2008 Outside Wall Calendar

Our copy of Outside Magazine arrived yesterday. It included the 2008 wall calendar ... a gift for new subscribers. I am very excited to have my photo of Pete freediving with a humpback whale as the photo above the month of September. And it is in good company. The calendar includes some great images.

Getting Old.

Ok, it is too late at night to try to find a way to fit these images into some sort of a narrative. Both Curacao and Bimini produced images that remind me why I think that I have something to offer as an underwater photographer. And the stand out photos from both trips remind me that years ago I told Pete that I would start shooting macro photography when I was too old to freedive. Well, I just turned 38, and both assignments found me spending long, patient hours behind my 100mm macro. On scuba, no less! There is something about a Petersen shrimp in an anenome that shows me there is a world of underwater photography still to discover. But Katie's style while freediving is reason enough to always have the 16-35mm as the lens of first choice.

Ocean Futures

I had the chance to spend a week in Bimini aboard the Apnea. Fabiene Coustea and Ocean Futures flew to the island to film a documentary which focused on the environmental problems (some might say the ecological disaster) created by the development at Bimini Bay. This was the first time that I visited the north end of the island in years, and yes, I was truly shocked by what I saw. Bimini is just too small for the vast numbers of cookie cutter town homes that are planned and it's mangrove shoreline is far to valuable as habitat to be removed for something as self serving as a golf course or a channel to bring yachts to a backyard. Please take a look at these sites. Bimini needs all of the friends it can get.

Catch-Up

Two trips and the Thanksgiving holiday have really put me behind in my blog. But I have a couple of hours in a noisy hotel room to try and get caught up. What follows is what seems noteworthy from three weeks and two projects.

Gallery Opening

My gallery show at the Biscayne Nature Center opened on Saturday afternoon. It was a great turn out and I'd like to thank everyone who braved some truly incredible Miami traffic to see the photos. Lara and I were talking that morning about what a nice community feel Key Biscayne has, and when you narrow that community down to a group of water people, the Nature Center is an great place for everybody to gather. Many thanks to Theo Long and her staff for all the help in the lead up to the show. Many more thanks to Deblois for the music. Buy her CD!

I thought that the show looked really good. Lara's Eye continues to be the image that raises the most questions. And for some reason many people want to know how much Photoshop is involved in the prints. I think it might be a default question that starts a question about the process and ideas behind the images. And I also like to think that the question has a lot to do with making sure that photos like these are still swimming around.

Ironman

Lara entered the 2008 Florida Ironman Triathlon on Sunday. We heard that it sells out quickly, so she had her whole family on standby to hit the website precisely at 1pm in hopes of someone securing a spot for her. But it turns out that Lara was the one who made it through. She was so excited. So thus begins the year of early mornings, healthy eating and "right" choices. Or in Lara's case, I should say EARLIER mornings, HEALTHIER eating and RIGHTER (?) choices. But you can follow the whole process on Lara's blog. Her first entry sounds like it might have been written by a WWF wrestling promoter, but she tells me that this is the kind of attitude needed to complete an Ironman. It should be an interesting year.

Caribbean Travel & Life

I had lunch with Dave Herndon on Wednesday on my way through Orlando. It was nice to get caught up on everything that has changed since we camped in the Dry Tortugas so many years ago. Life changes quickly! He gave me a copy of the December issue of his magazine which features Chris Cox's article and my photos from St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Maybe because it is the most recent, or maybe because of the great portraits I shot on the trip, or maybe because it was something that Lara and I worked on together, but this assignment still feels like my best for the magazine. But it wasn't until I discovered the St. Vincent and the Grenadines booth at the DEMA show and was able to show the magazine to everybody that made the trip happen, that I really knew what it was to feel good about an assignment. It was so fun to stand around with all of the great people from the tourism department, Young Island Resort and Indigo Dive and talk about all of the great spots that we visited in July. After so much time on the island for Pirates of the Caribbean and then this assignment, SVG has many good memories for me.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center Gallery Show - November 10th 2-5PM

This afternoon I picked up the promo cards for my upcoming gallery show at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Biscayne Nature Center. It took one rejected attempt, but Ser-Mar did a nice job. There is a huge difference between these cards and the product offered by Modern Postcard. I don't know what the coating is, but they look almost wet. Very glossy. Tthe show opens on November 10th. Click on the image for more information.

Design District

I have been back and forth to DistrictLab the last few days. The drive from the beach into the Design District is always good for a couple of reasons. 1. It's close and the traffic is almost manageable ... compared to most places in Miami. 2. It involves the Julia Tuttle Causeway, which is as Miami as roads get here. (All it's missing is the cruise ships.) And 3. The closer you get to the Design District, the better the design gets! Between the cement factories, the Target stores and the guys living in vans are murals worth driving out of your way to see. But by far the best is the easiest to find. Right where Biscayne goes under 195, a man and a woman stand in the sun. Their shadows against the wall make it seem like they are standing in the grass, and his hands and expression might be apologizing or might be imploring. But it is her hips that turn my head ... every single time I drive by. Don't tell Lara, but it might be love!

