Today 5 of my photos were dropped off at the Orb gallery to be included in their upcoming ‘Art of Giving‘ show. I’m so thankful to be included in this cool event and hope you all can come out and join me on the 26th for the opening and auction. This is only my third time showing my work publicly in this way. You know… Prints. Hung. On walls… and I’m totally excited. Thank you so much to everyone involved in pulling together such a great show and cool group of artists!

No rest for the wicked though now that the Orb show is ready to go… I’ve also been asked to show my photography in the upcoming ‘Cheaper’ show here in Vancouver. This event features Vancouvers top 150 emerging visual artists and I’m humbled to be showing amongst some of my personal favorites including Jer Crowle, Fiona Garden, and The Dark. More news on this one soon as the details come together!

I’m sitting here in the ‘Crowd Sourcing’ panel at VIDFEST 2008. Derek, Jasmine and Matt are doing an awesome job talking about the wisdom of crowds and community participation on the internet. It got me thinking… I’m working on an Artist Statement for an upcoming photography show and thought I’d share it and get some feedback. I’ve never written anything like this before and am quite nervous to share it so widely, but I figure my friends know me best and can probably help out. What do you think of this draft? What about the tone? Too informal? What is your reaction? HELP!!!

I’ve always been drawn to the creative and visual arts, but I never developed a talent for drawing or painting (despite years of trying). In photography, I found an outlet for my yearning for creative expression. Suddenly I could capture and share some of what was going on inside my head.

I’ve had no formal education in photography, but I’ve got tremendous passion for it. I simply fell in love with it, and after a while I started to think I could do it. It took me several years and several thousand pictures before I felt comfortable calling myself a photographer. I’m still struggling with the idea of calling myself an artist, and I’m both humbled and honored to be included in such an incredible and creative group.

I’ve developed as a photographer from learning by doing – finding out what works and what doesn’t (especially what doesn’t). I find inspiration in everything and everyone around me. I’m curious by nature, but I’ve also been lucky to have been helped along the way by so many who’ve been willing to show me the ropes, answer my questions, and keep me going the right way. Many thanks to all.

I use photography to capture a tiny glimpse of what’s going on in the world as I see it. Mostly I do this for myself, but I am always pleased when something I’ve shot resonates with others. For a moment, we’re all in the same place.

Special thx to my buddy Alan for some help pulling this together!

Check out the new ION Magazine blog - featuring Daily(ish) Reviews, behind-the-scenes peeks at fashion and music shoots, and access to guest list and insider info on the by-now-legendary ION parties. They assure me that 08 is going to be next-level, and Static Photography and Kris Krug will be a part of it all! Good work Fiona, Vanessa, and Michael.

PS. We’ve also recently created a ION Magazine Flickr group. Submit your photos there and have them included in the magazine and the blog. Here’s some more info…

A couple weeks ago I was a guest on CBC’s On The Coast talking about photography and how to take better family photos over the holidays. It was a fun interview with JJ Lee who is a fashion and design columnist for CBC Radio One. Every Monday you can hear JJ On The Coast. OTC airs between 3-6 PM on AM 690 in Vancouver. JJ also writes for the Georgia Straight about fashion.

From JJ’s blog…

“Fashion photographer Kris Krug, just back from China Fashion Week, took the time to give some pointers on how to make your snapshots works of art… Follow these tips and you’ll have holiday photographs worth posting!”

Listen to the segment here…

Thanks JJ and happy holidays!

PS. Thx to Vancouver photographer Fiona Garden for the hookup. *squish*

With BC Fashion Week bearing down on me, I’ve spent some time this week catching up on blogging over at my fashion photography blog at Static Photography. I’ve been shooting tons and involved in lots of interesting projects but haven’t had the time to post about them properly until now. Late last week I put up posts about:

• Arson Spring 2008 fashion shoot - I shot the lifestyle pics for Arson’s upcoming spring catalog.
• The Police Reunion Tour - photos from The Police’s dress rehearsal the night before they kicked off their world tour.
• Androgyny Magazine inspired photoshoot - a shoot with Malloreigh and Patron inspired by Androgyny Magazine
• AJ Woodworth shoot - I recently shot the pics for countryrock pop-star AJ Woodworth’s upcoming album
• b5 Media photoshoot - I traveled to Toronto to work on a fashion shoot for b5’s new online merchandise store.

