2016 Fall Gallerie English Version

Canada’s Premier Magazine for Professional Photographers

2016 Accreditation Issue + Universe in a snowflake + 30 days to studio success + Creative Personality

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Issue 14 // fall 2016 // The Accreditation Issue

Contents 7

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The Universe In a Snowflake

30 Days to Studio Success Rick Ferro provides a simple plan to help every photographer achieve more success in their business.

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The Creative Personality Psychology Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, identifies 10 traits creative people share.

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The Universe in a snowflake

Don Komarechka takes us into the world of capturing the amazing beauty of the tiny wonder that is the snowflake.

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Night Photography Accreditation

Explore the world after dark with Lois Nuttal, CPA and her Night Photography Accreditation.

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Dive into the world of Advertising photography with Marc Duchemin and his recent Accreditation in this field

Greg Blue shares his successful Image Manipulation Accreditation submission

Advertising accreditation

Image Manipulation

Photo by Don Komarechka

Departments 4 Letter From The Chair 28 My PPOC 29 Commercial Partners 30 Concept To Cover

Cover photo by nicole noyce. Read more about this photo on Page 30.

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Message from the Chair I recently attended the PPOC-ON Regional convention, Focal Point 2016, and was reminded of what is one of the greatest benefits of my membership in PPOC. Although it doesn’t appear on any list of benefits, or have any discount code, the fellowship you experience when you connect with your peers and celebrate the profession you share is truly invaluable.

There is really no other way to recharge those creative juices than sharing your passion with your peers and being inspired by their creativity. The events that are offered within PPOC, at every level, allow our members

Tina Weltz, MPA PPOC National Chair

Gallerie is the premier magazine for professional photographers across Canada.

Each issue features award-winning images, editorial information, technical and feature articles, advertising, and member services. All photographers are welcome to view the digital versions on our website.

Gallerie is published three times annually; February (on-line issue) June/July (print and on-line) October (on-line issue) Editor Bruce Allen Hendricks, MPA 204-227-9447 - editor@ppoc.ca Designer Tamsin Lambert

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Subscription All PPOC members receive the printed issue directly to their doorstep. On-line issues are available to all photographers.

To be added to our email mailing list please contact the PPOC office (info@ppoc.ca) indicating your province of residence.

Additional printed copies of Galllerie are $6.95, plus postage. Please contact the the PPOC Office.

these types of opportunities on an ongoing basis throughout the year.

Also, I am excited to announce the re-branding of our annual National conference as the International Photography Conference and Expo.

The 2017 conference will take place in Ottawa April 29th to May 2nd, and will play host to a broad range of Canadian photographers. Visit the PPOC website at www.ppoc.ca to link to our newly launched conference pages and watch for the announcement of our speaker line up. With Ottawa hosting Canada’s 150th anniversary in 2017, there are sure to be celebrations throughout the year.

So, check out the activities taking place in your own Branch and Region and register now! It’s an investment in your creative growth, and an experience you won’t want to miss.

Advertising One single advertising package will secure your ad space in all three issues for the year.

Double Page Spread Full Page Outside Back Cover Full Page Inside Cover Advertising Supplement Full Page Half Page Quarter Page

$1575/year $1375/year $1125/year $1000/year $975/year $630/year $400/year

PPOC Trade members receive a 20% discount. To reserve your ad, contact the advertising manager.

Submissions Articles and member stories are welcome, please submit them to the editor for consideration.

Advertising Manager Brad Kelly, MPA advertising@ppoc.ca

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30 days to studio success by rick ferro

for just 30 minutes a day, or more if you choose, challenge yourself to take to task the items listed in the chart.

So many business owners work in crisis mode without any organization or goals to develop the growth of their business. A good business plan is essential and since financial tasks should be done daily, they are not mentioned here.

The 30-day plan is designed to help you develop and work on your business instead of working in your business. It’s up to you to be successful and define what that means to you.

