AMPA and Uppercase Gallery Host an Evening of Design Pairing

Read on for an event of note, I'd like to pass along. Janine Vangool designed my corporate portfolio and logo a couple of years ago, and I've had nothing but compliments on it. I hired her because among other things, she designs beautiful books and magazines. I will be in Halifax the day of this event, but I encourage you to attend. I wish I could!

--

July 22, 2007 (Calgary, AB) – The Alberta Magazine Publishers Association has partnered with Art Central’s Uppercase Gallery to host a gathering for designers and design-lovers on Thursday, August 14 from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm.

Design Pairings is a networking and learning opportunity, featuring a talk and design feedback from Uppercase founder and proprietor Janine Vangool. The evening focuses on pairings: which typeface perfectly suits which image? Plus, Uppercase will have all its best toys on hand: letraset, woodtype, dimensional letters, rubber stamps, stickers, pegboard letters, typewriters, etc. so that people can play with type. No computers—this is all hands-on.

Janine Vangool graduated from the Visual Communications program at the Alberta College of Art & Design in 1995. Her solo design studio, Vangool Design & Typography, was formed the following year. Her client focus remains in arts and culture, creative small business and publishing. Past and current clients include Calgary Opera, ACAD, Ottawa Art Gallery, TRUCK gallery, Art Central, Beyond Magazine and Whitecap Books. Her award-winning work has been included in Communication Arts Design Annuals. She was a member of the 2007 Alternative Pick illustration jury and was a judge for the 2006 Junos’ music packaging category.

Join AMPA and Uppercase for fun and fascinating evening with local designers, design enthusiasts, and magazine professionals. Entry is free, with a complimentary wine and cheese to follow.

Design Pairings begins at 7:00 pm

Uppercase Gallery
#204, 100 - 7th Ave SW (upper level of Art Central), Calgary

-30-

For more information, contact:
Anh Chu, Communications and Program Assistant

ampa@albertamagazines.com T: 403.262.0081 F: 403.670.0492

Grizzly Hare Scramble

This past Saturday July 19th, I shot the kids Grizzly Hare Scramble XC motorbike race. What a blast! Girls and boys as young at 5 were racing their bikes through the Maclean Creek Recreational Area just southwest of Bragg Creek, Alberta. The kids were great and were very keen to hang out with me when they weren't racing. The weather was great too, so that made it all the more fun.

It wasn't the easiest event to photograph and I was a bit disappointed with my camera's (Canon 5D) servo focus. I have photographed many mountain bike races and other fast action sports using servo as well as manual focus, but the camera focus could not keep up with the action in this event. I'm pretty sure it's not the lens, as I've shot ski racing with my old EOS3 with no problems tracking focus. Maybe it's time to upgrade to a higher-end sports shooting camera.

Other technical details: I shot using fill flash for many of the images, with my Canon 580EX flash set at -1 using TTL and the High shutter speed setting. I shot using all sorts of shutter speeds as I was experimenting, but 1/800s and higher speeds seemed to freeze the action best. I used 400 and 800 ISO to try and keep decent depth of field, but that wasn't always easy, especially in the trees. Lots of mixed lighting in the trees made post processing a bit of a challenge too. One or two images would have been fine, but having to deal with hundreds was daunting. Shooting in RAW saved me.

Just like the triathlon, I focussed on the individual athletes as opposed to the event as a whole. My goal is to sell files and prints to the riders through my PhotoShelter Personal Archive. Check out the Grizzly Hare Scramble gallery. It was the first time I shot motor cross country and I learned a lot by doing it. Great workout too! My butt was sore from all the crouching and hiking along the course. A special thanks to Joal (#75) and Owen (#900) and their parents for inviting me to the races. And congrats to Joal for winning his race, and to Owen for placing 3rd in his!

Coral Springs Triathlon Photos Now Online

Summer has been slow to come in Calgary this year, but I've managed to get some great shooting days for the events I'm covering. July 13th, I shot the Coral Springs Triathlon in Calgary. With that, I'm using my PhotoShelter Personal Archive to sell personal use licensing of those event photos. It's a great self-serve selling system. I'm not a computer or web programming whiz, so I opted to use PhotoShelter for online sales. Once the uploading of images is done, the client is able to purchase the files from the archive, with no further interaction on my part. I also set up PayPal to collect the money. PhotoShelter has very thorough instructions on how to set everything up. Configuration of PhotoShelter and PayPal still took a couple of hours though, mostly because several decisions need to be made during the process, and I was back and forth with the instructions a lot.

On the subject of uploading, even with high-speed Internet, it took a couple of days to upload 300+ jpg format photos ~2MB in size. Of course this wasn't constant uploading, I sent the files in batches of 30 or so, in between the post processing of all the raw files. I realize though, that this is a process that needs streamlining or automating, and next time I have hundreds of files, I need to figure that out better.

As far as the personal use licensing, I'm going this way as the photos are unique to each athlete so the market for the photos is very limited. Plus, none of the photos are model released. I will also sell prints, but in order to do so using PhotoShelter, I would have to use an American supplier and all the pricing would be in $US. My events are all very local to Calgary, and I don't feel right selling in $US. I'll sell prints if people contact me directly, but since most people do their own printing, I'm not counting on that. I'm hoping that eventually, PhotoShelter will partner with a print supplier in Canada so that production and shipping costs will be less, and will also be in $CAD. Maybe Technicare would be interested? They would be a perfect partner, as they have labs from Vancouver to Winnipeg, so could service the country well.