The paragraph below is a first draft at some thoughts that I may include in the project. Looking for perspectives and feedback on photography in difficult situations such as the one in my neighborhood.
“What people need to understand about Downtown Eastside is that there is a long and sordid history to this part of Vancouver. When you make a photographic history of the place, you cannot lose sight of this fact, you need to be aware and you must be respectful of it. Jeff Wall’s oeuvre is preeminent in describing Downtown Eastside. His contributions have established themselves as key components of Vancouver’s contemporary, critical art lineage but by extension, have emphasised the dilapidation of the place.
There are only three ways of capturing the essential characteristics of Downtown Eastside on film. You can ask permission from residents explicitly, refrain from photographing them at all, or you can encourage their engagement implicitly, by way of the establishment of an affiliation that is both personable and considerate. Ultimately, the latter approach makes for a comfortable and mutually respectful atmosphere that will appropriately translate into photographs. When a resident refuses to be photographed however, the only ethical thing to do is to act in accordance with their wishes. People have stories to tell and they have histories that we want to see, but these will only be recounted when thoughtfulness and caring is shown them. When you want to document Downtown Eastside, all I say is – respect the area when you are there. Voyeuristic surveillance is not acceptable. I am not interested in that.â€
I’ve been spending a lot of time this year working to turn my photography from a project into a business. I’ve been making photographs way more often, on larger and more well paying projects, while still staying involved in the internet and technology industry. For me (tech + art = happiness).
In an effort to catch everyone up on what we’ve been up to lately we’ve posted a series of recap blog posts over on our site. In the near term we’ll be updating our portfolio, pulling together an accurate client list, and exploring other creative ways of getting our work in front of the right people. We’ve been working really hard on getting this ship in shape for the future as well as shooting almost everyday.
As a part of making sure that our studio runs like a well oiled machine we’ve brought on Danielle Sipple as our Studio Manager. She’s been working on photo editing, photoshoot production, estimating, invoicing, and promotions. She’s awesome and if you work with me and the team over at Static you’ll likely meet her.
South by Southwest 2009 – Band & Live Music Photography – The next big trip for Static Photography was traveling down to the southern section of Austin, Texas for the yearly festival of South by Southwest . SXSW includes four days of Interactive and Film followed by four final days of Music.
Creative Class Gets Together at Pecha Kucha Night 5 in Vancouver – Translated as the sound of conversation Pecha Kucha is the optimized vision of creative presentations. At every Pecha Kucha Night around the world, each presenter is allowed 20 images shown at 20 seconds a piece, with a grand total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds for their entire presentation. Having this time limit really keeps presentations down to just the good stuff.
This was the fifth time that Pecha Kucha has happened in Vancouver . Kris Krug was chosen with 11 other presenters to speak on varying topics. Krug’s discussion was a visual handbook on open-sharing . He was positioned along side Rex Weyler ‘s photo presentation from the startup of Greenpeace , Dolly Hopkins ‘ discussion on her involvement with the Illuminaries Festival , and Shawna Cox ‘s documentary adventure with the desert races.
Matt Hern started the Purple Thistle back in 2001 with 7 teenage youth. Carla Bergman is an adult mentor who helps the youth run the collective today. Carla is also the founder of Rain zine which features art and writing from youth at the Purple Thistle as well as us at Static Photography .
Lotsa other stuff goin’ on out there for us too but no time or space for it here. Follow me on Twitter. See ya soon!
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.
“Fashion photographerKris 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!”
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:
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.
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
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 testshots 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.
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.
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
My business partner, Rhonda Fast, is having a photography show at the Wicked Cafe in Vancouver. It’s a part of a 12 month series we’re running featuring emerging Vancouver photographers and Rhonda is the 3rd artist to exhibit. Her show is titled “Strike”. The idea behind minimalist art is that it lacks concept, focusing on geometric shape, monochromatic color palettes and anonymity of style. That’s where the journey for “Strike” began. However, as will happen, it evolved, concept started to develop and location became of utmost importance. Strike is a new look at the commonplace; a twist on the mundane of an iconic pastime. An exploration in minimalism with concept. The show will run for about a month and we’d love for you to join us at the opening on December 16th @ 7pm.