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mArketinG

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customer service

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Product develoPment

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GoAl settinG

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educAtion

you may be a Master photographer but 80% of your business is marketing and sales. Marketing showcases your brand and creates a competitive advantage. if you are not good at this, find someone who is and hire them or barter with them for exchange of services.

it is much easier to keep a current client than obtain a new one. with that being said, attention should be brought to find ways to keep your customers coming back and referring their friends to you. clients buy for two reasons: good feelings and solutions to problems. so, value plus appreciation equals loyalty.

keeping up with the latest trends in products can be overwhelming, but not if done this way. Make sure you are in touch with what your clients prefer, like jewelry, photo purses, gallery wrapped canvases, etc. if you do not offer these items, they will find a photographer that does.

a small business owner does more in one day than a ceo does in one month. so, how do we get everything done? Goals! “Goals provide the energy source that powers our lives. one of the best ways we can get the most from the energy we have is to focus it. that is what goals can do for us; concentrate our energy.” — denis waitley

with the digital revolution, changes in technology are made every day and if we are going to offer the client more than they can do themselves then we must be aggressive in learning. instead of life changing around us, we must be the change!

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The Creative Personality

Ten Paradoxical Traits of a Creative Person

By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Of all human activities, creativity comes closest to providing the fulfillment we all hope to get in our lives.

Call it full-blast living.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives. Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the result of creativity.

What makes us different from apes-our language, values, artistic expression, scientific understanding, and technology--is the result of individual ingenuity that was recognized, rewarded, and transmitted through learning.

When we’re creative, we feel we are living more fully than during the rest of life. The excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab comes close to the ideal fulfillment we all hope to get from life, and so rarely do.

Perhaps only sex, sports, music, and religious ecstasy--even when these experiences remain fleeting and leave no trace--provide a profound sense of being part of an entity greater than ourselves.

But creativity also leaves an outcome that adds to the richness and complexity of the future.

I have devoted 30 years of research to how creative people live and work, to make more understandable the mysterious process by which they come up with new ideas and new things.

Creative individuals are remarkable for their ability to adapt to almost any situation and to make do with what-

ever is at hand to reach their goals.

If I had to express in one word what makes their personalities different from others, it’s complexity.

They show tendencies of thought and action that in most people are segregated. They contain contradictory extremes; instead of being an “individual,” each of them is a “multitude.”

Here are the 10 antithetical traits often present in creative people that are integrated with each other in a dialectical tension.

1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.

They work long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm.

This suggests a superior physical endowment, a genetic advantage. Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness.

It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.

This does not mean that creative people are hyperactive, always “on.” In fact, they rest often and sleep a lot.

The important thing is that they control their energy; it’s not ruled by the calendar, the clock, an external schedule. When necessary, they can focus it like a laser beam; when not, creative types immediately recharge their batteries.

They consider the rhythm of activity followed by idleness or reflection very important for the success of their work. This is not a bio-rhythm inherited with their genes; it was learned by trial and error as a strategy for achieving their goals.

One manifestation of energy is sexuality. Creative people are paradoxical in this respect also. They seem to have quite a strong dose of eros, or generalized libidinal energy, which some express directly into sexuality.

At the same time, a certain spartan celibacy is also a part of their makeup; continence tends to accompany superior achievement. Without eros, it would be difficult to take life on with vigor; without restraint, the energy could easily dissipate.

2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.

How smart they actually are is open to question. It is probably true that what psychologists call the “g factor,” meaning a core of general intelligence, is high among people who make important creative contributions.

The earliest longitudinal study of superior mental abilities, initiated at Stanford University by the psychologist Lewis Terman in 1921, shows rather conclusively that children with very high IQs do well in life, but after a certain point IQ does not seem to be correlated any longer with superior performance in real life.

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Photography Š Johan Sorensen

ficult to do creative work with a lower IQ, but an IQ beyond 120 does not necessarily imply higher creativity Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. As Howard Gardner remarked in his study of the major creative geniuses of this century, a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.

Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent.

Convergent thinking is measured

by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer.

Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas.

These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.

Yet there remains the nagging suspicion that at the highest levels of creative achievement the generation of novelty is not the main issue.

