We’ve been keeping this little project under wrap for a number of weeks as we were waiting for the launch of the doublespace photography blog, but we can now finally air it.

We’ve had this idea for quite sometime but we finally got around to doing it. Amanda and I both love the ramp and the Via Train Station in Ottawa and have been talking about doing something interesting with it for some time. When a previous project to do some photography with a few yogis couldn’t come together in time for what we had first intended, we thought that the combination of the two could be interesting: Yoga, meet busy, cold concrete and train station.

Once we secured the authorisations and the partcipation of Madhuri and Katie, we  pulled off a fast-paced 1-hour shoot at said location. Here are a few takes from it. For more images, head out to our doublespace blog today.

The northern town of Chefchaouen in Morocco, never ceases to amaze me. The profusion of blue all along the town’s walls is nothing short of mesmerizing. When this lady stopped to catch her breath on her way down to the market, I was immediately attracted by the combination of gold and blues. The lines at the top and bottom of the frame helped me pull it all together.

Chefchaouen the beautiful

There are still spots available for our Morocco adventure in May. Check here for more details.

I’ve been dropping hints for the last little while. I have been tweeting about it timidly for the last week or so.  But now it’s all out in the open. I can officially that my venture with Amanda is off the ground for good!

We have a new logo, a new business, a new website and a new blog. doublespace will be the space for us to showcase our commercial photography. We are first starting with architecture and interior design, but will slowly be integrating other sides to our commercial venture, such as portraiture and conceptual imagery. In the meantime, I will leave you with some images from our portfolio, and a teaser from the blog. I also invite you to visit both and would love to hear from you.

Father and Son

A few weeks ago, I wrote on G+ about some of those images that just keep you coming back. Images that you made but that have a special connection or meaning for you. Beside the image I posted on that day, here is another one of my earliest images (it remains probably my best seller – though that is a very relative term). It was a really warm early spring day. A day that brought some of the thickest fog I have ever seen. You could barely see 20 feet ahead of you. For certainly makes for one of my favourite shooting conditions, the dark, mysterious and atmospheric conditions are great to create some fantastic imagery. The ordinary turns into the extraordinary, the beautiful into the sublime. It’s the perfect condition for simple, streamlined compositions that are half real, half dream.

I headed to my favourite spot back then, a short walk from my place, by the Ottawa river. Remember that at the time, I am almost exclusively a landscape photographer. That said, as I arrived on the scene, I couldn’t help but notice a boy have the time of his life with his father. The scene was touching and beautiful. I knew right there and then that it would make for a compelling image. The only problem was that I didn’t have a clue how to photograph people, and my legendary shyness would very much get in the way. The very thought of mustering the courage to start thinking about approaching them to let me take their photo was too much to bear. So I moved on.

For a while at least. As I was heading back home, I couldn’t help but take some side glances hoping *they* would start the conversation (yeah, right). For some unknown reason however, I though those trees would also make for a pretty image. Given that I was using my wide-angle, our two friends would hardly feature in the image and I was fine with (yeah, right). Anyhow, I set up, I make an image or two, and miracle, the two decide they have had enough and head out for their car. That meant they were going to walk right into my frame. In the best possible spot. Click. Better to be lucky than good I guess. I’ll take it .

Last week I posted the image below and asked you to deconstruct it and tell me how it was done. Among others, I asked you if it was composited or one frame, what you thought was done in terms of lighting choices, post-processing and so on. At the end of, the person who got the closest would get a 12×18″ of their choice.

The answers pretty much covered the entire gamut with some really intricate responses and some more straightforward. So how did Amanda and I make this image?

Well believe it or not, this is a single frame. No trees or snow or model were added.

Let’s start: it was snowing very heavily that day, with big, fluffy snowflakes falling at an impressing rate. By choosing a slightly long focal length, we knew that was going to make the background look foggy. The key to this image is two fold. First, Amanda is standing under the shade of the tree, thus creating a strong contrast with the background which is much brighter. Second, the choice of lighting had a strong influence on the final look. Instead of going for the colourless and drab conditions that prevailed at the time, we thought we’d rather go with a cooler atmosphere and convey the cold feeling that reigned at the time. For this we chose a low WB temperature (4700K), to compensate for that and maintaining the warm tones of the came and Amanda’s skin tones, we gelled two flashes with full CTO gels, slapped them on an umbrella at camera left at a 45 degree angle to Amanda. And that was that.

In post-processing, we simply added a tiny bit of contrast, brought in some highlights then cloned out all of the footsteps to keep a clean look.

And tadaa!

Congratulations to Duffy Knox for coming the closest to the actual explanation. You had it down to a tee! I will be in touch shortly.