My friend Ian King called me up this week and asked if I could drop everything and come take a photo of someone he was interviewing for the Terminal City News. Turns out the interview was with Sam Sullivan who is running for mayor in Vancouver. I took my Canon 20d but forgot my memory card so I decided to shoot expired slide film instead and to cross-process it. It actually made me happy that I forgot the flash card so that I had a good excuse to go analog and shoot something that I feel like is a little more distinctively my style right now. A couple of the shots turned out and it Ian ended up using this one for the cover. I think it would be fun to do more quick lil projects like this.
Last week Roland and I drove down to Portland for the Podcast Hotel. The event was for musicians, record labels and other people interested in podcasting, the web and audio recording technology. Thanks to Alex Williams for everything you did to pull together a great first event… it was great to see Eric, JD, Matt as well as meet lots of great people like my new best friend Schlomo Rabinowitz.
I presented on Friday about Web 2.0 and how bands and artists can take advantage of open-source and free web based tools to grow their audience, create new revenue streams, and connect with fans. The presentation is available here for download in PDF format.
SillyGwaiLo is sitting here giving us a super sneak preview of the DrupalFlickr module he wrote this weekend (based on Boris‘ Skype Drupal module by the way). This thing is very alpha… and very hot. Unlike other implemenations of Flickr/Drupal modules I’ve seen this one is multi-user… perfect for community sites!
It adds your flickr sets, photos, favorites or rss feed of tagged photos as a block to your Drupal site. It automagically sucks in all the data via XML from Flickr and displays it on your site. It also sucks your Flickr photos into your user profile on a Drupal site based on your NSID (Flickr user number). The top 5 photos from your photostream (or any site users) can be displayed at the top of your profile page. In addition, it can create a ‘photostream’ page on your site imported from your real-time photostream at Flickr. It can suck in anything from Flickr that is available via the API including all the metadata too like comments, favorites, EXIF data, upload times, etc etc.
Colin wrote some code for Backstage that publishes photos to Flickr from a Bryght or Drupal site. I think they’re going to work on integrating their stuff together this week. Cool stuff boys… will be exciting to work the bugs out and release the code.
I’ve been telling my friends, family and various other photogeeks I hang with that Canon will be putting out a full-frame sensor upgrade to the Canon 20d in time for Christmas. The 1d is just too expensive, but all us prosumers are drooling over the idea of a full-frame sensor. I also guessed that it might be around 12 megapixels. The 8MP of the 20d can’t keep up and the 18MP of the 1d is just ridiculous and I can’t afford to pay for it. Anyway, here’s a rumor I found online (thx to Roland) that suggests that my instincts were correct and that Canon will be putting out a new model called the 5d later this year.
There are a couple rumors floating around this morning about a new Canon dSLR, the 5D. Canon’s model numbering is reversed from most manufacturers–lower numbers signify higher-end models, so this would be a model above the current Canon 20D but below the 1D series.
The spec sheet that I’ve seen suggests that it’s a full-frame camera that takes 12.8 MP images at 3 FPS. It looks like a cross between the 20D (same AF and metering system) and the original 1DS (same sensor size and similar resolution). The rumors put the price around EUR 3500, which usually ends up meaning that B&H will be selling it for between $3000 and $3500. That’s a fantastic price for a full-frame camera, but personally, I’d probably rather buy the 1D mk II–it’s basically the same price, it has a slightly smaller sensor and slightly lower resolution, but it has 2.5x the frame rate, an amazingly fast SD interface, and it’s built like a tank.
So is this a rumor or yet another leak on Canon’s part? Generally, new Canon cameras don’t leak until a day or two before the official announcement, so we should know what they’re up to by the end of the week.
Last week I went to Gnomedex. I took a bunch of photos. Some film, some digital. Here’s a few of my fav’s. Please check out the rest of the photoset too over at my event blogging site. I still have a few more to scan (including some cute ones of Chris and Ponzi post-show) that I’ll be uploading over the next few days. To everyone I met, thanks for being so photogenic.
For 3 years I was the editor-in-chief of a great online magazine called *spark. It was a culture and technology monthly with a philosophical bent and great design and photography. Here are the archived issues.
Photography Ethics on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside - Comments (5)
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