I still have a fair amount of catchup to do and a backlog of creative shoots that I’m working on but it feels good to get these up. The site is rather new and I’m still working on growing the content and traffic there. Thanks for checking it out, please subscribe to the RSS feed and consider linking to the site on the keywords ‘Vancouver fashion photographer‘ or something similar.

Photo by Rachael Ashe

This weekend is BarCamp Vancouver and I’ll be heading up a PhotoWalk on Friday night and a PhotoCamp on Saturday.

Here’s some shots from last years late night photowalk at BarCamp.

If you’re interested in photography, cameras, or just want to talk a cool walk through East Van… it would be great to see lots of you out there. Here’s the details. Get in touch with me if you have any questions.

PhotoWalk
- signup on FaceBook
- meet at WorkSpace
- 11pm, Friday August 17th

PhotoCamp
- signup on the Wiki
- @ Workspace during BarCamp Vancouver
- TBD, Sunday August 18th

BarCamp Vancouver is this Friday and Saturday. I’m one of the organizers and will be hosting my 5th PhotoCamp. If you live near Vancouver and use the internet you should come to this event. It will be fun. You will learn a lot. You will mean a lot of awesome people. You unfortunately will not get laid.

Here’s all the details and informations about the event… get in where you fit in.

I took this quiz that Thomas Hawk pointed me towards and the results that were ‘the robot’ thinks that my photography most resembles Helmut Newton’s… who happens to be one of my inspirations. Awesome.

Here’s a video of me talking about photography at Northern Voice earlier this year. It was taken by Robert Scoble of PodTech and has been posted all over the web including over at Digital Photography School where there is an interesting pissing match going on between people who think my video is a good informal intro to photography and the people who think I’m lame because I don’t know where in Germany the glass in my lenses is ground. *smirk*

In the past 2 years I’ve getting more and more into fashion photography. I’m involved in a couple photography and fashion online communities and subscribe to a few blogs and am generally trying to familiarize myself with the industry and scene. I go to meetups, look at other photographers work, assist different photographers when I can, but photography books and tear them apart, and book lots of lil creative shoots for practice and experience. Anyway, today over at Flickr in the Fashion Photographer’s Discussion Forum I came around this awesome post that I thought was so insightful that I wanted to copy it here to my blog.

“there are few exceptionals for sure. but my “personal” experience are here:

dont go to the expensive photography college,they are a ripoff for the posh kids. the most important thing i ve ever learned in college was the zone system, u can learn it in one week for under 20£. i spend hours and days in the darkroom. u can build a make shift darkroom for less than 300£. it cost me 6000£ in the end and delivering pizza with my lomo.

dont assist (specially those famous one)photographer or you will be shooting like him, only if u like to be copycat , or a short cut to the dosh, but believe me u will never be happy( maybe assist several diferent photographes, but then when are you going to do your own stuff??).

to learn how to light things up, just spend time dazing under the sun, you get a good idea about lighting for sure. the rest you will find a way to get it. i build a £50 kino flood or get a flood 500w tungsten light from a construction site, legally.

dont buy any fancy equipments, my £10 seagull twin lens works great with landscape. digital camera and computer are terrible inventions if you dont have the discipline to use it. shoot film first, black and white film and make some mistakes. absolutely no retouching, buy a computer later when u have a client.

have a very very good relationship with as many model agencies as you can…..be nice to your crews and let them create something for you as well. you should have a good feeling in the beginning who you are working with. feed them even just an apple and a banana. charismatic personality get you very far.

dont copy trends or up and coming stuffs or u will always be the one catching up with everybody else. find inspiration in some unlikely resources. if i dont have to, i prefer not to use models, instead my fav. are dancers, actors…..but some great models just had it all…

dont give a damn on what everybody said, photorgaphy comes first, fashion second then the model to fit in the shot, NOT vice verse, maybe equally important sometime but not more important than photography******(only if you want to create a picture with an unique signature of yourself and create a niche of fans and clients, then follow this path)

these are everything i did for the last 8years, and i realized its a long(*)road( not so hard and painful if you are passionate about photography and have some nice pictures sometime) .

make sure you have enough to pay your rent and food, or get your frineds and families to pay for it …. just for a while and dont piss them off, they are a life saver…

and keep on shooting and no retirement plans. ”

Original post by takkytak
Photo by Megan Cole

(this has been cross-posted from my fashion photography blog)

We've really been learning a ton about flashes, strobes and studio lighting for fashion photography in the past year and one of the main avenues for my education has been assisting other working photographers on their creative projects.

