Vivian Maier Street Photographer

Vivian Maier. I wish to do my bit to make sure the world knows this name. Vivian Maier, a French born photographer who past away in April of 2009, was a street photographer and nanny. She shot photos of mostly Chicago from the 50's to 70's. However, Her work was unknown up until 2009 when a young real estate agent named John Maloof went to an estate sale and bought a box with 30,000 negatives of her work. Maloof announced on Flickr of his find and pointed us to the blog he started on Maier's behalf. I've been following Maloof's blog since he first posted his find on Flickr in the discussion group HCSP (Hardcore Street Photography). It has been an amazing Flickr thread to witness and follow.

After being impressed with Maier's work, Maloof went hunting and purchased more boxes of negatives and brought the collection of Maier photos up to near 100,000 images. If you read through the Flickr thread, you'll witness how the efforts of Maloof's has now grown into a Kickstart documentary that is in the making and an art show at The Chicago Cultural Center. I must say, full credit goes to John Maloof for all his hard work and bringing Vivian Maier, perhaps one of the best discoveries in street photography, to our attention. His efforts and her art have recently made the news and a segment on Chicago Tonight can be viewed here.





A great story. Thanks, John!

Commercial Drive, Vancouver

Holga and good old tri-x.

Main St., Vancouver

Fred Herzog at Emily Carr

It was a wonderful day today. I had the privilege of sitting in on lecture at ECUAD given by renowned Vancouver street photographer, Fred Herzog. Fred's work was once shown at The Vancouver Art Gallery and on the way home from the exhibit, I paused for a moment and made this photo.



Cheers, Fred!

Squamish Nation Powwow

I took these two photos at The 2010 Squamish Nation Powwow held at the Capilano Indian Reserve Park in North Vancouver.The top image I did a high-pass contrast work over on one layer and on another layer, I did a black and white infra-red conversion and then blended the two layers. The bottom photo was imported into Vignette App and had a couple funky settings applied.

Robson St., Vancouver

A few layers here to achieve this image. I think it`s a little over-cooked HDR but many like it and compliment on it. There`s some HDR and high-pass sharpening on one layer, some surface blur for the background, and some unsharpen mask on the hair and pimples. This fellow played a great slide, btw!

In almost every picture #7

I saw this in Lens Culture and thought I'd pass it on.



In almost every picture #7 photographically tells the story of a woman whose life is captured from a camera set up near the targets at a fairground shooting gallery. It starts in 1936 in The Netherlands, takes a break between 1939 and 1945 becasue of WWII and resumes up until present time. At the age of 88, Ria van Dijk still makes her annual visit to the Shooting Gallery. Very cool!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer's Workflow

I can't believe two months have gone by! I've been on a great film set for most of the summer and haven't had a chance to have a personal life; let alone a social media one. It's great to be able sit at my desk and create some photos!

After catching up this week on emails and accounts and other business duties, I came across a Photo.net forum posting by Montréal photo re-toucher Patrick Lavoie who recommended a $25 ebook on Adobe Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5 by Michael Clark Photo.




It's called Adobe Photoshop Lightroom: A Professional Photographer's Workflow and is 353 pages! I'm really impressed with this pdf e-book. It's well written, the screen captures are top notch, and it's produced by a working pro. Get your copy here,

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/#/BOOKS/DIGITAL%20WORKFLOW/


I hope you find Michael's tips and instructions as resourceful as I am!

Trilby Jeeves Speaks 'Twitter' at Marketing Dangerously Seminar

My friend and twitter coach Trilby Jeeves spoke at The Social Media Challenge. The Challenge is a marketing and sales coaching program for business builders put on by Neil Godin and was held at The Hampton Inn in Langley, BC.




Trilby gave a great one hour tutorial and introduction to using Twitter to a few dozen small business owners. She wowed the crowd with the power of Twitter by demonstrating the nearly instant results that her followers created by their web page visits to the couple of the business owners that volunteered.




I highly recommend Trilby and her Twitter coaching. If you are new or just dabble in Twitter and wish to get through the learning curve much quicker, you can get you in touch with Trilby and take one of her coaching sessions. On Twitter, Trilby can be reached at @tjbuffoonery and her site is here http://buffooneryworkshops.com/

RED ONE Camera I.A.T.S.E. 699 Workshop

I had the pleasure of attending an IATSE 699 workshop with the RED ONE Camera.



We spent most of our time in front of the monitor learning the software. If you're not aware, RED ONE captures in RAW and like the still cameras that shoot in RAW, you have to apply "your dream" to your footage in post production with Redcine-X. Basically, this means that you only have to be careful of exposure when shooting and then once in front of the monitor, you can adjust everything else from gamma to white balance to achieve your vision. And because it is raw data, it is non-destructive editing so you can always go back and apply different changes.



Coming from a still photographer background and personally living the sweeping changes the film-to-digital transition made to our industry these last five years, it was interesting to see the familiar looks of ponder on some of the faces these fine DOP's and moving-camera people. They are going through the same learning curve on their journey from film and into digital.



It was a great class and hosted by Craig Harris of Inspired Cinema. We went over some basic stuff for newer people. Just like our still camera work-flow, we touched on how important it is to back-up and make redundancies of your back-up's. Craig had some great stories on how RED had saved a few productions a ton of money due to the fact that the footage can be viewed immediately and re-shot as opposed to finding out the next day with film.

Dennis Hopper, R.I.P.

