What good is having a custom built lighting system for car and bike shots, if we don’t show off the finished product?

As mentioned on our Twitter and Facebook pages, last week Stoney Creek Choppers came into our studio to utilize our new lighting system to their advantage, and boy was it fun! Not only were they great to work with, but the quality of custom bikes they brought us were second to none!

Over the course of a day, we shot three of the most amazing bikes we’ve ever seen. Their beautiful and talented rep Amber, stayed the day and helped ensure all the bikes were polished and posed perfectly, and we even got her to join the fun and pose for us.

Once the photography was complete, John Majorossy demonstrated his superior design skills and created final images that will make anyone’s jaw drop. Whether you are a motorcycle enthusiast or not, these images are sure to impress. Check them out and let us know what you think… your bike could be next, all you have to do is call!

So… I broke out of the comforts of my studio, to shoot food on location.  About 2 weeks ago our client As You Like It Marketing and Communications had us shooting menu items for Spring Rolls Restaurant in Toronto. They’re a chain of restaurants that combine a fusion of Chinese, Thai, Korean and Vietnamese food. Well, I have to say, it’s been eventful.

First day on the shoot, I got a parking ticket and then my car window was smashed in just to get my portable GPS on the dash. Lesson learned/ don’t leave anything worth any value in your car especially in Toronto. Aside from that the shoot went great. Had to move a few things around to create a makeshift studio but all and all it’s working out great. Tanya Eng, our food stylist, has worked out great, she knows what all the dishes should look like and she can speaks Cantonese to boot!! Now that’s a bonus. I’m also getting a cultural experience each day when the client takes us to eat in a different Asian restaurant for lunch everyday. Haven’t had the courage to eat the chicken feet yet but I’ve even almost mastered the use of chopsticks. Well, we still have more menu items to shoot but have a look and let us know what you think of the results.

We are very excited about extending our talents to the ever popular sensation of YouTube.

Check out our two videos now posted on YouTube showcasing some of our best work in Aerial and Food Photography! We would love to hear what you think.

Aerial Photography Video

Food Photography Video

These are a few excerpts from his Blog which are fascinating. Read more on his website: www.georgehunterphotography.com

George Hunter: The Formative Years

Press photography was in the transition era between flash powder and flash bulbs. …I rigged up my Korelle with a rudimentary flashgun. With tinfoil wound around the finger release button to make contact and a table lamp reflector mounted onto a flashlight to utilize No. 5 flash bulbs.

In keeping with Irving Penn‟s edict in that folks are more interested in where you came from than where you are at, I will recall some early happenings and photographic endeavours.

Their Majesties, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Winnipeg, 1939.

(1939) King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, paid a visit to Canada. During the processions through Winnipeg on the 24th of May, I was at the curb on Broadway Avenue and made a close-in shot of the couple in their carriage as they passed by. Eaton‟s, Winnipeg‟s largest department store, sold small prints of this photograph. From the royalties received, I was able to upgrade my Voigtlander Bessa to a Korelle Reflex II, a single lens medium format (2 1/4″ square, or 6cm x 6cm) camera, the predecessor to the Hasselblad that came along some twenty years later.

I had become interested in industrial activity through listening to a weekly radio program on my crystal set called “Night Shift” and so with our cousins from Toronto, we visited industrial plants such as Wrigleys, Canada Starch, Goodyear and Tip Top Tailors. I believe the tours and the radio programs were a big influence in my specializing in industrial photography assignments years later.

George Hunter‟s first flash shot: Hollywood stars James Stewart and Madeleine Carol, Winnipeg, 1939.

When the most famous Hollywood film stars of the day, James Stewart and Madeleine Carol, were in town, I got up enough nerve to run down to the Fort Garry Hotel where they were staying. I waited around the lobby to catch a shot of the pair as they were leaving the hotel. In the crowded lobby I only managed to grab an individual shot of each. I heard that the stars were working on a film featuring the RCMP and were proceeding to Banff. While most of the crowd rushed over to the CN Station, a block away, I tore a mile down Main Street to the CP Station as I knew Banff was on the CP line. I managed a shot of the couple boarding the train. With the Mickey Mouse flash setup, I had to shoot at a fifth of a second to ensure the flash bulb would synchronize. While the individual „portraits‟ were on the fuzzy side, I surprised myself with the station shot being fairly sharp. Happy with the shots turning out at all, I decided I would like to become a press photographer one day.