People often claimed to have had only two or three good ideas in their entire career, but each idea was so generative that it kept them busy for a lifetime of testing, filling out, elaborating, and applying.

Divergent thinking is not much use without the ability to tell a good idea from a bad one, and this selectivity involves convergent thinking.

3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.

There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, and perseverance.

Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her

sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’

It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time.

“But they don’t wish to hear that because they really only imagine the first part, the exciting part. But, as Khrushchev once said, that doesn’t fry pancakes, you see.

“That germ of an idea does not make a sculpture which stands up. It just sits there. So the next stage is the hard work. Can you really translate it into a piece of sculpture?”

Jacob Rabinow, an electrical engineer, uses an interesting mental technique to slow himself down when work on an invention requires more endurance than intuition: “When I have a job that takes a lot of effort, slowly, I pretend I’m in jail. If I’m in jail, time is of no consequence.

“In other words, if it takes a week to cut this, it’ll take a week. What else have I got to do? I’m going to be here for twenty years. See? This is a kind of mental trick. Otherwise you say, ‘My God, it’s not working,’ and then you make mistakes. My way, you say time is of absolutely no consequence.”

Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not.

Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: “What a beautiful thing is this perspective!” while his wife called him back to bed with no success.

4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.

Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas as fantasies without relevance to current reality.

And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go be-

yond what we now consider real and create a new reality. At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land.

What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.

Most of us assume that artists-musicians, writers, poets, painters-are strong on the fantasy side, whereas scientists, politicians, and businesspeople are realists.

This may be true in terms of dayto-day routine activities. But when a person begins to work creatively, all bets are off.

5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.

We’re usually one or the other, either preferring to be in the thick of crowds or sitting on the sidelines and observing the passing show.

In fact, in current psychological research, extroversion and introversion are considered the most stable personality traits that differentiate people from each other and that can be reliably measured.

Creative individuals, on the other hand, seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.

6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.

It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead.

Yet there are good reasons why this should be so.

These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective.

They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they’re usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them.

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in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.

When tests of masculinity/femininity are given to young people, over and over one finds that creative and talented girls are more dominant and tough than other girls, and creative boys are more sensitive and less aggressive than their male peers.

This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person’s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender.

A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses. Creative individuals are more likely to have not only the strengths of their own gender but those of the other one, too.

8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.

It is impossible to be creative without having first internalized an area of culture. So it’s difficult to see how a person can be creative without being both traditional and conservative and at the same time rebellious and iconoclastic.

Being only traditional leaves an area unchanged; constantly taking chances without regard to what has been valued in the past rarely leads to novelty that is accepted as an improvement.

The artist Eva Zeisel, who says that the folk tradition in which she works is “her home,” nevertheless produces ceramics that were recognized by the Museum of Modern Art as masterpieces of contemporary design.

This is what she says about innovation for its own sake: “This idea to create something is not my aim. To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative

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impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating.

“And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’--that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work.

No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.”

But the willingness to take risks, to break with the safety of tradition, is also necessary.

The economist George Stigler is very emphatic in this regard: “I’d say one of the most common failures of able people is a lack of nerve. They’ll play safe games. In innovation, you have to play a less safe game, if it’s going to be interesting. It’s not predictable that it’ll go well.”

9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.

Without the passion, we soon lose interest in a difficult task. Yet without being objective about it, our work is not very good and lacks credibility.

Here is how the historian Natalie Davis puts it: “I think it is very important to find a way to be detached from what you write, so that you can’t be so identified with your work that you can’t accept criticism and response, and that is the danger of having as much affect as I do.

“But I am aware of that and of when I think it is particularly important to detach oneself from the work, and that is something where age really does help.”

10. Creative people’s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.

Most would agree with Rabinow’s words: “Inventors have a low threshold of pain. Things bother them.” A badly designed machine causes pain to an inventive engineer, just as the creative writer is hurt when reading bad prose.

Being alone at the forefront of a discipline also leaves you exposed and

vulnerable. Eminence invites criticism and often vicious attacks. When an artist has invested years in making a sculpture, or a scientist in developing a theory, it is devastating if nobody cares.