It was Dennis and his role in Apocalypse Now that is undoubtedly responsible for my pursuit and love of photography and photo journalism. And is definitely the reason why I chose Nikon years ago. No other images from the cinema have struck me as did those of Dennis with three of four Nikon's dangling around his neck. He's been an iconic figure for me. Years later, I had the pleasure of doing unit still photography on a show of his. I knew I had completed a life dream when I had this privilege of photographing him. He was a great man and also loved art and photography. Thank you for so much, Dennis. You will be missed.

photo: Graham Timmer

Rule #1. Always carry a camera with you.

And preferably with a memory card loaded. I just happened to have my spider-sense tingle and turned to see this going on. With a trusty Nikon in one hand, and a freshly made awesome Red Burrito in the other, I quickly snapped this.

Stereo Portrait Project

With two Nikon D90 cameras, 3D portraits have been made by Alex Fry and Jamie Nimmo will have thier 3D photography exhibition, “Stereo Portrait Project”, in Sydney Australia on 27th May 2010 to the 10th of June at the OH REALLY GALLERY.



For lighting, they used three Nikon sb900’s. One was connected via pc sync in a soft box and the other two were optically slaved.

Alex and Jamie made a custom camera rig as one was needed to put the cameras as close together as possible while roughly emulating the distance between the human eyes.

The pairs of images were then batched and sorted using Aperture before being exported into Nuke. Final tweaks were made in Nuke before combining them into the final anaglyph 3D images.

"...while Nuke allowed us to simply adapt many of the same 3d work-flows we use in our day jobs as stereoscopic visual effects compositors." says Alex and Jamie.

They also printed a limited edition run of 25 books for the exhibition using the self publishing website Blurb.

More details here;

http://stereoportraitproject.com/

Looks to be a very cool exhibit. Go check it out!

Puppy X

I took these photos of puppy that I was recently looking after for a few days. I offered to be a transition home between the vet and hopefully her forever-home.





Puppy X and her story are a sad and all too familiar story in the world of dog rescue organizations.

She was one of the 27 dogs from a historical seizure in Surrey, BC on May 1 2010. Of the 27 dogs, 26 were pit bulls and one is a Sharpei. Of the 27, 23 were transferred to SPCA and then into the care and legal responsibility of the bully friendly dog rescue organization, HugABull. Of these 23, 19 were puppies and 4 were adults. The on-going story is here on a thread inside HugAbulls forum; http://hugabull.forumup.org/viewtopic.php?t=7329&mforum=hugabull

These dogs are suspected as being puppy-milled for the fighting ring and is as much as I can say. The horrors these dogs have experienced since first brought into this world are despicable. Five of the puppies have very severe mange.




An adult has a leg soon to be amputated because fighting was encouraged and then a lack of vet care for the wounds.




The one thing that continually amazes me with this breed, is their ability to trust humans after experiencing torture and abuse from the human hand. She's 14 weeks old, yet this puppy, though scared and only with me for a few hours, is slowly letting her guard down around me and my other dog and is willing to let strangers hold her, love her and care for her. And they in return are all to easy to start over and begin wagging their tails and are almost always excited to see new people. Here's a short clip of her and my forever dog trying to get her out of shell. It didn't take long, I might ad.

Jake and X from Eric Milner Photography on Vimeo.

Stories and progress reports to come!

Cheers,
Eric Milner
Still Photographer

How photography connects us to the world: David Griffin on TED.com

I came across this video on TED and must share. The photo director for National Geographic, David Griffin, discusses photography and the power it has to connect us to our world.





Cheers,
Eric Milner
Still Photographer

I Love Shooting Dogs

Sounds horrible, doesn't it? But I do. Here's a couple favorite snaps I've taken recently of a couple favorite dogs in my pack.


This is Mags (Maggie) and is mastered by Kayte.





And this is Sinbad and is mastered by Bobby Pinn.







Both dogs have owners that put tireless hours into dog rescue and work primarily with HugABull.com, a registered non-profit organization and a community of pit bull owners, advocates and enthusiasts. We're lucky to have people like these two out there making a difference.

Robson St., Vancouver

The Making of the 2010 Pirelli Calendar by Terry Richardson

Caution, if you know anything about the Pirelli Calendar's, it is NOT work safe! Enjoy!

The Making of the 2010 Pirelli Calendar by Terry Richardson from Rafael Rubira fashion4fun.com.br on Vimeo.

"House" Season Finale Filmed Entirely with the Canon 5D Mark II

Latest buzz is that the Canon 5D Mark II has become the first video-capable DSLR to shoot a complete episode of this US prime-time series. Director Greg Yaitanes, of FOX's drama series 'House', used the 5D MKII and a selection of of Canon's prime lenses along with two of the finest zoom's; the 24-70mm and 70-200mm. Speaking via Twitter, Yaitanes said that this was to achieve a shallow depth of field and also added that he 'feels it’s the future'. More here at Cinema 5D...

http://www.cinema5d.com/news/?p=2818

Cheers,
Eric Milner
Still Photographer

Adobe CS5 Photoshop is set for launch on April 12 2010.

Here's a couple sneak peak YouTube videos on some of the new features. They look like amazing new tools for the tool box.

Painting in Adobe Photoshop CS5 Step by Step


Adobe Photoshop CS5 - PatchMatch



And it looks like CS5 will bring on HDR/Photomatix/Tone Mapping/Topaz Adjust filter. Some will love, and others will not.


Photos of The Adobe San Jose Headquarters were taken by Kelly Castro, a quality engineer on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Team.


Rumour has it that CS5 will finally be 64-bit for Mac users and can utilize more than 3.2 gigs of ram!