Sunday Panorama Shooting! Whee!

Ok so I’ve been learning to shoot spherical panoramas for work…. it’s tres cool, so I’ve taken it upon myself to give it a whirl on my own too.  Feast your eyes on some panos that I shot last Sunday.  I shot some HDR stuff that day too, but it takes ages to process, so I’ll post those later.

So, click on the image and it will link to the panos.  Click and drag in the image window to look around.  Oh, give it a minute to load, my web server is painfully slow at times.  You’ll know it’s loaded when there’s no black and white portions left.

Enjoy!

Some hockey shots

I've been working on weekends for a company that shoots minor tournaments in the Ottawa area. It's a lot of fun and the extra bit of cash is nice. Here's some samples of my handywork. Enjoy!

Mr. Edward Jones

Here's Ed, Lisa's (well, actually he's sorta everyone's) cat. He's quite talkative and not a big fan of staying still for photos. Yes, I realize that everyone takes pictures of their cats and posts them online, but none of them are of Eddie, so eat that! 

(In trying to clean up the code I lost 2 of the images… to be posted later!)

Vice Family - January 3rd, 2009

Ok here's some selections from the first (and currently only) family shoot from 2009. I'm reasonably happy with the results, although I find it really difficult to compensate for my surroundings in client's homes. I think I'm getting spoiled by having a studio with top o' the line lighting at work. However, it's a good exercise in thinking on my feet. All that being said, I think it's a little too flatly lit, could have been a bit more dramatic, but it was tough with all the ambient light. Still learning!

Photo Bank shoot - Feb. 11, 2009

Ok, so I have this cool project going on at work... basically the department would like people to stop using stock photography of people in our publications/presentations/etc...  So, here's where I come in!  The good people in Communications have started gathering folks interested in being "models" and I'm shooting them in groups, and doing individuals as well, with silly props and whatnot.  So here's some samples of the first bunch that I edited today.

As with the previous post, these images are copyright protected, and can't be used anywhere for anything without permission.

Enjoy!

Old Bank of Montreal Building - Ottawa

Alright! Here's some samples from a shoot I did a couple of weeks ago. I'm a little bummed about some of the colour shifts, but in any given picture, there were at least 2 sources of light, each with different colour temperature... so I kinda had to eyeball it to get the colour as close to what I saw as possible. These shots are of the "Great Hall"... it's really a great old building, it's a shame it's been sitting collecting dust for about 5 years. It'll get pressed into service again shortly however, as it gets renovated to house what is currently Room 210 in West Block on Parliament Hill... which as far as I know is used for official functions, large meetings, conferences etc. I have to go again and do the basement, which houses all the vaults and deposit boxes, which are really cool... so stay tuned...

The photos are tagged, but please note that these are copyright protected and can NOT be used for anything. Ever.

Enjoy!

Mmmmmm Thai...

They very recently opened a Thai Express place here in the food court at work.  If anyone reading this has a Thai Express near them, go there.  Now.  I mean it.  If you don't have a Thai Express near you, you have 2 choices:  1)  Get in your car, and go to a place that has a Thai Express   or   2)  Open a Thai Express, and reap the benefits of on-demand Pad Thai!

 

Don't get me wrong, their Pad Thai is probably not as good as most non-ghetto Thai restaurants.  But then, I can't honestly say a 1/4 Pounder can even hold a candle to most restaurant burgers, but it still sells cuz it's fast food!  All that being said, their Pad Thai still kicks ass.  Don't just take my word for it... examine the attached photo!!!  Remember to wipe the drool from your monitor and keyboard...

 

 

What up, yo?

Ok so I've already broken my promise of posting something once a day. At least I'm doing it on Twitter, so that counts for something!

To update from the previous (full) post... Bludomain has come through and far exceeded my expectations in terms of service. A few short hours after ordering my web site through them, it was uploaded to my web server, and ready for me to customize. Not only that, but I was having some problems uploading images this weekend so I submitted a support ticket (which, from what I read online, was supposed to be a complete waste of time) and they had the ticket resolved within hours... on the weekend no less. It looks like they repaired any customer service issues they had in the past, and I would now heartily recommend them to anyone. Now, that being said, the site is almost finished! All the image sections have been set up, I just have to write some copy. This if course is the hard part, because truth be told, I suck at writing. Sure, I can blog, I can "stream of consciousness" write... but it's different and MUCH more difficult when I'm trying to sell myself to potential clients. To be quite honest... I would rather that potential clients just assume that I'm awesome and call me anyways. But hey, what can ya do? So that's where I'm at... I'm hoping to be done the text in the next couple of days, then give it to about 5 different people to hack and slash, then get this bad-boy live!