Deep interest and involvement in obscure subjects often goes unrewarded, or even brings on ridicule.

Divergent thinking is often perceived as deviant by the majority, and so the creative person may feel isolated and misunderstood.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for creative individuals to bear is the sense of loss and emptiness they experience when, for some reason, they cannot work. This is especially painful when a person feels his or her creativity drying out.

Yet when a person is working in the area of his or her expertise, worries and cares fall away, replaced by a sense of bliss.

Perhaps the most important quality, the one that is most consistently present in all creative individuals, is the ability to enjoy the process of creation for its own sake.

Without this trait, poets would give up striving for perfection and would write commercial jingles, economists would work for banks where they would earn at least twice as much as they do at universities, and physicists would stop doing basic research and join industrial laboratories where the conditions are better and the expectations more predictable.

From book: Creativity: The Work and Lives of 91 Eminent People, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, published

by HarperCollins, 1996. Retitled as Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, PhD, (pronounced me-high chick-sentme-high) is a psychology professor at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California and former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago. He is noted for his work in the study of creativity and subjective well-being, and is best known for his research and writing on the notion of flow. [From Wikipedia bio.]

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The Universe

In a snowflake Words and Photos

By Don Komarechka

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Most Canadians are painfully familiar with snow. Growing up in Northern Ontario I learned on the coldest winter days not to close my eyes for too long or they would freeze shut; my memories of winter are far from pleasant. The experience changes when we take a closer look at the details of the season however, where the true magic of winter presents itself: the snowflake.

These small enigmatic skyborne crystals surround us by the trillions in the winter months, and such a fascinating photographic subject can be found two feet from your back door. This is the precise location that all of my snowflakes are photographed. This convenient location is often a requirement, because “beautiful” snow can be hard to predict. Even when the atmospheric conditions seem perfect, you might end up with bedraggled and misshapen crystals that don’t possess the allure of symmetry. Some of the most beautiful snowflakes have found their way to my doorstep when there was zero chance of any snowfall. There is luck involved, and when the right snow is falling you’ll need to act quickly.

A snowflake starts to fade the second in leaves the cloud that formed it, high in the sky. By the time it reaches the ground, sublimation (evaporation from a solid) may have already claimed the outer tips, and within 20-30 minutes will become a ghost of its former self. Time is

absolutely of the essence, with noticeable changes happening within minutes even on the coldest days and nights. Couple this rush with the fact that finding the proper angle, and you’ll realize why I have no choice but to shoot the snowflake without a tripod to get the best results.

While a tripod isn’t used, there are a few important pieces of gear to mention. The first and most important ingredient is a proper backdrop for the snowflake. I photograph all my images against a black woollen fabric: a mitten. The fibres of the mitten lift the snowflake away from solid detail, and while some fibres need to be edited out of the final image, the background is much cleaner than felt or most flat surfaces. The lens used is the Canon MP-E 65mm 1x-5x F/2.8 macro lens, which can achieve a magnification five times closer than standard macro lenses. Using extension tubes and the Canon Life-size Converter EF, that magnification can be pushed further to 12:1 in the most extreme scenarios.

Any macro lens would work, but

you’d never be able to fill the frame with a snowflake unless you reversemount another lens in front of it.

The snowflake is illuminated with a ring flash, any non-LED would work for this but a ring flash is convenient for the subject. In order to get the right angle of light, the camera must be rotated around the snowflake as the centre of rotation as you search for the specific combination of snowflake and flash angle that allows for a reflection off the surface of the snowflake akin to glare on a window.

Find this angle and you’re set!

Because you’re photographing the snowflake on an angle, depth of field becomes a big issue. For a subject that measures at most a centimetre across, the amount that you have in focus is often less than a millimetre. This presents certain problems when you’d very much like to have the snowflake completely in focus from tip to tip, and the solution is focus stacking.

For those unfamiliar with the technique, it requires you to photograph every “slice” of focus across the crystal, resulting in a collection of images that can act as puzzle pieces; when combined, you will be presented with the full picture.

