click photo to see it larger!

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Who is Chase Jarvis? A commercial photographer that likes to wear sneakers and photograph ninjas. Check out his work!

Why do I have Chase Jarvis’s Shoes? Because I entered my name into the Chasejarvisshoeproject.com and received them in the mail.

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Unsure weather or not Chase’s shoes had ever had the opportunity to visit Montreal, I brought lefty and righty out to a date one evening where they could view the splendor of Montreal in all it’s magical glory. How? By arriving 2 hours early, waiting for the sun to set, and run around with sparkler’s in my hands to paint and draw with my untalented hands!

The date however did not start there. Chase’s shoes and I had some fantastic adventures involving twisted pipes:

A quick escape from the house of ultimate doom:

Attempting to save the shoes from the almighty construction machine:

… and failing

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I think somewhere along the lines, Lefty and Righty decided that I was getting a little boring so I figured I’d involve some friends as well as members from the Montreal Strobist community:

From left to right: Rosemary Chu, Anna Li, Yannick Khong, Jerry PH (and his dad behind him), Martin Auclair and Kyle Ruggles.

Obviously, I wasn’t the only one awed by the power that these mystic shoes held:

Even our shoes decided to follow the lead!

That is.. until lefty and righty tried to pull a quick escape on us:

No worries though! It soon began raining Chase Jarvis Shoes down on top of us…!

The End.

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

Thou robb’st my days of business and delights,
Of sleep thou robb’st my nights ;
Ah, lovely thief, what wilt thou do?
What?  rob me of heaven too?

Originally, this wasn’t really the concept… but the result was still pretty entertaining.

In complete contrast, this is the next shot we took together:

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

There is never enough time.

24 hours in a day, 7 days a week. That’s a constant. The only thing we can change is how we manage our time.

5 hours of sleep a day, 40 hours of work in 4 days, and 40 hours of photography over 7 days with the remaining time going towards family and girlfriend.

Still, there is not enough time.

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It is ironic that I had originally chosen the theme for the 7th Montreal Photo Challenge to be “Distress” & “Out of Time” specifically for people in exams thinking that I’d be perfectly safe. Turns out that I managed to fill my schedule as full as the next guy over. With 5 photoshoots over the last week, 2000 photos to sift through, a surprise birthday party for the little sister, and Anna finishing exam,  life’s been pretty hectic.

I can’t complain though since I’m doing what I love. =)

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The shot above was taken in two parts.

The first was the background clock taken during a photoshoot last Saturday with a porcelain princess. Be sure to look out for those shots, I believe my best portrait ever taken will be included in it =)

The second shot was taken with the help of the lovely Anna Li in her apartment hallway. One shoot through umbrella on camera right to match the clock’s lighting and a little bit of fill from the front flash was all that was required to make the shot. A bit harder was to make sure she had the exact right posture that would fit properly on the arms of the clock! We took a total of 73 shots!

Hope you enjoyed the result

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

- “We are the sum of our experiences.”

Take all the good and bad, throw it all together, blend it in the mixer for a lifespan X, and every single event that has happened in the past has made us who we are today. There’s no reason to regret the past, no matter how bad the past was… learn and live; it’ll be all gone before you see it pass by.

*End random philosophic rant.

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This was yet another shot taken in the back of the Du College metro with my buddy Michael. This shot alone took us approximately an hour of trying and testing to get right. To clarify things, this shot is NOT a multiple exposure but rather a single long 20 second exposure.

How was it done?

The green glow comes from the ambient light located upper camera left.

Besides that, the camera was set in Rear-Sync Flash mode where the flashes trigger at the end of the 20 second exposure (which is why the center character is so clear).

During the 20 second period, our hero Michael took two other poses, (the versions of him left and right) while the hyperactive photographer (yours truly) ran around with an SB-800 flash unit manually triggering it to create the two ghosts. For the ghost on the right, I flashed twice from camera right and for the ghost on the left, I flashed twice from camera left. And for the final shot, 2x Sb-600s fired from camera left at 45 degrees , 1x gelled Red the other bare while the Sb-800 I was holding flashed from straight ahead, 45 degrees above the camera.

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

Blog Update: There is now a new fancy star rating system at the end of each post for those of you who are too lazy to leave a comment just throw on a rating =)

Part of the same series with Michael, this shot was somewhat of a challenge to produce. Taken with at ISO-800, F/9.5 and with a 1 second exposure, photographer and model had to work together to synchronise the jumping and shooting.

Before heading out into the technical details, I wanted to share with you guys the ANGLE at which this was taken. Let me explain. I was standing on the top of the tip of that triangle shooting downwards while Michael stood on the metal grill and jumped upwards. Fully conscious that I was risking my life and my brand new 17-55 f2.8, I had to get up there because the opportunity was too good to miss out on. (Below shots taken today, day time)

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So the setup looked something like this, where I had the off camera flash blasting off at full power and the on camera SB-800 firing at 1/16th for some fill.

The off camera SB-600 flash had a red gel on it which explains the redness in the image. The yellow on the other hand actually comes from a combination of the fluorescent and sodium vapor ambient captured by the 1 second exposure.

Turns out that the two colors compliment each other nicely =D

—
Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

Thinking back on the moments we had together ~ 

That’s what this shot makes me think when I look at it. A man, thinking of the past.