I had a good photo shoot at the Bank of Montreal building last week, I'm going to try and get them edited sometime this week or next and perhaps I'll post some stuff. This week I'm startign a new photo project at work too... they want to stop using stock images of people for departmental publications, so we're taking photos of PWGSC staff to be used instead. It should be really cool and a nice bit of experience for studio portrait photography. I need to talk to someone about using some of my gov't work in my portfolio. I've done some decent work for them and I'd love to be able to show it... but of course, it's the property of the department so I'd need some kind of permission. something to look into anyways.

Aight... I'll cut it off there... I'm sure there will be something exciting to talk about tomorrow. Perhaps I'll revel in the fact that the Leafs actually won on Saturday! Woohooo!

Life, The Universe and Everything

42.

New Website!! (hopefully)

Well, I've finally bit the bullet and taken the next step to trying to get my photo business off the ground. I feel like I've got a decent start to a portfolio, and some reasonable skillz, so it's time to start the process of getting my name out there.

For the last few months I've toyed with designing a web page and customizing a nice Flash image gallery and having a nice page, but I've come to the grim reality that I'm just not a web designer anymore. Given an infinite amount of time, I'm sure I can get back up to speed, but given the fact that I'm working 2 jobs (although to be fair, my second job only really takes one a day a week... but creeping crap it's tiring!), plus whatever photo gigs I can get... there's not a lot of web development time. So... I decided to purchase a "canned" web site from bludomain.com. Their sites are gorgeous, and I found one design that matches what I wanted to do with my own anyways. Their prices are great and from what I've read, the administration is painfully easy and works really well. The problem is, their customer service is legendary for it's shitty-ness. Do a Google search for "bludomain" and the bulk of the hits are some pretty intense rants about them... about how they never answer email and it takes longer to get their site than they promised... etc... However, it seems that each of these forum postings is matched by an almost equal number of people who said they have no problems, OR from people who said they had the CS problems to start off with, but once they deliver the site the end-user generally doesn't need to deal with them anymore and the simplicity of the sites take over. I'm an extremely patient person, so I figure if I can live through the potential CS problems, I'll be good to go once everything's set up.

So, if anyone actually reads this... check out my site at some point and see if it's up and running!
www.blairhallphotography.com

Cheers and wish me luck!

Go Wednesday Go!

Just a quick one this morning... I think my body is finally starting to
get accustomed to getting exercise again... Which is nice, because not
being able to walk from the muscle pain is sooooo not cool. I bought a
combination recumbent bike and rower, which rocks pretty hard, AND I'm
using the 10 Minute Trainer series. The DVD's are actually great,
they've been kicking my ass, in a mostly good way. That being said, if
I ever meet Tony Horton (the trainer/host of the DVD's) in a dark alley,
he's screwed.

I'm off to the old Bank of Montreal building today for a photo shoot.
I've been doing archival interior shots of all the buildings involved
with the West Block Project and this is the next on the list. Should be
pretty fun, I'm going to do a combination of regular old wide angle
pics, HDR shots, spherical panoramas and HDR spherical panoramas. I'll
post what I can, although I'm a bit leery, considering all the work I do
is property of the feds (all the work in my day-job anyways)... But
we'll play that by ear! Of course, I'm not 100% sure anyone's actually
reading this blog as of yet, so I can probably post away!

Anyhoo... Until next time! Same Bat-time, same Bat-channel...

Serenity now!!

Ok so my boss, who is generally a sweetheart... has this unfortunate ability to anger me to the point of screaming or violence... or even worse, screaming violence.  She's probably the biggest control freak I've ever met, which is made much worse by the fact that she's in complete denial about it.

 

For example:  When she's away sick or on a day off/holiday, she has all her work email forwarded home and she replies to it from home.  On numerous occasions, whoever is acting for her will reply to a client about an email, only to be told that she has already replied.  Of course she never mentions to the person acting that she's replied.  So not only does this make the acting manager look stupid to the client, it also makes us feel like she has no faith whatsoever in our abilities.  Cuz you know, answering a phone and returning emails is a pretty demanding task, that requires razor-sharp precision and ninja-like reflexes.