Recently we had the chance to go to a local Gastown boxing training gym to assist on a shoot for Trevor Brady. We brought our new lights and between the 2 of us we lit 4 different locations and came up with these shots.

We spent most of the time on set setting up and testing lighting and cameras, but also had the opportunity to step in and Trevor took a couple test shots of Kris this time around and published them with the rest of the images. *blue steel* Careful, now he's a 'male model. Ha.

Trevor is a true creative talent… We're big fans of him as a person of his work as well. He's been super gracious and knowledgable and very fun to hang out with. Thanks again man.

Model - Kay (Jettmodels.com).
Photography - Trevor Brady.
Assistant - Kris Krug.
Makeup - Dana Mooney.
Wardrobe Stylist - Jessica Smith.
Location - Vancouver, Canada

(cross-posted from my Static Photography blog where I’m starting to get more work in the music and band photography space… yay!)

Other than fashion photography some of our favorite shoots are live concerts and bands. Static Photography was at South by Southwest (SXSW) again this year and had the chance to shoot over 30 bands including Bloc Party both live on stage as well as behind the scenes.

We still have quite the backlog of both film and digital photos to deal with so stay tuned. For now you can check out more Bloc Party photos here on Flickr as well as all our pics from SXSW 2007.

(This is cross-posted from my fashion photography blog)

Some cold wet Saturday's in Vancouver it's just plain hard to get rolling. To fire up our creative juices this weekend, Static pulled together a shoot with aspiring models Margaret Torgerson, Jordan Petryk and Bill MacEwan to build up their portfolios and have some fun.

We pulled from Discollection made by local vancouver fashion designers kdon and Elika Designs, styled by Kimberley Nelson and hit the Vancouver streets and alleys. This is what we came up with. Check out the rest of the creatives over at Flickr.

(This is cross-posted from my photography blog over at http://staticphotography.com)

We recently had the chance to wander around Gastown and dowtown Vancouver with actor and musician Mark Huculak. He looks like Justin Timberlake and sounds like Akon and he was an absolute pleasure to hang-out with and shoot.

I shot 100% film on this including both color negative and cross-processed expired slide film. Check out the rest of the headshots and portraits over on Flickr and check out Mark and his music on his MySpace.

If you’re an actor or actress (or model or dancer or DJ or comedian) looking to have headshots or portraits taken and/or build your portfolio please don’t hesitate to drop us an email or give us a call. We’re fun, easy to talk to and affordable… look at the results!

With Northern Voice behind me it’s time to finalize preperations for my trip to Austin Texas for SXSW (thats South by Southwest for the uninitiated) 2007.

Last year SXSW was huge for us at Bryght. We had a booth, thew a great party with Raincity, Blue Flavor and NewsVine, and drummed up a bunch of great Drupal development and consulting gigs. Since last year we’ve worked on lots of online community projects including the one for Warner Brothers Records and are excited to mix it up again with music industry moguls down in Texas.

This year will be more of the same with the exception that I’ll be speaking on panel this year. The first panel of the whole conference in fact! Alex Williams, Corey Dennis and I are working together to present the talk “Snakes on A Mother Fuckin Plane“. Raincity will have a booth this year and Bryght will have a presence in it. Come find me in booth J5 during exhibition hours.

I’m trying to keep track of all the extracurricular activities that I’ll be participating in over at Upcoming.org. Of particular interest is this years South by Northwest party throw by Byght, RCS, and Blue Flavor as well as the Yahoo BarTab party featuring Flickr, MyBlogLog, Upcoming, Bix, Pipes, etc etc..

I took a bunch of pics last year including some great ones of the Flaming Lips. I’m super excited to get out and about with my cameras again this year and see what I can capture.

I’m super excited and have lots to do before I leave next Friday. If you’re gonna be there and wanna hang out make sure you drop me a line and let’s plan to meetup!

(photo by Trevor Brady)

I recently assisted on a photoshoot with awesome Vancouver fashion photographer Trevor Brady. Trevor is an amazing guy with fingers in lots of different creative pies: from the web, to retail, to photography.