On Christmas and summer holidays in my latter school years I had diverse part-time jobs to earn money to buy film and equipment. They included repairing those old black desk sets at Manitoba Telephones, breaking heads off hogs at Canada Packers and selling women‟s shoes at the Timothy Eaton store. Everyone from Winnipeg worked at Eaton‟s at one time.

St. Matthew Church after the fire, Winnipeg Manitoba Canada 1944.

The night editor screamed, “St, Mathews Church is burning down! Get over there right away!” Smart-ass George replied, “The church is brick. It can’t burn down. Call Bruce.” After another call, I rang Bruce. We decided we should both go. Hell, at 2:30 we arrived to find one of the biggest fires Winnipeg has ever seen.

Then there was John Diefenbaker. I’ll always remember him placing his hand flat on top of my head and saying, “Son, mark my words, I’ll be Prime Minister of this great country when this great country celebrates its 100th anniversary in 1967. Son, mark my words”. I especially enjoyed photographing another celebrity, the Hon. Tommy Douglas, also from Saskatchewan. He impressed me as being a super person and made me appreciate all the more being from his province.

It wasn’t long before I learned of the unwritten newspaper edict, “If you don’ t come back with the picture the editor requested, don’t bother to come back at all. Save the embarrassment”. I can add another edict, and that is from personal experience. It goes like this: “If you want to get smart and make a shot that is not as requested, make the requested shot first and then get smart”.

This is how I learned the lesson. The sports editor, Vince Lea, gave me an assignment to photograph Mayor Garnet Coulter making the first pitch of the season at the ballpark at my alma matter, United College. What a dull picture that would make, I thought. My reluctance heightened when mother had an excellent dinner on the table that evening and I stayed for a second helping. I missed the opening pitch, of course, but figured I could make a shot of something more interesting.

As it turned out, I didn’t even go into the ballpark to make my shot. When I was parking the car, I noticed two kids climbing a pole across the street from the high fence surrounding the field. I jumped out just in time to catch the second lad sliding down a wire into the bleachers. When I placed a print on Vince’s desk next morning, he loved it and marked it up for four columns. That layout didn’t last very long. The city editor, in passing by the sports desk, noticed the shot and was told Hunter made it the previous evening at the stadium. Having nothing for his page, the front of the second section, he seconded it. It didn’t last long in that layout either. Later in the morning the news editor saw it and grabbed it for his front page. Was everyone happy about this shot? No way. Sports editor Vince was sore as hell. He didn’t have anything for his page.

Two boys sneaking into a baseball game. Winnipeg Manitoba Canada 1944.

I hate to wind up on a morbid note. Don’t read any further if murder is a poor subject for you. It concerns twice-convicted murderer, Albert Westgate. One morning the city editor called reporter Jimmy Anderson and me to his desk and said, “There’s been a murder down the street at the Marlborough Hotel. Run down and make a shot of the room”.

We didn’t hear till later that Bruce and another reporter were kicked out of the hotel earlier and sternly warned not to return. Jimmy and I thought it over and decided we must be as inconspicuous as possible and not look like newsmen. We rushed to our homes and changed to suits and overcoats to look more like detectives. I picked up my smaller camera, the Super Ikonta B with flashgun and extension, placing it all in one of my father’s leather sample cases.

We walked into the hotel looking like we owned the place. We walked straight to the elevators, not looking right or left. The elevators had operators in those days and we said rather sternly, “The floor please,” not knowing which floor the room was on. Arriving at the floor we saw a maid’s cart at a doorway and calling the maid, we said, “The room please”. We entered, locked the door, and found a badly disarranged room. We assembled the camera gear, made a few shots and got out as quickly as we could. When the paper came out that afternoon there was no picture of the room.

Asking the editor the next morning what happened, he told us the paper’s lawyers said that if one of the photographs had been published, the paper could have been sued for trespassing. Had we been caught in the room, we would likely have been thrown in jail for crossing police lines.

