better, but I am reasonably happy with these ones. And now I've added few more hours of practice to the 10,000+. 

kathryn@hollinrake.com
www.hollinrake.com

Christmas Tree Inspired by Pinterest Posters

My 2015 Christmas card

Dear people who pin, I'm a bit behind schedule doing this, now that everyone is pretty much done with Christmas for another year, but I just wanted to thank you for the inspiration! After checking out Pinterest and seeing a bunch of pictures of Christmas trees cobbled together from various objects, my favourites probably being the driftwood ones: https://www.pinterest.com/treesforachange/driftwood-trees, I decided to make a version of my own out of some of the books, picture frames, fabric and decorative little boxes I've collected.  

The one thing I had to buy (other than a couple of new frames...you can never have too many picture frames) was tiny Christmas lights, and I almost failed to find the right ones in time. However, by a great stroke of luck, we came across a fabulous little gift store at, of all places, the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. It was called the Sandhill Nursery Garden Market, and has two locations: Burk's Falls and Huntsville. The lights are the Luca silver LED bundle - 125 lights. We loved them so much we bought a couple of 288 light bundles as well, which hang like twinkly rain in the studio.  So, thank-you Sandhill!

And now, Happy New Year! I wish everyone the very best for 2016!

Maybe I'll repost this next year before Christmas when the references might be more useful! In the meantime, call me if you need me to make a pretty picture out of something for you.

kathryn@hollinrake.com
www.hollinrake.com