Sloooow

When the assignments slow down and then stop, there is really only one thing to do. Marketing. I have spent many hours in front of the computer designing a new promo card. The results went into the mail yesterday. It is a little anti-climatic to spend a week looking at images and fonts, another week matching editors and addresses, and a weekend labeling and stamping to then simply hand 500 cards to the post office. But that's the drill. The best that can be hoped for is that the card finds a home on a photo editors wall or in a file, but more likely the card gets one glance before landing in the trash. Such is the life of a promo card.


I really like the design part of the process. When I put these two images together ... Dave in his Kayak and Lara at the university pool ... I felt a relation between them. Motion, expression, composition and color were elements that drew me to these images. That was two weeks ago. Now I think that I might have had one or two specific magazines in my head when I chose the photographs. My goal with these cards is to convince any editor that water and underwater offers a fresh look for any magazine. I'm just not sure that these two images suggest that idea. But the good thing about a marketing campaign is that I have another shot at it in two months.


Something else that I noticed in this process. I do not always immediately recognize THE shot in a roll of film. This image of David on the Calchec River didn't even make the blog when I first wrote about the trip. Three months later, it is one of my favourite images.

Swim

Lara and I swam at the University of Miami pool yesterday. It had been a long time since our last visit, but the scene hasn't really changed. Most of the students still lay around the pool catching rays, and three or four people are in the pool swimming lengths. (I might say that university was nothing like that for me, but it might be more a comment on my age. Or the fact that I went to school in Toronto.) Lara is extremely focused on distance and speed these days ... two things that will help get her through a triathlon next year. I have to admit that years as an underwater photographer have ruined me for any kind of lengths. There is just too much water to look at, too many possibilities to consider. Lengths require me to turn off the creative side of my brain, and water usually has the opposite reaction on me. (How is that for a reason not to swim lengths?) After the workout, we spent some time shooting the details of a body moving through a lane of water. Lara is very patient when it comes stuff like this. She learned long ago that "one more time" has no real meaning to me, even though I say it after every shot. And she patiently continues down the lane as I try to swim in the same space that she is using. Only a swift kick or a hard bump from the housing gets a reaction.

I have been using my AquaTech housing for these images. The thing I really like about this housing is the Canon 580EX strobe underwater. It permits great things like second curtain sync on a slow shutter speed, or a hi-speed sync on a 1/2000th of a second shutter speed. This opens up so many ways to capture motion, and control the background. I am anxious to see how far above 1/250th of a second I can get with the Ikelite strobes in my Seacam housing.

New Promotion

Two new places to find my work went up this week. Taking Larry's advice, I now have a portfolio on both Workbook.com and Blackbook.com. (Larry has decades of experience and a huge amount of talent, and I am always thankful that he is so open to helping.) There is a lot of great work up on both sites, and it is nice to see that my portfolio has something different to offer. Water is the simplest theme that runs through my images, and it is my hope that an editor looking through the portrait, lifestyle or travel section will see that is a theme that can apply to any story. I don't want to change what I do, but I would like to find a bigger market for my work. Links to my new portfolios are below.

http://www.workbook.com/portfolios/calver_t/
http://www.blackbook.com/TimCalver

New Website

My new website went up yesterday. Thanks very much to Nadine Baurin at Creataria. (http://www.creataria.com) It was a great experience to work with Nadine. She took my website plans, trimmed away all of the bad ideas, added her own great thoughts, and delivered a beautiful site. On time. All while preparing for her wedding. I would highly recommend her.

The site went up sometime between late night west coast time and first thing east coast time. And for a while yesterday morning, it seemed that some sort of a big announcement preceded the update. In the space of a couple of hours, I had three calls for three different jobs, two of which were brand new clients and just a coincidence that they came on the same day that my new work went up.

Anyway, if you found this blog without going through the website, please check out http://www.timcalver.com

Dolphins

I always intend to write these things immediately ... that is the purpose of a blog, isn't it? But for some reason it takes me until Thursday to get Monday on paper.

Monday was the day that the Miami Seaquarium shoot happened. A tropical wave postponed the shoot for a couple of days last week, and afternoon thunderstorms were still a factor on Monday. But by the time they rolled in, the shoot was over. Young dolphins unaccustomed to divers were more of a factor than the weather. And it was so frustrating to look up from the bottom of the Dolphin Harbor facility, see world class light shafts, realize that an amazing photo was possible, and then watch the dolphins do everything they could to stay out of the photo. I would like to think that in the end persistence paid off, and two or three moments made the shoot a success, but I'm not exactly sure. I got some nice photos, but my dolphin, diver and light shafts could have been truly amazing and wasn't. There may be a chance for a re-shoot.

