360 Degree Reverse Panormas

       It's been awhile since anything new and exciting had appeared on here so I've opted to share a few photo manipulation projects today. These are quite easy to do, all one needs is a tripod for shooting a 360 degree panorama, photo stitching software, and then to a "polar coordinates" distortion tool which comes with Adobe Photoshop or a free program like Gimp.

I may have accidentally made this one look like the
character on the Pringles cans

Glowstick Play, January 6th, 2012

       An activity I've wanted to do for quite some time now, is to take some glowsticks, break em, shake em, and then spill the contents all over interesting objects and then photograph them in the dark. I've long wanted a picture that would be a Gunderson's Shooting Gallery Trademark; something that was very recognizeable and decided that a camera doused in glowstick goo was appropriate. I enjoy doing this very much, however, and imagine I'll be dousing many more things in glowing goop, maybe even a whole person some day!

Tunes for Refuge, Songs for Japan

       Here's a few charity concerts I shot in early to mid 2011. Tunes for Refuge was a shoot for the Y Women's Shelter in Kamloops (first 5), and songs for Japan was a charity event for the victims of the 2011 tsunami disaster in Japan (second 5). I don't feel that either of these shoots are my strongest work, but I might be my own worst critic in this case. Several shots from both events made it into local newspapers, and I know one of the artists used one of the shots from Tunes for Refuge as her album's cover art.

May 17th, 2011, Turner-Marr Wedding

       I'm a good friend of Kathleen Marr and Brendan Turner, the newly we couple in these pictures, and so when I was invited to their wedding in May of last year, I decided to bring my camera along to try my hand at shooting a wedding. Plus, their wedding offered a great excuse to upgrade from Nikon's D5000 camera, to the D7000! It would appear in some of the samples here that I was liberal in my use of contrasty, black and white post processing, but the rest of the pictures on the GSG Facebook page include many more colorful samples. I delivered somewhere just over 200 pictures to Kathleen and Brendan within 48 hours of the ceremony. If you like what you see here and would like me to shoot at your wedding, please note that I do prefer to be the "candid second shooter" at events such as these and recommend leaving the very formal, posed, group shots to photographer's with additional training in those areas. 

August 13, 2011, Valken Tactical, First Response Duty Gear Shoot

       Sticking with the vein of paintball, I'd like to shoot forward from the previous shoot by several months and share some of the photos from another gear shoot done as repayment to paintball sponsors. This time, my model, Mike, and myself went to a quiet parkade some time after 9pm one summer night in 2011 to photograph some of the black/urban sort of gear available to paintball teams from Valken Paintball. I was quite a bit more pleased with how these turned out in comparison to those taken in February. There were 30 shots in this set.

Can't shoot duty gear without doughnuts!

     

Valken V-Cam Paintball Gear Shoot, February 22nd, 2011

       Paintball is a sport which is very near and dear to me. Earlier in 2011, I organized a rag-tag group of guys to try and form a team when Valken Paintball had a shout out for teams hunting for sponsorship. There wasn't much that Valken wanted in return for helping teams out, but one by one, I took my team mates out into the woods to model the gear, shoot it, and send Valken the results. The photos were quite well received by our sponsor and their fans on Facebook. I had been shooting for a good while up until this point, but it wasn't until February when I really began to understand the full workings of SLR cameras and begin to make them  do what I needed them to.

Archie, Sheila, and West, August 11th, 2011

       I owed a friend of mine, Courtenay, some pet photos of the family dogs. I'm not sure exactly why I owed her these ones but I seem to recall part of the reason being that I wasn't proud enough of some of the ones I'd taken the previous winter. We went up to a small lake off of Heffley Creek road one sunny August day and I began snapping away. After the lake we returned to her place to shoot the dogs weaving through some poles so she could analyze the dogs' foot placement during agility trials. Including the weave trial shots, (a few trials taken in bursts of 6 shots per second) I delivered 139 pictures to Courtenay two days after the shoot. Courtenay also blogs about her agility training and animals she fosters on cpetrescue.blogspot.com, and photos I snap of her animals and some animals living at local shelters occasionally appear there.

The little one has a tendency to wander off wherever she please unless
 there was a leash dangling behind her

Pet owners are kind great. They know the poses they want
and how long their furry companions can tolerate being
this close to eachother

We were going for a product shot
of the collar in this one