Breaking Halifax

Before I moved to Whistler I was living in Halifax Nova Scotia with a similar life style to what I have now just with smaller mountains. I always was looking for some action to shoot and one of my good friends Cory was into break dancing, I saw some pictures of what he could do and I chose some locations in Halifax and we created some pictures for his portfolio.

The first time we set up a photo shoot together I was pretty new to using off camera flashes. I set up two flashes at 45 degree angles to camera right and camera left. At the time I was shooting with Fuji Film Provia 100 which was a medium saturation colour slide film. Since I was new to using flashes and didn’t shoot Slide film (slide film is more sensitive to light i.e. easier to screw up).

For the first photo shoot I chose a location on the Halifax harbor at dust to be able to get the rich sky colours at dusk. Which was great because the day of our shoot was a hazy day but at the time I knew at dust the sky from the sunset would provide some nice colours.

The shoot went off well even though I was a bit nervous shooting slide film with the flashes and I learned a bunch about metering my flashes with ambient skies.

My second shoot with Cory was in the beginning of the summer a few weeks before I flew off to Whistler. At the time I had purchased a Canon 10D from another Action Sports Photographer for my trip to Whistler because I knew I had to make the switch from Film to Digital.

Film had its uniqueness but I knew if I wanted to start building a good catalogue of images in Whistler it would help a ton if I was shooting Digital. Digital’s the way of the future right?

The switch from film to digital is a big work flow change so It took a little while to adapt which Is why I wanted to get out and shoot with Cory again to familiarize myself with the new Canon 10D.

For this shoot it was in the middle of the day and I found a beautiful mural near the Halifax Commons Skate Park that I knew would make a great back drop for a photo shoot.

I set up 2 flashes on each side of our designated break dancing area. The flashes where parallel with Cory to add some contrast on him instead of the flat natural light we had that day.

We managed to capture more usage-able photo’s from our second shoot together and I was quite happy with the results.