After years of visiting Paris in the spring and years of tantalizing her home-bound friends in Canada and the USA with tidbits on her blog about her favorite city, my dear friend Carmi has FINALLY written an [...]]]> The title alone illicts intrigue doesn’t it? Well, I’m happy to say that the intrigue is worth the read…

After years of visiting Paris in the spring and years of tantalizing her home-bound friends in Canada and the USA with tidbits on her blog about her favorite city, my dear friend Carmi has FINALLY written an Artgirl’s Guide to Paris, literally.

It’s a well written and visually beautiful guide book for us arty chicks to all the wonderful haunts and spaces that every art-inclined girl should visit in Paris. The book gives you exactly what you want to know – where to shop for arty things, where to eat lightly and well, where to stay and how to get around. It’s a great companion travel book to any existing Fodor’s, or other ‘official’ Paris travel guides. It picks up where the big travel books leave off and give you an insider’s look at Paris – the Paris WE arty chicks want to know…

I’m lucky enough to have received a personal copy from my art-girl-friend and I have to say that it is a beautiful and inspiring book. It makes me want to jump on a plane to Paris right this second! BUT… I’m waiting until the Spring when I will finally haul my Vancouver butt across the Canada and then across the Atlantic to the City of Lights.

I’ve torn through the book, voraciously eating up all the gorgeous photographs and I confess that I’m dying a little that I can’t leave today to shoot the summer streets of Paris. BUT, I can, and will wait, until Spring when the tulips are blooming – after all that it Carmi’s favorite time over there and let’s be honest, she knows the City best =)

I highly recommend this little gem of a book. You can purchase it here.

Here is a preview of the book…

All of my new pieces are [...]]]> Hello all…
Just a quick note to let you know that all my new giclees are now available exclusively at the Velvet Room Boutique in Vancouver, on 41st Ave between Yew and Vine. I delivered them myself yesterday and are currently being hung in this exceptional, Canadian oriented designer clothing store.

All of my new pieces are based either on my botanical photography or on antique 1950s imagery from 1950 Vogues and Officiel fashion magazines. The Botanika Series is based on hand-altered photography in combination with 1890s ledger book sheets and the new retro fashion collages are timeless, elegant and beautiful – perfect for any young woman’s bedroom, a powder room, or anywhere you want a little bit of Audrey Hepburn style. The 1950s collection are 24×36 and the Botanika pieces are 12×18 archival, museum quality giclees on canvas respectively. The giclees are gorgeously printed and have a minimum expected lifespan of 100 years!

Here is an example of the artwork you’ll find at the Velvet Room Boutique:

The store location is:  2248 West 41st Ave Vancouver – Kerrisdale 604-264-8664
HOURS: 10am-6pm Mon – Sat and Sunday 12-4pm

The shot is a re-worked single RAW HDR image from 2008 and the British Open Car Show held annually at VanDusen Gardens in Vancouver. LOVE the red and chrome together. So slick…

Collector Jaguar

Jacob - Age 1.5yrs

is currently being featured on the super cool HDRSpotting website and was selected by the HDR editors as an example of great HDR work. [...]]]> I’ve re-worked a number of photographs from single RAW files into HDR images and have posted a few older images in my smugmug account for fun. This image:

Jacob - Age 1.5yrs

is currently being featured on the super cool HDRSpotting website and was selected by the HDR editors as an example of great HDR work. At least that’s what I’m telling myself and why it’s being featured. To view the HDRSpotting daily featured sheet, click here.

More HDR shots on their way… just waiting for a break in the weather (and my migraines) to get out there. PLUS I have a new 8mm fish-eye lens that I’m dying to test out and a 200mm f2 lens on its way. Yup, I’ve said it bef I’m a gear head LOL

Skagit Tulip Festival-14

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

We had a super fun day yesterday at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in La Conner Washington.

My friend Yvonne and I drove down for the day to La Conner and spent 3 hours shooting tulip fields in full bloom. There were acres and acres of flowers to shoot and while [...]]]>

Skagit Tulip Festival-14

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

We had a super fun day yesterday at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in La Conner Washington.

My friend Yvonne and I drove down for the day to La Conner and spent 3 hours shooting tulip fields in full bloom. There were acres and acres of flowers to shoot and while every tulips starts to look the same after a while, they were all beautiful and full of colour [and even some with frangrance!]

I always seem to miss this annual Festival and time it either too soon to take full advantage of the bloom calendar, or usually I’m too late and the majority of the tulips have past their prime. This year, with our exceedingly mild northwest winter, the bloom season was early and the tulips were ready to be viewed and photographed as early as two weeks ago. Timing for this festival is critical. A few days can make a huge difference when we’re talking about spring weather… A rain/wind storm can decimate the fragile tulip blooms with a blast of wind, leaving nothing but unsightly stem to shoot. Not what I had in mind…

This year I vowed I would be on time, I would catch at least a good percentage of the fields and I would do what it took to get there. I took a vacation day on Friday since the weather was expected to cooperate and going on the weekend would mean massive crowds and congestion in the fields. Yvonne joined me and also took the day off work and we drove down in the mid-late morning.