I brought out my new Alien Bees studio lighting and we tinkered around with our 5 lights combined. I learned a ton about studio lighting gear and am excited about another upcoming shoot that I will be assisting him on at at boxing studio here in Gastown. Stay tuned.

Thanks Trev for having me out and to everyone who collaborated on this super creative shoot.

Photographer: Trevor Brady
Assistant: Kris Krug
Model: Bianca (Jett Models)
Makeup: Dana Mooney
Styling: Adan Chan
Location: Studio 304

(Cross-posted from my fashion photography blog over at www.staticphotography.com)

This is a very exciting week for me as I prep with the rest of the organizing team for Northern Voice 2007 and MooseCamp.. I'm going to be leading a PhotoCamp as a part of the event and am wondering who else will be there?

Didja catch all that? I know it's a lot… here's a couple quick descriptions.

Northern Voice - Vancouver's 3rd annual personal publishing conference held out at UBC. Saturday, February 24th @ UBC.

MooseCamp - the first day of Northern Voice is a self-organizing 'unconference in the style of BarCamp. Friday, February 23rd @ UBC.

PhotoCamp - the session at MooseCamp that I am pulling together focused on photography and collaboratively presented by the many talented photographers attending Northern Voice.

So far I know that Matt Trentacoste, Warwick Patterson, Bre Pettis and Evan Lesson plan on giving workshops at Photocamp… and that good buddies Robert Scoble and Scott Beale will be on hand for the event… but I'd love to know who else is coming and if you have something you'd like to talk about? Drop me an email or post to your blog and I'll get you on the agenda.

(cross-posted from my Vancouver Fasion Photography blog over at www.staticphotography.com)

We recently had the chance to do a fun fashion editorial photoshoot with Natalie Pagnucco. We used several impromtu Vancouver photoshoot locations including an alley along Water Street in Gastown, and Matthew Good's apartment.

Congratulation to Natalie, she has recently been picked up by the Vancouver modeling agency L2 Models and has used several of the shots she worked on with Static in her portfolio.

Kdon over at Discollection is an amazing designer and stylist. I've been using her for lots of Static Photography shoots lately and was even more impressed than usual in the job she did styling the Ashley-Rae photoshoot with awesome designer vintage clothes from her store.

I recently stumbled on this great list of photoshoot tips for models (or anyone who is having their portraits taken). Thanks to Vancouver editorial and people photographer Dawn Stenzel for the list!

I'm sure every working photographer probably has their own list. What's on yours?

1. Make sure you get a good night's sleep prior to the shoot. This will help prevent the un-wantedbags under the eyes as well as help give you the patience and stamina that is needed during a shoot. After all, we all look and feel better after a good nights sleep!

2. Your normal diet should include the daily recommended consumption of water. This alone will add greatly to the look and healthiness of your skin.
3. Striking different poses with the same facial expression does little to enhance your portfolio. Spend some time in front of a mirror learning and developing a variety of expressions. You may want to consider studying the expressions and body language of the top models in your field for examples and ideas. If you are just starting out your photographer will be able to share ideas with you.
4. I can appreciate those models, dancers and people in the talent industry that prefer to wear as little make up as possible. However, I prefer to have a make up artist and even possibly a hair stylist on set whenever I am shooting, although this is not always possible due to the pricing package the model has chosen. I am going to include a few make up tips for if a make up artist is not present for your photo shoot.

   If you leave all your other make up at home never go to a photo shoot without your facial powder. The freshly scrubbed face will undoubtedly present undesirable highlights in the nose and forehead. If you are intent on the natural look you can find a translucent powder that will tone down the highlights (consult a make up artist for recommendations). There is only so much your photographer can do with high key lighting and you certainly do not want your images to project a shinny or oily looking skin.

   A matte look can make a big difference in the quality of your headshots. By using a solid foundation evenly blended well into the neck and upper chest area we are able to avoid changes in colors.

   Your eye shadow should be a lighter shade to avoid the "raccoon look". A lighter shade gives a flattering appearance of bringing the eyes forward rather than the unflattering deep set appearance from a darker shade.

   Be sure to carry your hair brush, hair spray, and/or gel to the shoot. Keep hair and jewelry accessories small. Hair styles can make a drastic difference in a model's look.

5. Try to avoid sun tanning just before your shoot. Start tanning weeks before to avoid sun burn and tan lines on the day of your shoot.

Cross posted from my Static Photography blog: Photoshoot Tips for Models.