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be perfectly aligned, we can handle the corrections for that automatically in Photoshop. By gently pulling and pushing the camera with your left hand, you can shift the focus forward and backward by the distance needed, all the while firing off continuous bursts of images as fast as your flash and memory cards can handle.

On average, I combine roughly 40 separate images into a single snowflake… but I can’t just shoot 40 images and expect to get exactly the right pieces without missing anything. In order to be absolutely sure that somewhere in the mix I’ve captured all the necessary images, I usually shoot 100-200 images of the same crystal. That’s a lot of data to deal with, but your needed puzzle pieces are in there.

Getting the images in Lightroom, the next step is to start flagging all the pieces you need. Don’t worry about missing some of them, once you process the images automatically in Photoshop, you’ll see which pieces you still need and can fill in the gaps on a second run. You don’t want to select the same focus slice twice, but some overlap is always beneficial.

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Once you’ve got what you need, select all the flagged images and choose “Edit In > Open as Layers in Photoshop…”

Once in Photoshop, select all the layers and choose the wonderful feature “Edit > Auto-Align Layers…” and let everything happen automatically. If the camera didn’t shift too much and if you don’t have any huge gaps in focus, the alignment should work well.

Due to the slight shifts, you might have some issues with alignment caused by differences in perspective.

Focus stacking also has issues with instant shifts in depth (such as one snowflake behind the main crystal) as well as the nature of a snowflake being transparent and potentially

having it choose the wrong details to feature. You can take control of this process and paint “fixes” in using the original images that Photoshop stacked. This requires a slight revision to the process if you want to take the tedious perfectionist approach: Import layers into Photoshop, Auto-Align Layers, but then duplicate the entire aligned layer stack and blend the duplicated images. Merge the results down into a single “foundation” layer, and then move this layer to the bottom of the layer stack. Turn off the visibility of each layer above the foundation layer, and one by one, flip them back on while painting in fixes with layer masks.

Get friendly with the CTRL/CMD+I keyboard shortcut to invert the layer mask, switching back and forth from the current layer to everything below it to identify a part of the new layer that works better than the Photoshop automatic version. This can be boring at first, especially with so many layers, but it quickly becomes

muscle memory. It doesn’t require my full attention, so I often binge-watch Netflix as the total edit time per image – with perfection in mind – is roughly four hours.

The results speak for themselves, and received universal acclaim. My work snowflakes has been featured everywhere from Discover Magazine to BBC documentaries, and I was personally filmed and featured in an episode of CBC’s The Nature of Things with David Suzuki. Most recently, I worked with the Royal Canadian Mint to design a coin that features one of my snowflakes. The limited edition pure silver coin is currently available directly from the mint and from Canada Post offices nationwide.

The process for producing these images is one that I share openly, and wrote an entire book on the topic (Sky Crystals: Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes). While there are no secrets and many people have recreated my workflow for themselves, it doesn’t devalue any of my own work in this area. No two snowflakes are alike, and the journey to find the “perfect snowflake” continues.

“There is luck involved, and when the right snow is falling you’ll need to act quickly.”

Don Komarechka is a nature, macro and landscape photographer located in Barrie, Ontario. From auroras to pollen, insects to infrared, much of Don’s photographic adventures reveal a deeper understanding of how the universe works. Exploring the world that we cannot see with our own eyes has been a common thread in Don’s career as a professional photographer.

Always science-minded but never formally trained, Don uses photography as a way to explore and understand the world around him. Photographing something unusual or unknown is the perfect excuse to learn something new.

Don’s work often pushes up against the technical limitations of modern camera equipment and the physical limitations of light itself..

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Accreditation: NIght Photography Images by Lois Nuttal, CPA

By David McCammon

Lois first dove into photography 12 years ago wanting to offer her Thunder Bay tourism clients better group photographs. She joined PPOC in 2014 where she has been challenged to become a better photographer.

The accreditation process has turned Lois into a real student of photography. Before joining PPOC in 2014, taking classes and being an active member of a local Thunder Bay camera club was helpful, but it wasn’t until taking on the challenge of earning her accreditation and image salon that she really began to grow as a photographer. “It forced me to be better.”