Although I’d like to say that this shot was 100% pre-thought out, this was actually the only “mistake” among the series of photos Anna and I took together Friday afternoon, I think it came out to be the most interesting one. 

The original shot, was supposed to look something like this, w here we were trying to make a heart with our chest, necks and lips… It didn’t quite work out:

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The reason why the shots are semi-blurred is that all this was done using the natural sunlight shinning through the window so we didn’t have that really strong harsh light for clear defined shadows.  The camera was mounted on a tripod that was on top of Anna’s bed which was then set to Interval Timer mode where we had 10 seconds between a series of 9 shots to pose. 

Nothing too technical, nothing too fantastic and probably far too cheezy. All in all, a relaxing shoot filled with cheese.

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

Ok, so this isn’t a very normal photo, I’ll admit.

Actually, it’s probably extremely far from the norm.

The concept for this shot actually came to me while talking to Yannick Khong, a friend of mine who lives, breathes and dreams photography. Click here to check out his blog.  Yannick, after seeing my shots from the Besnard Lakes, wanted me to write up a tutorial on how to take Multiple Exposures. Combine that with an upcoming MUPS photography contest in which the theme is “Senses” gave birth to the above shot.

The concept was to incorporate four out of the five senses in a photograph.

• hearing
• smell
• taste
• touch

…. with the fifth being you, the viewer’s eyes.

This shot took 51 tries, and I know it’s not perfect, probably because my ear and nose managed to mash itself together into an unrecognizable blur.

So how was this taken?
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Equipment Used:

• D300 with a 17-55mm/ f2.8
• Manfrotto 190-ProB Tripod
• 2x SB-600 Units on CLS
• 1x Sexy model/photographer

Step 1:

First, I had to set up my Camera on the tripod, zoom it to 55mm to have some fantastic closeups of my flawless facial features (*barf). This was set up at approximately face height so that I wouldn’t have to stoop over like the Hunchback of Notre Dame (although I do look remarkably like him in this shot)

Step 2:

Drill down into the camera menus and look for two things:
Multiple Exposure and Interval Timer

Why Interval Timer and not just a simple timer? Because the Interval timer will focus after the timer reaches zero, whereas the Timer will only focus before  … meaning that I have to be standing at the exact moment I’m pressing the shutter. Since I have yet to master the art of Shadow Replication, the only alternative was to use the Interval Timer.

So there we go. I set the Multiple Exposure to “3″, with “auto-gain” activated and drilled down into the “Interval Timer”, and set that to “3″ with a 30 second delay between each shot.

Step 3:

Plan how I wanted to be lit.

This took a couple tries but I have realized that the best shots for multiple exposures come out of highly contrasted shots with various hot spots and dark spots.

Shot 1: The ears.

This was the hardest shot of them all. Turns out that it’s really hard to position your ear at a specific place inside a fixed frame since your eyes and ears are… well, somewhat far apart.

On top of that, my hair’s a mess. Meaning I have hair coming out of well, everywhere. Consequently, I tossed on a black hood to try to control it, but as you can see on the drawing, some strands still managed to struggle free =(

In other news, I’m getting a haircut Monday, so that hopefully won’t be a problem in the future.
As far as the lighting is concerned, I just used two SB-600’s positioned on either side of the camera to create a focused beam of light on my ear:

Shot 2: The mouth

I tried all angles and positions and it turns out that being able to see the Teeth is far better than staring at my not-so-awesome brad pitt lips.

All that required to be done was to point one flash towards my face as a fill light, and the second down my throat to light my mouth. Hold the position for the remaining 15 seconds…

*click*

Shot 3: The hands

This part was actually the easiest since I could see where my hands were pointing at. I have to say though, that this particular shot did not make my hands come out the way I wanted to but it works out anyways.

Lightwise, I positionned my two sb-600s on opposite sides pointing at the the respective palms while I reached out to the camera.

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From there, all that remained to be done was to convert it to a sexy Black & White.

Hope you enjoy the shot,

—
Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

What happens when you mix artistic creativity  with the technology of digital photography?
Smiles, tears and a pair of creative photographs.

The shots were, for once, lit by natural light. By tossing a sofa, computer desk and a round chair thingy all over to one side of my room, we managed to get a small clean corner to work with. These shots were done in collaboration with the fantastic Anna Li who’s hands you can see in these shots using her Canon 40D mounted on a tripod in one corner of my bedroom.

The intial shots that were taken had far too much contrast and we were loosing too much texture on the skin.  A little voice then popped in my head saying that I should try using a reflector,  so remembering some free advice I got from a guy named  JerryPH , I used a clothesrack to hang a white towel close to the window to reflect the sunlight to difuse a bit of the contrast.

From then on, it was all improvisation and translation of feelings into images.

PS. Diagram from this shoot:

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Benjamin Wong
http://iintrigue.com
Montreal Based Photographer

I have been participating regularly at a local monthly photo competition hosted by Tyler Ye.

I have found that participating in such activities forces myself to exceed expectations to try and find new and creative ideas around a given theme. This particular competition was “Unconventional Light Sources” and a photo I took randomly in Toronto turned out as the winning shot, yay! First win ever!

There was actually a reasonably large amount of post processing that was added (vignet, yellow/golden hues on the metal) but it seems like people liked the symetry and futuristic feel of the image! What do you think?

Continue reading ‘Photo Competition!’ »