Weeks later, and prior to his trial, the paper heard that Westgate was to be transferred to a jail on York Avenue, a block over from the law courts on Broadway. I was assigned to cover his arrival there. A policeman came up to me and said in an emphatic manner, “No photographs”. He didn’t know I was stone deaf to a demand like that. It was dark and I mingled in the crowd that was assembling. When Westgate finally arrived in a paddy wagon, I grabbed a shot. I spotted reporter Shirley Scott and handed her the film holder and inserted a fresh one in the Speed Graphic. The cop must have seen me as a minute later he grabbed my arm and told me I was under arrest. He didn’t demand the film. He was walking me off, perhaps to the same jail cell where they would be holding Westgate when another officer came along. He may have been a sergeant, or even the chief, as he told the cop to let me go, saying they knew where to find me. The picture made the paper the next day and I never heard anything further about the arrest.

© George Hunter 2010

They say a picture means a 1000 words and the more toys you have, makes you the winner!! Well, we have this new Digital camera back (Toy I’d Say) that is absolutely fantastic. It’s the new Phase One P40+: a 40 megapixel digital camera back that fits onto our Hasselblad or 4×5 Sinar camera. You can shoot tethered to the camera or directly to flash cards, no wires!! 120 megabytes per shot!! You’ll need a lot of flash cards.

Anyway enough talk, have a look at the results. You can enlarge this file beyond your imagination. Why don’t you test us?

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Photo provided by Bell-Labs

Willard Boyle and George Smith have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics for 2009.

What could that possibly have to do with a photography studio?  Why does it merit a few minutes of my time to blog on the subject?  Boyle and Smith are the inventors of a crucial piece of technology used every day in our studio.

In 1969 Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith invented the first successful imaging technology using a digital sensor, a CCD (Charge-Coupled Device).

The CCD is the digital camera’s electronic eye. With the CCD, light can be captured electronically instead of on film. It revolutionized both amateur and professional photography.

The CCD and its more recent cousin CMOS (complimentary metal-oxide-semiconductor) use an array of millions of tiny photo sensors. Each sensor creates an electrical current when exposed to light. The strength of the current is proportional to the brightness of the light.

The CCD technology makes practical use of the photoelectric effect, as theorized by Albert Einstein almost 90 years ago. Through this effect, light is transformed into electric signals. The challenge when designing an image sensor was to gather and read out the signals in a large number of image points, or pixels, in a short time.  That is where Boyle and Smith made their historic contribution.

Starting in 1999, after 40 years of capturing photos on film, the introduction of the CCD and digital photography allowed us to capture photos as digital files for the first time. The benefits from the technology have been dramatic to us and our clients. The added quickness and efficiency from capture to usage and the ease of making changes after the shutter release are both important improvements are both important transformation. However, the ability for the photographer and client to examine a shot at high definition on a computer screen – during a shoot – has proved to be the most revolutionary change and resulted in a much better chance at perfection.

Happy Holiday’s from all of us at BPImaging!

I landed in Kelowna and picked up the rental car, which let me tell you, it is a good thing it had 4 wheel drive! More on that in a second though. Now I was in for a bit of a drive but off I went! I traveled from Kelowna to Kamloops and then north to a small town called Quesnel, and that is where the fun began.

I woke up to 20cm of snow and I had to drive 8 hours to Vancouver in it! That is where the 4 wheel drive helped, and after passing 1 truck and 5 cars in the ditch (enough to make you a bit nervous), getting 2 chips in my windshield from on coming trucks (joy…) I managed to get onto some dryer roads. The drive threw the mountains however, was breathtaking! I managed to get to Vancouver in one piece, only to wake up in the morning to drive to Victoria.

From there I was north bound to my last stop in Campbell River. I headed out that evening for dinner when out on the front lawn of the Hotel was 2 deer! I think I was more startled then they, and like any good photographer, I didn’t have my camera!!

The next day was the final leg of the trip. I had to go back through the mountains to Kelowna, and wow, another incredible drive! If you have not gone that way and taken the drive, you should!

After it was all said and done I had shot 11 different hotels in 10 different cities! It was a busy trip, and a very successful one. Have a look and let me know what you think.

We got to the location and started to set up the scaffolding and yes, there is a first time for everything! Luckily all went well and we are still here to talk about it. But there was another issue, no sun, and overcast…Good thing we brought our own sun! A 4800 watt second head, oh that will work. From the front corner of the lot and standing a nice 20 feet in the air, we had sunlight!

The shoot went together really well and without any injuries. To get the proper illusion there is a little bit of post Photoshop work. We took a picture of just the ladder with no scaffolding and no model, once that is Photoshoped in the image will look exactly how the client imagined it. Have a look and let us know what you think.