Like many of us, her first accreditation attempts were unsuccessful.

“It seemed they were so picky. Can’t you just look at the photograph and see the good in it?” she thought. Her response today is, “no, you can’t!” Lois adds, “it was only through the accreditation and people being picky that I learned what to do… that’s what it has done for me.”

Night photography, her most recent accreditation, was hugely challenging. She often headed out practising with a group of girlfriends slowly getting better at it. The pre-accreditation process has been helpful on her journey giving insight into what was and wasn’t working. Another benefit to her PPOC experience has been the help and guidance she has received from simple tips on Facebook to a great mentor in Wendy Gonneau, MPA. Wendy reached out offering assistance to Lois. “Wendy was a task mas-

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ter. With her guidance I spent hours and hours making changes, learning things and transposing in Photoshop which I wasn’t that proficient at, but I keep learning things. If you don’t keep practising them they’re gone.”

Lois has learned a lot by pushing her photographic boundaries. “You’re not just a photographer… it’s not that you’re just capturing it or document-

ing it… you are the artist, the creator, if you have the ability to make it better through post processing then do it! Now, I find I get very excited by the creative process of building the image.”

Never one to rest on her laurels, Lois is ready to embark on her next challenge involving portraits on location.

“You’re not just a photographer… it’s not that you’re just capturing it or documenting it… you are the artist, the creator, if you have the ability to make it better through post processing then do it!”

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Accreditation: Advertising Images by Marc Duchemin

By Alicia Kingsland

Marc Duchemin’s newly awarded accreditation in advertising may be his first with the PPOC, but he is certainly not a newcomer to professional photography.

Duchemin has been running his own photography business since 1982 and has an impressive portfolio of images taken for big name clients such as Sears, The Bay and Target.

It was from this extensive portfolio that he had to choose the images he would submit to earn his accreditation. Duchemin explains, “I had lots of different things; furniture, shoes, glasses, kids. It took two or three weeks to go through and decide on the pictures that were strong enough.” Of the submitted images he is particularly fond of the image of the girl in the car, which was originally composed for Colori, a clothing store in Quebec. “We rented a car and did a big shoot in a warehouse and painted everything white,” Duchemin recalls. “Everything you see in the background is fake, it’s all painted”.

The finished image is not a montage and is minimally photoshopped, real props were used on the set. The image was originally part of a set of 8, but this one was Duchemin’s favourite of the set.

Although this particular image was finished with minimal digital editing, Duchemin is very familiar with the use of software to aid in his craft.

“CGI is taking over,” he says, “which saves money because we don’t have to physically build the set, and it’s easy to change if we need to change a colour or design”. Advertising is such a competitive field that photographers

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have had to adapt to by learning new skills. Comparing the type of work he often does now to when he started out, Duchemin says “It’s totally different. You still need the creativity, but the tool has changed”. Luckily, creativity is certainly not something that Marc Duchemin is lacking, and he has proved more then able to adapt to new tools for his trade.

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Come to our annual Fusion speaker series and expo, held in conjunction 2 0 1 6 with PPOC-BC’s PHOTOGraphie festival.

November 5th, 2016. 2017 - TBA.

FUSION

Beau Photo is the Canadian distributor for Renaissance Albums, high quality albums, handmade in New York.

Flush Mount Albums

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Studio samples are available at up to 50% off. Call for details.

Bowery Book

Proud to be a PPOC Commercial Partner, Beau Photo has been supporting professional photographers for over 30 years!

Cameras / Lenses / DSLR Video / Lighting Rentals / Camera Bags Albums / Accessories / Film / Darkroom Supplies / Advice We ship anywhere in Canada.

Nous livrons partout au Canada.

Beau Photo Supplies 1520 W. 6th Ave. Vancouver, B.C. 604.734.7771 1.800.994.2328

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Beau Photo Store @beauphotostore

beauphoto.blogspot.com beau1520

Beau Photo

Accreditation: Image Manipulations Images by Greg BLue

by Sébastien Lavallée

Greg Blue has been a PPOC member for just one year but he has spent the last 30 years working as a commercial photographer and 25 years as a CAPIC member. “The majority of my career has been spent in the commercial world. I wanted to shake things up. I felt that I wanted something new and portraiture was what was the most appealing to me.”