 

Allow me to continue...  today, we have a meeting with a client at 1:30 and the studio (where we hold client meetings that can't be done in somebody's cube) was still set up for a photo shoot and in slight disarray.  She comes to me at about 11:00 and mentions that we should tidy the room up, which of course I agree with and say that I'm working on something and will tidy well before the 1:30 meeting.  At about 12:15, I just finish munching down on my veggies and dip (immediately go to Costco and buy their Yogurt Chipotle dip... NOW!) and see her trundle on down to the studio room.  Sure enough, 2 minutes later there's a huge crash.  We have two fair sized tables in there that we use for meetings, and I had stacked one upside down on the other to free up some space for lighting.  Both of the tables are REALLY heavy.  Apparently my boss, in her infinite wisdom and legendary patience, decided she would take the table off the top, flip it over and get everything ready.  Now, my boss is about 6 months from retirement, can barely walk due to knees that will be reconstructed early this year, and I'm fairly certain she hasn't done a whole lot of weight training as of late.  How the hell did she figure she can just grab one of these tables and safely put it down?  I'm certainly not a power lifter... but I've got reasonable strength... and I can't even begin to try and flip one of these tables over by myself.  So a couple of us wander over to see what she destroyed and one person mentions that it's not illegal to ask for help.  I'm already angry because I told her I would take care of the room, and as usual she ignored me just because she's a tad obsessive about these things.  I mention calmly that I told her I was going to tidy the room, and her response was, "well, the meeting's in 45 minutes!!"  Let me dissect this statement from a critical perspective:  First of all, the meeting was in an hour and 15 minutes.  Second, even if the meeting was in 15 minutes, I WAS STILL GOING TO TAKE CARE OF IT.

 

Anyhoo... after reading back what I've written so far... it just all seems like small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.  That being said, this has been happening in varying degrees for 3 years, and there's a lot of other stuff that I haven't mentioned (but probably will as time goes on).  But like I said, she's really a sweetheart, she's done some really great things for me, and I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now without her, so I soldier on... I guess that's one thing I'm really looking forward to in terms of blogging...  being able to vent!  Although I don't want to seem like Mr. Negativepants... I'm actually a really positive guy... there's just a lot of things that piss me off!! (insert laughing emoticon and abbreviation such as LOL or ROFLMAO here)

More email testing!!!

Ok so rumour has it that you can only attach one image when posting by email.  Let's give this a whirl then shall we?  Don’t you love that we can share all this discovery together?  I feel like I should be holding hands with people and singing Kumbayah (or however the hell you spell it).  But then, holding hands with people who I potentially don't know could go either way… either it'll be a nice warm n' fuzzy, touchy-feely sorta thing… or I'll get kicked in the balls.  Your mileage may vary.  Pay no mind the the photos… I need to get out more.

<<Photo 8.jpg>> <<BeachBlair.jpg>>

More exciting testing!

Ok seeing as the PWGSC network seems to have blocked any posting or blog management… I'm now testing the ability to "mail it in"… as it were.  Frankly, I quite often mail it in here at work… but that's not really for discussion at this point.

Seems odd about the network thing though, usually when the network blocks something, if you try to access it you get this lovely page that comes up and informs you that the page you're trying to view has been blocked as per Network Policy Bullshit #XX Blah Blah.  That's really the name… I swear.  Although I replaced numbers with X's… just to protect the innocent.  Just sayin...

Sorting out my at-work blogging woes

Ok I'm testing a different iPhone app for blogging. The last one really sucked, but at least it was free.

I'm attaching a picture of my hopelessly messy desk just to test out the picture posting capabilities. Isn't this exciting?

Ok so you can't see that much of my desk. Get over it.


-- Post From My iPhone

Still annoyed...

Ok right, I've just found another limitation to this iPhone software! A cap on character count! AWESOME!!!

Anyhoo, I'm on the can writing this post, and my legs are starting to fall asleep. I'm going to keep trying to blog from my work PC, and try some offline software too. I'll have to save the pretty-fying for when I'm at home.

In closing, if anyone actually stoops as low as reading my blog, welcome! It'll get more interesting and nicer to look at as time goes along and as I learn more about the stuff I can do with blogs.

Cheers!

First real post, and I'm already annoyed...

So I've decided to re-enter the world of blogging, although I hesitate somewhat to say re-enter because of all the blogs I've attempted to start, only one ever really got off the ground, my travel blog.

I'm gonna make a real go at this one because it's something I feel like I need right now. I vow, to post at least once per day, even if it's something completely inane and useless.

So here it is, my first post, and I'm annoyed. The dumb-assed corporate network where I work appears to have blocked the authoring section of Blogger. Oh, I can read blogs 'til the cows come home (moo!) but I may not be able to post or make my blog pretty at the government's expense. Very disappointing to say the least. So you may be asking yourself, "well how the heck is he posting right now? Is he already lying to us??". Well, I have downloaded a nifty (read as: almost useless) blog app for my iPhone. I planned on using it for posts on-the-go, but it's looking like it may be my primary communicatio