Not getting into the debate about consultation, or the implementation, I have to say that I applaud the City Of Vancouver for the new bike lanes. I could extensively be considered to be exclusively a motorist for when I am not walking I am driving, but as a motorist I have no problems giving up lanes of traffic for dedicated bike lanes. Just saying.

So I have come up with what can only be considered to be a brilliant Idea for a photo project! I am thinking about doing a whole series of photos with captions double exposed onto the film. These are some of my tests that I fired up tonight with a the Mamiya RB67 & a Polaroid back. I took a photo and then double exposed the photo with another photo of the quote or caption. I used white writing on an otherwise black monitor for the captions.

This first photo is technically triple exposed because the photo of the bridge was from when I was there earlier this winter. (I often leave my self a photo to double expose later but this one I forgot about so there is a hint of an exposure of a cello in this one as well which explains the caption) but I was super happy with this result.

While this is a super cheesey quote I found it a bit fitting for the photo. This is one of our good packs of Polaroid Chocolate film!

I am thinking about shooting a random roll of quotes for our film workshop this weekend and the double exposing the roll on the photowalk. In-fact this would be a great thing to do with some online photo friends! Who want to trade a roll or two of random words to shoot with out know what is on the roll or what it may say?

I love shooting the backs of peoples feet :) Seriously I think that anonymous disembodied feet wandering out of frame are the best!

So as none of you really know I have been working quite steadily on one particular photo art project for oh.. about five+ years now. Seriously I have been working on this one for over half of my photographic career and I am now just getting around to talking out loud about it.  :) The Project (which I have been calling The Alley Project) is a collection of photos that I have mostly taken in Alleys though-out the lower mainland & in Alberta city’s like Calgary & Edmonton, although there are many photos from all over. Places like Montreal, Ottawa, Regina, Jasper, & Banff, You know basically anywhere that I have been in the last 10 years.

I have no real stats on the extent of this project, but I can say that in this 5+ years of shooting I have taken nearly 10,000 photos that have made the short list.  Now no one has really seen the fruits of this labour including me. So starting from the beginning and working foreword I am going to sort though my massive catalog and try to narrow that 10,000 down to a far more reasonable number. My original intent was to collect images for a book or something like that. Right now I am going to just see what I have and then decide what to do with them & as I find them I will share them :)

Want to follow along with The Alley Project? I have created a new Category

Some photos from downtown Vancouver.

Last night after we played an online My Friend Lisa Show we hauled our asses out & to see Steph MacPherson & Michael Benard Fitzgerald play at the Biltmore.  Man! What a great show! :) Steph MacPherson and her crew put on an awesome opening act complete with banjos! (everything is better with banjos) MBF also put on a stellar show! this was the first time I have seen him play live with a backing band. Previous times have always been him solo with a looper pedal. The double drummer thing he had going on was spectacular to say the least! I didn’t get to many (aright it was just one) photos of MBF mostly because I didn’t want to elbow my way up to the front, that and I may have been just a little drunk. :)

On the way home (thanks Shan for driving!) we stopped at the McDonald’s on Main street near terminal.  What a horrible idea that was in so many ways. The first being that I hate McDonald’s & rarely eat it.  In fact the only two times in the last year that I have eaten McDonald’s I was drunk coming home from the Biltmore.  Curious :) However, that said what an awesome place McDonald’s is at 2am on a weekday.  We somehow (I say we but really I mean Me) managed to offend a trollish woman to the point of leaving, eat a whole Big Mac on an empty beer filled stomach, and start up a random conversation with a sun glass wearing, (it was 2AM) safety vest clad, cart pushing, hobo who insisted that we invited him in to the McDick’s (which we didn’t do) and that he had a lot to add to our earlier conversation about E.T.s (which we didn’t have) In which he Insisted that Sarah Palin was in fact an E.T. and that given a moment or two he could prove it.  We didn’t give him his moment, we instead left, quickly, after loudly clapping our (my) hands one last time in order to wake the odd man who was sleeping face down in the corner booth.

All in all it was a good night :)

On this date in 2004 I shot a photo session with a Model with the pseudonym Sommers. This was shot in our fledgling studio on 109th street in E-town with a canon 10D and the cheapo kit lens that came with my first rebel film camera. I remember this shoot well because it was the first real success that I had “in studio”  I say that in quotes like that because the “studio” was a short roll of white seamless backdrop paper and  two Vivitar speed lights mounted pointing towards the ceiling one on a optical slave and the other corded to the camera. This set us was super soft light but it tended to be super foggy with the cheap kit lens. Most photos were really soft of out of focus altogether.

This was the photo shoot that drove me to seek out all I could learn about fashion photography and studio lighting.