First chance he got, he submitted five accreditations… and got them all on the first try! One of these acBowery Book creditations was Image Manipulation: “Even what looks like a simple image in advertising is most likely a composite image. I was coming up with more abstract, surreal, concepts and I was eager to pursue that accreditation with the amount of space that Photoshop takes in my life.” For him, this was an occasion to “get people to second glance” by hiding the manipulation: “Photoshop should be invisible.”

His best advice to any photographer who would like to create composite images is to get a really good grasp on lighting theory. You have to make sure that the light is matching the original figure for which you sometimes have no control over the light. For instance, the antelopes in one of his creations have been shot in a museum of natural history. He then had to wait for the outdoor light to match this specific image. Therefore, these photos must be planned ahead of time and can’t be rushed: “I’m the least spontaneous photographer”,

Greg adds. Also, it’s the simple things that work. Manipulation plays a major role, but you have to try to get as many real elements as possible. If you need skin tone behind a bubble, it’s better to create that bubble in front of that specific skin tone than to push your luck in front of the computer.

Greg also has one interesting story about an image (the knight in the ER): “I had to find a model in his eighties (and willing to show his behind).

We showed up on set and he had an ass like a 25 years old! I had to spend some time aging him using elephant skin textures.”

“Even what looks like a simple image in advertising is most likely a composite” Fall 2016

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ACCREDITATION DEADLINES 2017 It’s never too early to start preparing for your next Accreditation submission, be it a new category for you or a re-submission.

If you haven’t achieved a new Accreditation in a while make 2017 the year you challenge yourself and demonstrate your photographic ability further by proving you can deliver above average professional work in a new category.

Mark these dates on your calendar and start combing through your hard drives and planning assignments in search of images.

Submission Deadline: February 6th, 5:00pm EST April 3rd, 5:00pm EDT July 10th, 5:00pm EDT October 2nd, 5:00pm EDT

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My ppoc

Members share their stories

Professional Photographers of Canada (PPOC) is a diversified group of creative artists dedicated to the highest standards in professional imaging. We welcome photographers of all genres to join our community of dedicated professionals.

PPOC offers photographers a way to rise to professional status. Educational opportunities, networking, direct member benefits and the ability to earn awards and designations will assist in your potential for growth and economic improvement.

Meet new friends and mentors and take advantage of the wealth of experience and knowledge.

Once an accredited member, your personal area of specialty and images are promoted on our website so clients and other photographers making referrals know who to contact.

Contact 1-888-643-PPOC (7762) Phone: 519-537-2555 Info@ppoc.ca www.ppoc.ca Mailing address: 209 Light St. Woodstock, ON N4S 6H6 Canada

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I’ve been a member of PPOC for over 25 years and I keep coming up with more and more reasons on why I value my membership. This time my membership saved me $1,400 and a lot of heartache.

Recently I was going through a Facebook equipment buy and sell group and I noticed a lens for sale out of Calgary (I’m in Winnipeg) that I have been wanting to purchase for quite some time. The price was decent, but I didn’t know the seller. He wasn’t a PPOC member and in fact he never even heard of it, or PPA either. A red flag. We had no Facebook friends in common that I could contact to see if this person was trustworthy or not.

That was another red flag to me as surely there must be someone in the industry in Calgary that we knew in common. Though he said he has been in business for 10 years, he only had a Wix website, one of those you get for free as long as you have their branding all over the site - yet another red flag. He also preferred payment by e-transfer. While that might not have been a problem, with the other red flags already concerning me, this didn’t sit well.

I decided to have someone I know in Calgary check out the lens in person on my behalf. That way the seller didn’t have to concern himself with shipping and if the lens was good he would be paid cash on the spot. He agreed. I quickly did a mental inventory of everyone in PPOC I knew that lived in Calgary and realized that Chris Thombs would be a perfect person to ask. Not only does he shoot Nikon so he would be able to do test shots, I know he is pretty particular about his gear.

