Younes Bounhar Photography

Blowing smoke

It’s funny how much fun making smoke photographs can be…had I only known earlier…

I made this image as I am preparing a new magazine submission for next fall. Not only is it a blast to shoot, but the post-processing part is even more fun as you can let your imagination run wild. Love it!

Posted on June 9th, 2010 in Creativity Images | 7 Comments »

Pots of Gold

This past winter hasn’t been a glorious one as far as photography goes in our area. Barely any snow, or ice, or fog, it has been about as plain as you can get.

But it wasn’t all for naught! First, we’ve been getting some fantastic weather of late, very unusual for the season. Mostly, though, the river has been providing a great subject of late with some interesting thaw patterns. In fact I have spent a few days over the past couple of weeks studying a little area a few minutes away from my house, and all I can say is that it’s been a blast.

These two shots were taken on two separate days using a combination of techniques. Both were shot way past sunset as dusk provided some fantastic colour reflecting on the water. For the image below, I got as low as I possibly could to catch as much of the reflecting light. I used a polariser to further strengthen the reflection, then I zoomed out to 300mm at f/22. Even with the small aperture I couldn’t get as much depth of field as I needed so I basically took two images, one focused for the front of the image and one for the back. The two images were then blended manually in photoshop to give the result below.

For the second image, the process was essentially the same but with a slight modification. As I returned to the scene a few days after the first image was taken, there were even more “pots” on the ice than before. Since I wanted to capture as many of them as possible, but still make them an important part of the image, I decided to make a panorama. The final result below is combination of multiple horizontal shots. Each horizontal shot is a blend of two images to maximise depth of field. The resulting blends were then stitched together using photoshop’s photomerge function. I can’t quite remember the total number of shots, but all I can say is that the image below is a crop from an image that would print at 60×10 ” at its native resolution (34mp).

Posted on March 16th, 2010 in Creativity Images | 3 Comments »

The best camera…

…is the one you have with you.

Needless to say that no matter how great your vision is, not having a camera with you will not help you get any pictures. It is simply a practical reality for me that I can’t have my SLR with me every day when I head to work. For the longest time, I just pestered at the missed opportunities, blamed this and that, and the other for my inability to take pictures. Yet, nothing said that a picture MUST be taken with an SLR. So what was stopping me? OK, you can’t really answer this question (it’s not that you can’t, but I just won’t let you, cuz I know what you will say, especially you Justin, yes I mean you, you know who you are …anyway, I digress).

Enters the iPhone. Other than the fact that it’s just a great piece of technology, the main reason I got my iPhone was specifically to be able to take pictures at will, whenever I feel like it.

The advantages are two-fold: 1) obviously, you have a camera on you at all times, that’s a big plus; 2) contrary to an SLR, you have almost zero control: no lens changes, no aperture or shutter speed setting, zero, nada, zilch. The result is in fact quite counter-intuitive: by restricting your possibilities, you in fact free your mind of its constraints. You have a set of parameters to work with, it’s now up to you to do something with them. From a creative perspective, I must say it is liberating. Instead of going for a different lens to produce the look you always produce, now you have to come up with a different way to view the same subject.

Now each week from now on, I will try (time allowing) to post an image I took with my iPhone.

Posted on February 9th, 2010 in Creativity iPhone | 8 Comments »

Follow the curve

Sometimes, you just never know where you will find your next subject or when inspiration will hit you and start your neurons firing all over the place. As I was heading to board my plane to Brussels a few weeks ago, I came across this odd sculpture at Toronto’s Pearson airport, when my head said “Jackpot”. This thing has photo opp written all over it and I couldn’t help but take a few snaps in the very limited time I had with it. Before you knew it, I had my Nikon 14-24 on my D700 and I was happy shooting. Here I was particularly drawn to the strong curves and the color contrast between the various structures and the twilight sky showing behind the glass.

Moral of the story: always have a camera ready to go. No, it doesn’t have to be your super duper top of the line D75000XPFS, but any camera is DEFINITELY better than any camera. In my next post, I will be displaying a shot or two taken with my iPhone just to demonstrate this point.

Posted on February 8th, 2010 in Creativity Images | 2 Comments »

When the human mind just blows you away

Today’s post is a bit out in left field, but I came across something I simply just had to share. I am still giddy at how creative and beautiful this actually is. Definitely the sort of stuff that just keeps you wanting to get better and try harder. Just watch this video (and listen to the music, it’s pretty nice too)…

Posted on October 25th, 2009 in Creativity | 2 Comments »

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