What is to Come of this Blog in 2018

I plan for making a post weekly.  This will vary for the first couple months by day and time just due to me still trying to figure this whole blog thing out.

I will be posting a number of things:

  • Weekly Adventures
  • Product Reviews
  • Video Edits
  • Minimalistic and Healthy Living Endeavours
  • Short Stories or Other Writings
  • Short Updates

Now I will expand on these:

Weekly Adventures – This can be everything from some photos I have taken on one of my days off to just talking about how good my day of skiing was or just talking about a particular health routine on a certain day.  Could even be more of a short update!

Product Reviews – I am definitely a trier of things which is ironic as I am on a minimalistic journey but it is important to remember it is about adding value to your life and not owning nothing although I would like to work towards the 100 things challenge at some point.  Anyway I will be posting reviews of items that I have found to add immense value or the ones that have added no value and brought complete frustration!

Video Edits – this will be very rare for a post as I am not much of a person to film as well as struggle to gain the time to film but keep an eye out for something exciting.  I have some plans for an edit for this ski season so keep eye out for snippets of that

Minimalistic and Healthy Endeavours – I will discuss minimalist journey, things that work for me and things that don’t work.  Same goes for my health, what works and what doesn’t work (check last weeks post).  Will post the occasional recipe even as I work towards better health.  We are all on a journey so why not share it!

Short Stories and Other Writings – I recently wrote a short story/personal essay for school and I quite enjoyed it so I hope to write more and share mini essays/short stories.  I will also be sharing that personal essay at some point as I really think it is a valuable part of my personal journey and well written.  I may even share a poem if I ever write anything that I think is good enough… very unlikely 😛

Short Updates – similar post to this.  will mostly come on the weeks when I have had a struggle to get up to anything of excitement or have lacked the time to do an in depth post.  More there just too keep up with the consistency.

Please feel free to follow and support me in whatever way you feel.  Whether that support is leaving a comment or sending me a message with tips and ideas or monetarily by purchasing a print as well as purchasing through one of my affiliate links!

 

 

 

 

Winter Holiday Trip

In the past I haven’t done much for winter holidays.  This is mostly due to my many years of working in retail.  If you haven’t worked in retail, the holiday season, November and December, account for 50% of your sales.  This year I decided to change this and break the cycle by going on an adventure!  Me and my girlfriend headed down to Los Angeles and San Francisco for our holidays.  It was an interesting trip with a lot of walking, average of 10kms (6 miles) a day.  The photos that came out of my trip didn’t end up being some of my best work but I will showcase about 10 of my best pictures at the bottom of the post.  I am always looking for more engagement on posts so if you have questions or are looking for recommendations for either San Francisco or Los Angeles please comment!

The biggest 3 things I took away from this trip were (this may be updated later on as I am still in the process of decompressing from the trip and bringing myself back to reality);

  1. Zoom lenses are a must for walking around in urban landscapes.  I have recently switched to almost fully using prime lenses.  As amazing as using primes is, I found there was times when I just couldn’t get the shot I wanted.  This inability was due to not being able to stand in certain places because of traffic and people as well as people and traffic being in the way of the shot which I have struggled with cropping out in post processing where as if I could have zoomed in I would have been able to compose a better image right on the camera.  The only time the primes shined were during night time but its a city so it is very well lit and I believe I would have been fine bumping up from my 1.8 to a 2.8 and wouldn’t have noticed the difference.
  2. Transit, in my past I have taken Vancouver (YVR) transit for granted.  After spending time in Los Angeles, I can not even believe how superior Vancouver transit is in comparison to LA.  Every time we went somewhere for an hour or two, the transit to the destination was about the same.  Now they do have Uber and Lyft but that ended up getting quite expensive to do for everything.  Also small addition, Lyft is infinitely better than Uber so a massive shoutout to those guys!!  Another thing with transit was in San Francisco we arrived Sunday morning and the train was not operating at 6 a.m, what is that about?!?!
  3. Overnight Travel, so 5 days in LA then 5 days in SF.  The 5 days in SF ended up being more like 4 days due to an overnight bus ride from hell.   We took a bolt bus for an overnight bus trip and ended up not really sleeping as much as we had hoped and slept till 4 or 5 the following day which ended up making it effectively a waste of a day.  The bus driver drove super erratically and there was many bumps as well as most of the bus stayed up through the night talking?  I plan for the future to no longer take any red eye flights or over night bus rides, to hard on my circadian rhythm!

These pictures were all shot using (affiliate links);

NIKON D750 FX-Series Digital Body 24.3MP SLR Camera Body only (Black)

With either of these attached;

NIKON AF-S NIKKOR 20mm F/1.8G ED Lens

Nikon 50mm f/1.8G AF-S NIKKOR FX Lens

 

I Want To Build My Ski Photography Portfolio

Its been a long time since I have posted!

I would like to say that it is mostly due to school but also possibly due to lack of inspiration since the leaves have fallen and the snow has not made its way back.

Speaking of snow though, yesterday was my first day back on my skis (I am very sore today) and I had made an instagram post talking about how I would be super interested in working with some aspiring skiers doing both photo and video work at Red Mountain Resort in Rossland, BC.  It has been a while since I have done much photo or film work with skiing which is why this is more of a portfolio builder for me than a steady stream of income.  This being said I believe that it may be time to start getting payed a bit for my photography but more as a “per donation” as well as paying for prints of work that I do for people (standard print rate)!  Would love to have input from people on whether this is reasonable or if I should have a flat rate?!

As for previous work (four of my favourite shots):