Bruce Allen Hendricks MPA, F.Ph, F/PPOC-BC, CPP One quick phone call and Chris quickly agreed to do me this favour. I asked him to make the judgement as if he was buying the lens himself. I transferred Chris the money and gave the seller Chris’s phone number to make the arrangements.

A couple of days later Chris called me and said the lens was no good and he decided not to make the purchase on my behalf. If I had just trusted the seller I would have been stuck with an iffy lens with no recourse. I thanked Chris for doing all of this on my behalf (all for the price of a beer the next time we run into each other at a convention) and later that day Chris e-transferred the money back into my account.

I avoided a potentially costly mistake all because PPOC has allowed me to meet and make friends with other photographers from coast to coast - some I haven’t actually ever met in person. Yet I know I could call any of them up and ask a favour and I would be willing to do the same for any fellow PPOC member. I have gotten jobs because of my contacts with other members in PPOC, as well as recommended others elsewhere in the country for the same reason. PPOC is like a family in many ways - we look out for each other.

PPOC COmmercial Partners These photographic commercial partners support the Professional Photographers of Canada and its members. Look to them for quality products and professional service.

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Concept to Cover

Words and Photos

By Nicole Noyce, MPA My image, Sculpted Reach, was shot with my Canon 5DMarkIII, 24-70mm F/14 at 59mm, 1/160 sec. The front light was a Profoto D1AIR1000 with a 4x6 soft box, the 2 back lights were Profoto D1AIR500 with 2x3 and 3x4 soft boxes and the hair light was a Profoto D1Air500 with a zoom hard reflector with barn-door and a 10 degree grid.

This was a typical client grade 12 grad shoot day… I will normally shoot 3-4 graduates on a grad photo day. I

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encourage all of my graduates to share their special talents or interests with me and I do my best to capture them, to tell their story. Justin is an accomplished dancer and we’ve worked together in the past as I’ve done the group photography for his dance school for years. We created some great images that day in his tux and representing his talent as a dancer. This image was finished using a basic Lightroom conversion and photoshop including contrast adjustment, paint brush to blend the floor, healing brush and clone stamp to even out the skin and the dodge and burn tools to accentuate the contours of the shadows and highlights. When I was young my favourite medium was pencil and black and white photography is very similar to pencil drawings for me.

Nicole Noyce is the owner of Noyce Photography, a thriving photography business in Lloydminster, SK. Since 2011 she has earned 11 accreditations, won PPOC SK Photographer of The Year in 2012 and 2014 and was awarded with the PPOC Masters Of Photographic Arts designation in April of this year.

The full-frame, FX-format Nikon D810 is the ideal match for the professional photographer. Count on impeccable image quality, meticulous detail and rich tonality in virtually any light, rendered awlessly in 36.3 megapixels. If you’re seeking the ultimate in DSLR performance, this is the one for you. For more information, visit Nikon.ca or your Authorized Nikon Canada Dealer. Made for Generation Image.

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Photo © Rodrigo Diaz Wichmann, shot using Elinchrom D-Lite RX 4.

The Perfect Portable Lighting Studio Elinchrom’s D-Lite RX4 To Go kit is perfect for taking professional portraits. And if you like your lighting “to go”, the kit is so light and portable it’s great for shooting on-location, too. Why break down your studio lighting, when you can just make the surprisingly affordable D-Lite RX4 your convenient back-up kit?

The kit comes complete with everything you need, including two powerful lightweight fan-cooled 400Ws heads, along with softboxes, stands, reflector, carrying cases, and Skyport transmitter Plus that gives you the ability to adjust and trigger both the heads and built-in modelling lights wirelessly.

With the purchase of a D-Lite kit, you also get the added bonus of buying in to the Elinchrom brand, a system of lighting preferred by leading photographers worldwide. Elinchrom gives you the flexibility to choose from a wide range of professional lighting and light modifiers, including Rotalux, Rotalux Octa and Litemotiv softboxes. All available at Vistek.

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