Art Gallery of Alberta Project – 1 of 3 – The Portraits
This is the first of three blog posts I’m going to make about working on the Art Gallery of Alberta supplement.
For the last six weeks I was off the normal photo schedule at The Journal and put on the Art Gallery of Alberta project. On Sunday the new gallery opened up to the public and last Thursday we had a 36-page supplement in the paper as well as a big online feature.
My favorite thing to shoot is portraits so I went to town with this one. It was exciting to have a new building with interesting architecture to shoot in. Here are my favorites.
Art Gallery of Alberta Executive Director Gilles Hebert poses for a photo in the new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton on December 1, 2009. (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal). Shot with a Canon 5D, 16-35L @ 31mm. 580EX flash into an O-Flash ring flash. F4, ISO400.
Shot with a Canon 5D and a 75mm DIY Tilt-Shift lens. One 550EX flash to the back left with a snoot on, Lastolite EzyBox softbox and a 550EX to the right. 1/200sec, f2.8, ISO50.
Art Gallery of Alberta Curator Catherine Crowston poses for a photo in the new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton on December 1, 2009. (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal). Canon 5D, Canon 24mm f1.4 lens at f1.8, 1/60sec, ISO640. Available light.
Allan Scott, Chair of the AGA Board poses for a photo in the new Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton on December 1, 2009. (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal). Canon 5D, ISO100, 1/160sec. Canon 50mm f1.4 lens at f5.6. Canon 550EX into a Lastolite Ezybox to the front right and a 550EX with a snoot on it to the back right.
Cool thing about this image is that the AGA has it framed and hanging in a boardroom dedicated to Allan Scott which means I now have a photograph in the Art Gallery of Alberta pernament collection!
Randall Stout, architect of the new Art Gallery of Alberta poses for a photo in front of the gallery in down town Edmonton on December 3, 2009. (Ryan Jackson / Edmonton Journal).
For this image I wanted to go all artsy so I shot it with my 1950’s-era Yashica D twin-lens medium format camera. I had a 24×36″ softbox to the left with a White Lightning strobe and a 40×60″ relector to the right. I shot on Kodak T-Max and develeoped it myself in the Journal’s old darkroom and then scanned it.
Is this image any better because I used all that gear and film? Nope! But it was a lot of fun trying to do something different and that’s the best part of my job!
Those are some great artistic shoots you got! Especially like the last one of Randall Stout (but of course we’re biased haha). If you want to find out more about Randall, be sure to check out his story at http://www.edmontonstories.ca/story/art-gallery-of-alberta
Hello! Fantastic idea, but could this really work?
MISTIE