This post is obviously very picture heavy and writing light. Three interior/design shoots in the past week have kept me on my toes. This shoot is from two weeks ago in downtown Calgary.
Stay tuned for next week, I’m setting up a little contest for some free swag.
Also check out my Weddings Gallery if you, or any of your friends are getting hitched I would love to photograph your wedding.
When you hear a photographer’s story you’ll often hear these two things:
“I started photography because…”
And some credible person saying ‘This photographer has such a good eye”
No one will ever say ‘Man, Reuben Krabbe has such a good eye’
One; its a cliche phrase and I despise cliches as I do runny eggs (very badly).
and two; neither of my eyes are any good. In fact they’re terrible. I was wearing glasses by age four.
My very first camera was a present from my buddy Brett for my eighth birthday. Made by the crayon company Crayola it took tiny 110 film. (bottom Left) I loved shooting with the camera but ended up stopping because it cost me too much for film and processing. Funny and sad thats what keeping me from shooting film now too.
It would be about 2 years before I would pick up any sort of camera. This camera was also an impressive behemoth to behold. The Sony Mavica. Shooting files about the size of the one of the camera below and writing it to floppy disk. Yeah, 3 1/2 inch floppy disk that make those scratchy sounds when you wrote to them and were great for throwing across the elementary school lab. And it could shoot movies too, I don’t have any stats on the quality of video but it might be a bit short of HD and you only could film 15 seconds before the floppy was full.
Several Years later again passed between me taking pictures. I think it had something to do with both of my older brothers destroying the ones they had for gifts I think. I bought a little digital camera this one came with a 16mb card, My current camera shoots single raw files about that size. The camera was a bunch of fun to shoot, but it didn’t quite do the trick. Two of my good friends Sheldon and Andrew both had tried their hand at 35mm cameras, so I wanted to do the same.
For many years my dad used a 35mm Pentax ME super to shoot our family’s adventures, and in recent years it had descended to the bottom of stacks of unused trinkets. I asked if could shoot with it on a trip to go to Whistler BC mountain biking with my brother Silas. He agreed.
I pulled the camera out in my living room and without film in the camera I played with the focus and built in meter till i had a general understanding of what function controlled what. We left on the trip and I neglected to buy film until leaving the lower mainland we made a last minute stop at some safeway on the North Shore to pick up a single roll of Kodak black and white film. I loaded the film and pulled out the camera as we camped for the night near Squamish. I shot 3 frames, double checking all of my thought processes to make sure I wouldn’t waste any of the expensive film. The next morning we stopped at Shannon Falls and I took another sparing shot.
Several months later I entered this image along with others to a competition ‘Calgary’s next top photographer’ and won an honorable mention for this picture of Shannon Falls.
Throughout the rest of the pictures on the roll I was already starting to show a trend which could be best described as ‘If it isn’t complicated to shoot, its not fun’
Both shots of Brandywine Falls above, and a seagull below were slow shutter speeds. (the first frames taken near Squamish were 4+ second exposures too) No longer is a long shutter speed complicated by any means, but at the time for my first experiments it was mind-blowing.
On my second roll of film I did my first work with an artificial off camera light source. The image below was lit with a hallogen light, not quite the lighting I use now, but it was a start.
Skiing, Mountain Biking, and Hiking were a large amount of my subjects. I had done all three of these activities for a long time, and now could document and explore the places that I recreated in a new way. Lake O’hara
“Could you do it again for me?” Any athlete who has worked with a photographer knows this lovely phrase. Thanks a bunch to my understanding friends who graciously did my bidding. This shot of Sean Sheldon and Andrew riding in Waterton is no exception, getting all three to hike this slope to ride back down for me.
First off camera Flash.
Another trend setting first: ghetto rigs. Many of my setups are often elaborate, complicated and getto due to my lack of equipment to make my ideas happen. This shot used my dad’s old flash which is so old and shady it only has one power level, triggered by an optical slave on the end of an old tripod held to the right as a monopod.
Excessive effort.
For those of you who don’t remember 35mm weren’t light, and for those of you who don’t know the West Coast Trail isn’t easy. The trend of excessive effort going into images could be said to have started by carrying a 35mm and a digital camera on the west coast trail. A G10 sure would have been nice back then…
Silas. I owe my brother Silas a lot for my photography. Mostly for the number of times I made him subject to “Can you ride it again” all too many times. We skied and biked together a lot, In fact it was his bike riding that got me into bike riding.
These two shot actually didn’t get the ‘Can you ride it again’ treatment.
The way I see it now, I started photography first and foremost because it was fun. I never want to lose that simple, yet important detail.
