No, I haven’t misspelled the old practice of map making.  I’ve been in a photographic slump for quite a while now; nothing seems to spark my interest or make me want to haul out my equipment and search for inspiration.  Maybe it’s the cold, wet weather we’ve been having?  But then, that’s the reason I bought my light tent so many months ago and it’s hardly been out of it’s case.

Maybe it’s something else.

Regardless of what it is, I’ve decided that it’s time to fix it.  Last night the boys were on the receiving end of my new found vigilance.  I’d say they were unhappy about it, but the only way to get a cat to stay in one place is to bribe them with treats.  A couple of Temptations and a few pinces of cat nip and it was time to pose.

There’s a couple more, including a set up shot in the gallery.

ps: after almost a year, my Week 4 photos from Tibet are online now.

I’m just in the process of importing all of the albums from my old website (http://www.kevinleitch.com) into the gallery here on evilkitchen.ca.

I’m mainly doing so to consolidate all of my photos into one gallery and also to free up my other domain for other persuits. There isn’t much in the way of exciting photos from the older gallery, they’re simply snapshots from that time of my life (predominantly while living in the Caribbean).

Things should be cleaned up soon, and hopefully nothing has broken in the process.

[edit] – Ok, it’s all finished and imported. I think everything rolled over quite smoothly, though I’m sure it helps that both sites are on the same web server.

I’ve also fixed a few style problems that have been plaguing the site for ages, which makes me feel a little better about things.

As part of the website creation process for my fencing clubs new site I’ve taken several head shots of the coaches.  It’s the first time I’ve used a 3 light setup (having just picked up another 580 EX II while back home), and it wasn’t as difficult as I was expecting.  I think the trick is just to add one light at a time until everything looks the way you’d imagined.  The setup shot is here, where the tripod in the middle is where I had the subject stand.

In this case I wanted to use the colour of the walls in our gym to add a warm, orange-ish background and use a fairly fast shutter speed to kill any ambiant light and make the rest of the image darker.  In this way I could get an orange/black look that would match the colour scheme of the website and I’m quite happy with the results.

A couple of examples are here, and the rest are in the gallery.

I picked up a new toy for the upcoming winter months so I can keep shooting without having to go outside.  It’s a fairly simple set up with just a couple of flashes, but it’s got a lot of potential.  So far I’ve played around and helped Danni with a batch of charms as well as taking some shots of my new toys (a Dell laptop and a Wacom Cintiq 12WX).

There’s a few here, and some more in the gallery like always.

I spent a bit of time in Hyde Park last evening trying to capture the latest autumn colours.  I think all of the photos that got posted from this set were done with my tilt-shift lens.  It doesn’t get as much use as it should, mainly due to being a manual focus lens and the fact that I’m rubbish at manual focusing.

I thought the fact that it would require more attention from me would help to slow me down and think about what I was shooting.  It succeeded in this, but mainly it succeeded in increasing the number of out of focus photos I ended with at the end of the day.  Always a learning process, and the lesson yesterday was to bring along a tripod and use LiveView 🙂

Here are a few keepers from the day and as usual, there are a few more in the gallery.