It was beautiful. Sunny with a bit of marine haze, breezy and warm. Picture perfect photography weather. I’m so glad I followed my gut and blasted through my workload at the office so that I could take the day off the shoot the fields in the sunshine… today, it’s miserable. Raining, cool and the fields would be a mucky wet mess. Timing is everything.

Anyways… I’ve posted a few of the 200+ shots I took at in La Conner yesterday to my Flickr account and SmugMug. You can view them here and here.

As a special treat for my regular blog stalkers, I’m posting a high resolution screen saver/desktop image for you here in the blog. Just click on the image below, and select the size you want for your desktop! Just click on the image with the size you want in the caption, then right click on the linked image and ’save as’ to your computer. Then depending on your system, either set the image on you desktop as ‘centered’ or ’stretch to fit’ and voila! Spring has sprung on your computer desktop =)

Enjoy the eyecandy and have a great weekend.

1024x768 Desktop

1280x850 Desktop

1920x1280 Desktop

2560x1705 Desktop

As featured on HDR Spotting today! Yay =)

Nitobe-10

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

Shot yesterday in the beautiful spring sunshine… Have lived in Vancouver my entire life and have never experienced the tranquil, lush beauty that is Nitobe Japanese Gardens. They are truly wonderful and a place of great reflection – both IN and out of the water LOL! I will be back again soon.

For [...]]]>

Nitobe-10

Originally uploaded by studiowerx

Shot yesterday in the beautiful spring sunshine… Have lived in Vancouver my entire life and have never experienced the tranquil, lush beauty that is Nitobe Japanese Gardens. They are truly wonderful and a place of great reflection – both IN and out of the water LOL! I will be back again soon.

For more of this spectacular garden and to see a few more pics from my walkabout yesterday, please visit me at Flickr

Comments and critiques are welcomed and appreciated.

I will be posting another shoot later this week from the La Conner Tulip Festival. I’m taking Friday off [to avoid the weekend crazy] and driving down to La Conner Washington for the day with a co-worker, who I’m sure plans to pick my brains about shooting in HDR – lol! It could make for either a very LOOOOOONG day, or fast one – we’ll see…

Have a good week everyone.

It’s great to work for the City sometimes, because I can get access to areas that are often closed to the public or under heavy supervision. The back deck of Britannia [...]]]> Yesterday, while the weather was nice and clear, I headed out for a quick shoot in Steveston. This time I went to Britannia Heritage Shipyards.

It’s great to work for the City sometimes, because I can get access to areas that are often closed to the public or under heavy supervision. The back deck of Britannia is like that because of the need to maintain the historic site and to ensure that no one falls into the water or injures themselves. Anyways, I popped in to the office at the site, and a co-worker was there from our department so she let me on to the back deck and I spent about 1 hour shooting the exterior and interior of the building. Here are the results… LOVE!

For more images from this shoot, please visit my SmugMug gallery here… Thanks and enjoy!

I’m heading out to shoot again later today… maybe ;^)

I’ll be teaching a 4 hour workshop on designing and self-publishing your own photo and portfolio books at Langara Community College on May 22, 2010. The class is being offered for the first time at Langara and came about in a funny way…

During my landscape photography class at Langara, as part of [...]]]> Yep… It’s true =)

I’ll be teaching a 4 hour workshop on designing and self-publishing your own photo and portfolio books at Langara Community College on May 22, 2010. The class is being offered for the first time at Langara and came about in a funny way…

During my landscape photography class at Langara, as part of my chosen curriculum for my Commercial Photography program, my instructor Jim Balderston showed an interest in the books I had published. One class, I brought in a few and he was blown away. So, after a bit of discussion, we [Jim and I] thought it could be a great class to offer the photography students at Langara – and since I was the one who had shown the potential of the books, Jim felt it appropriate that I introduce the idea to the department head Greg Blue… Greg was also impressed and could see the HUGE potential for not only photography students, but fine art and graphic students too and as they say, the rest is history LOL!

More details will be shared on my blog once registration for the course is open. So if you’ve ever wanted to create a coolio book like me, sign up for this 4-hour workshop and amaze your friends, family and YOURSELF!

It’s an 8×10 landscape book and is available for purchase now! For a 30 page preview of this 58 page book, please click here.

To order, simply [...]]]> I’m obsessed with graffiti art, spray art and HDR photography… So, when the opportunity to combine these obsessions presented themselves this week, I had to make a book about it.

It’s an 8×10 landscape book and is available for purchase now! For a 30 page preview of this 58 page book, please click here.

To order, simply go to my online Blurb store to purchase, or contact me directly for an autographed copy. I will have these fresh-off-the-press books in hand in about 10 days.

For a sneak peek at some of the photos, visit my smugmug site by clicking here!

Thanks for looking…