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!

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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.

Triathlon

Today I shot the start of the Chinook Half 119.1 Triathlon at Lake Midnapore in south Calgary.

It's been a while since I shot a sporting event. I used to shoot a bike race or a triathlon nearly every weekend when I was part of that scene in Toronto. It definitely brought back memories of early morning starts along with the beautiful early morning light. A couple of friends were participating in today's event, so I tried to pay attention to where they were in the pack so I could grab a few stock shots.

Then, this afternoon I attended an artist's market at the Carpenters Hall in Kensington. I bumped into a few of my former ACAD students (Amy Wakefield, Heather Reinhart, Pat Wong and Aimee Qiu) and it was from talking to them and seeing their work, that I was inspired to play around with my triathlon shots in Photoshop, as they just seemed so plain and ordinary. Not that I wanted to fix them, I just felt the urge to be creative in a different way than I normally am.

I'm usually the type to shoot a photo the way I want it to look as I have little experience in "Photoshopping" those artsy effects I love so much. Truth is, I had never actually tried. So, armed with layer masks, blending modes, and some experimental brush techniques, I came up with a few "sketches". I must say it was quite liberating and fun to be painting on my photographs. I shall definitely keep experimenting.

Vancouver Walk Walk

When I saw this utility hole cover for Vancouver Water Works this past Sunday, I laughed. The message that flashed through my mind when I saw the VWW, was Vancouver Walk Walk. I had been walking through Vancouver's Gastown, Granville, Coal Harbour Seawalk, up and down Howe, Hornby, Granville and Seymore streets to meet friends and take photos along the way. It was great to travel light for three days - no computer and just my Canon G9 for a camera, which shoots 12MP raw files.

I can do without my dSLR on a holiday, but I can't seem to do without RAW. Shooting raw files has been part of my work flow for the past 4 years. It pains me to shoot jpg, mainly because of the loss of control that those 4096 tones in a raw file provide me.

The G9 is not perfect. If it was, then why would I bother with a high end dSRL for 10x the price? I had to get used to the noise, but I try to keep the ISO as low as possible to minimize it. For grungy inner city photos though, it's perfect.

I'll be adding some of the Vancouver shots to the travel stock on my PhotoShelter Personal Archive over the next short while.

Oh, and while on my travels I bought a new pair of blue shoes. You can see the top of them in the shot.

Field Trip

Yesterday I took my Photographic Design (PHTG 202) Spring semester class on a field trip. We didn't have to go far, just to downtown Calgary. I thought it would break up the semester a bit and also give them a break from me doing all the talking. It was a great day to be trekking around the core. The energy of the office crowds at lunch was a nice change from the quiet halls of ACAD, as the school is nearly devoid of students after April 30th.

We visited ABL Imaging and the Four By Five gallery of photography. The purpose of the visits was to introduce the students (who are starting their last year of ACAD in the fall) to the world of design and photography outside of the classroom and to learn what happens after the photo is taken and the design is complete.

ABL President, Susan Otterson gave us the rundown of their services and a tour of the facilities. The students were impressed with all the professional design work that they saw in progress and in "finished" form. Their creative juices were really flowing with the possibility of designing a plexi mounted cover image on their grad portfolio book.

ABL Imaging produces a wide array of display solutions for all types of clients like photographers, ad agencies, real estate developers, architects, restaurants and more. Photographic prints from 8x10 inches to wall size, back lit displays, inkjet printing on canvas, custom wall paper from your design, signage, and all sorts of customized mounting options are just a few things on their product list. ABL still even processes E-6 film on the premises.

After lunch we went to Art Central where the Four by Five Gallery of Photographic Arts is located. Steve Speer was an enthusiastic presenter. As it turns out, Steve is a graphic designer as well as a photographer and it was a great fit for the students. It is clear that Steve "loves what he does" and he's not afraid to say so. He has a great blend of experience with both the art and the technology of photography, which really fits well with my own philosophy and way of teaching. Steve kept the group engaged with both his design and photography stories from the field, and finally settled the age-old question of inkjet vs. giclee. Inkjet = Giclee, and that only the pompous call their inkjet prints giclees, or as I like to put it, giclee is the French word for inkjet. (I recently exhibited an inkjet print on vinyl and cheekily labelled it "Giclee on Vinyl" to see if any eyebrows raised.)

Four By Five exhibits and sells only archival quality photographic prints. Silver based as well as digital prints are accepted. All shows are juried by the Four By Five collective.

As always, I appreciate the time busy professionals like Susan and Steve take out of their schedules to meet with students. It's a great way to introduce products and services to students as they enter their final year of college and move on to their professional practice. It teaches them to network, and it opens doors on both sides for future customer/supplier relationships.

Art Attack

Inspired by my Photographic Design (PHTG 202) students, I am participating in this year's Art Attack, which is a fund raiser for ACAD's Visual Communications student scholarships. See below for complete details.

About the work
This is my first time participating in Art Attack and also my first time shooting food, so I wanted to make something interesting and appealing for this year’s event.

Veggie Toss was created by throwing actual vegetables up in the air and capturing them at the moment of peak design. Some motion is still present, due to the slow shutter speed, which adds to the dynamic qualities of the shots.

The vegetables are lit from behind using the translucent panel of a Photoflex Litedisc, and in front using a shoot-through umbrella. This shows nicely in the backlit tomatoes and soft highlights.

Vegetables travel at different rates of speed depending on their weight. It took about 120 shots to get the three images shown here. No retouching was done to the photographs.

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ART ATTACK
A feast for the eyes: 50 fabulous creations that pay homage to food and drink

The Alberta College of Art + Design is pleased to present the ninth annual Art Attack on Thursday, June 5, 2008.

Art Attack is a fundraising extravaganza that features the thrill of a live auction for one-of-a-kind pieces of art. Started in 1999 this event has grown and now provides two scholarships to deserving students in the Alberta College of Art + Design's Visual Communications Design program. Art Attack is successful because of the outstanding support of the community combined with the contributing designers, illustrators and fine artists who donate their time and work. Many are ACAD alumni; busy professionals who want to give back to the college to benefit the promising students with strength in both design and illustration.

This year’s event promises to provide a feast for both mind and body with stimulating pieces of art and design combined with great food and conversation. The silent auction will feature works created by local well-known artists who will utilize a common household element as their blank canvas – the chef's apron. Twenty identical aprons will be transformed into twenty unique and creative interpretations. This "variety within unity" approach is based on a design principle of the same name and will create a tremendous visual impact, certain to be appealing to food aficionados and artists alike. In contrast, a live auction will feature thirty "anything goes" pieces which were created by artists and designers whose only direction was to create a piece that reflects their expression of the theme. Ceramics, photographs, illustrations, paintings, jewelry and mixed medium creations have been donated for the heart-stopping live auction event.

Artists who have donated work include: Rick Sealock, Chris Cran, Katrina Chaytor, Karen Klassen, Laurel Johannesson, Guy Parsons, Dena Seiferling, Dee Fontans, Charles Lewton-Brain, Hugo Dubon, Margo Visser, Scott McLean, Marlene Hielema and many more!

Art Attack
Alberta College of Art + Design
Thursday, June 5, 2008
7 pm - doors open and silent auction
8:30 pm - live auction begins
Tickets $75.00 each
Please call (403) 338-5585 for tickets

Art Attack is presented by the Graphic Designers of Canada, Alberta South Chapter and net proceeds go to Visual Communications Design student scholarships at ACAD. Art Attack is also generously supported by Macleod Dixon, Coast Paper, Sasges Inc. and McAra Printing.