It was good to work to work with Pete and Cuaks again.

Great Quote

I just finished posting the river stuff, and I lay down on the couch to kill some time with the endless magazines that somehow make their way into our mailbox. I can across some remarkable photos in Wired by Rick Graves. He is shooting NASCAR with a modified Hasselblad which freezes the cars at 200 mph. Anyway, he had a quote that applies equally to freezing fast cars and blurring water and athletes.

"Failure is a necessity and a lot of times, success is luck."

Rivers - British Columbia

Lara and I flew in from Vancouver on Wednesday night. It was a great trip to Whistler to see Dave, Mom and Dad. Everybody came from a long way away for an unfortunately rare, complete Calver reunion.

Lara and I stayed in Dave's cosy apartment and our Whistler days were filled with good food, long walks or runs on the trail, and catching up. We filled his tiny living room with our duffel bags and my camera gear, but it was for me a crowded reminder to use the equipment that I lugged across the country. I always feel that some of my best photos come out of personal trips, and I was looking forward to getting in a river with David.

We scouted the Calchec on Thursday night and returned on Friday to shoot. The river seemed to offer a lot of what we were looking for ... reasonable access for David, reasonable water flow for a swimmer, and reasonably good waves for a kayaker. I was a little worried about the water temperature ... a chilly 5 degrees Celcius. But it turned out that my 5/4/3 with a hooded vest was the right suit. Good thing, because I would have felt cold and dumb with a thicker suit hanging in the closet in Miami!

The water level was such that I could crawl and walk through the river to a cluster of rocks where David could make repeated runs in his kayak. I shot my 20mm in a dome port but had all kinds of problems with water drops. No matter how many times I rubbed spit over the acrylic, the river would throw little drops of water up on the dome, and there they would stick. I really need to find a solution to this problem.

Things were much better when I switched to the 24-70 behind a flat port. Of course, the flat port is much smaller than the dome, but it also got rid of water much much better. It made me really want a flat port for my 16-35 instead of the dome and extension ring that I bought. (I have not been making the most informed gear purchases lately.) I shot the flat port on the opposite side of the river from where we started. There was a big-ish hydrolic that Dave could surf in and I could stand close to. This is where I got the best shots of the afternoon. I tried a mix of slow and fast shutter speeds, and liked the look of the water motion from the slow shutter speed, but liked the recycle times on the strobe better on the fast shutter speed. I had tested these shots a lot in Miami before the trip, but I did notice one big difference in the river. With a lot of white water and spray, I think it fooled the e-TTL into not putting out as much light. Yes, I should have been shooting on Manual, but that is a lesson learned for the next trip.

Anyway, here are a couple of images from the Calchec river. This was probably the highlight of the trip for me. There is a good feeling that getting into the water produces, and a good feeling to working with your brother. I was happy to combine them.

Morning Swims

The ocean off 79th Street has been calm the last few mornings. Lara have I been swimming either early or late in the day. We swim from one marker-buoy 100 meters off shore, down a few blocks to the next marker-buoy and then back again. The swim takes us along the outside edge of the sandbar and is rarely more than 8 feet deep. Most of the time I can just see rippled sand through my crappy goggles. I doubt that the distance we swim is more than a mile, but it is far enough, both in length and distance offshore, to make me feel like I am doing something.

If we swim our course in the evening, I usually take the morning to shoot some photos of Lara swimming. I just received my new AquaTech housing from Australia and I am eager to work the kinks out before next weeks' Vancouver trip. The system I bought includes a housing for my Canon 1Ds MKII, a dome for the 20mm, a flat port for my 24-70mm, and a housing for the 580 EXII strobe. I bought this splash housing thinking that it would be light and highly swimmable, but there is no getting around the fact that the 1Ds MKII is a big heavy camera. It is a good workout to push the housing and flash through the water and keep up with Lara. But the results have been really encouraging. Second curtain sync on the flash and a lucky hit of light off the mirrored goggles, and you really have an open water swim image. And the following can't be overstated. it is so nice to have a model who gets out of bed at 6:20, dives into 77 degree water and swims in the direction I point. And with only a little grumpiness!

First Blog Ever

A few months ago I decided that I would start a blog to coincide with my website update. New photos, new design, new features. At the time, many photography related things were in the works, and I pictured everything neatly coming together at one point in time, and my new blog summing it all up. But as is more in keeping with my life's pace, there have been a few delays, a few successes and so far, no website update. I decided that I could either continue to wait, or start the blog. So here it is. water-blogged ... as in a blog about a lot of time in the water.