Jamie Look Jewelry – “Dark Summer” from Dave Brosha on Vimeo.
What do you get when you combine a beautiful northern night, the creations from the north’s most prolific jewelry designer, Jamie Look, and one of the most expressive, amazing northern models, Tiffany Ayalik?  Magic.  Dark magic.  I’ve shot a number of projects now for Jamie, and each time I’m impressed with the life and creativity her work offers.  And, well, Tiffany – you may have seen her through my ongoing “Sub-Arctic Butterflies” series (see more here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/brosha/sets/72157624318385254/show/ ).  She is probably one of the most professional models I have ever worked with.  She makes photography easy.

The above video sideshow is a short two minutes and contains some of my favourites from that shoot.  Below, a few more.  Most of these were light with a single Elinchrom beauty dish, skillfully wielded by my assistant, Andrea Nilson.  Other credits include Nicole Garbutt (make-up) and Geoff Fandrick (co-assistant/behind-the-scenes shooting).

In honour of Aboriginal Day, I thought it was a perfect day to share some of the results of a project that I’ve been involved with for the past couple of months.  I’ve been working with a very talented team of filmmakers – headed by Yellowknife’s own Pablo Saravanja - on the first of three documentaries conceptualized and commissioned by BHP Billiton Canada showcasing traditional knowledge in the Canadian North.

This first documentary, specifically, focuses on Dene drum-making.  Drum-making is becoming a lost art, and there are very few people in the north that know how to make the traditional caribou skin drums that are a common sight at many events, both spiritual and community-based, throughout the North.  Any resident of the Northwest Territories has no doubt seen and heard, on numerous occasions, the riveting sights and sounds of Dene drummers engaged in their song.  It’s powerful, and the thought of the Dene losing the knowledge needed to continue making these drums is alarming.

Phillip and Rosa Husky, of the small Dene community of Behchoko, are some of the last drum makers, and our team first traveled to Behchoko to document the Husky’s in their home, where together they create their beautiful crafts,  sawing and shaping the wood, and scraping and cutting the caribou hides which, together, are the key components of the drums.  Next, we travelled to the Ekati mine site, where Phillip and Rosa held a series of workshops explaining and demonstrating the process to eager participants.

It was a fantastic project and I myself learned a lot while photographing stills for the documentary, which is due to be released in the coming months.  The next documentary will see us travel to Kugluktuk, up in the Canadian Arctic, to document the traditional knowledge of Inuit making seal skin mitts.  Can’t wait.

Anyone who’s read Joe McNally’s fantastic book, The Hot Shoe Diaries – which has pretty much served as a Bible to many photo enthusiasts in their transition from using primarily natural light in their images to taking full advantage of the power of artificial light sources, like flash – knows that Joe doesn’t take himself at all seriously. Despite the fact that the guy has been in magazines like Life, National Geographic, American Photo, and anything else you’ve seen great photos, he gets on quite well with his persona of, well, a lovable and extremely knowledgeable goof.

Before I got into photography I was heavy into creative writing. It was a passion in university and despite not really pursuing a career in writing – I don’t have the patience to write anything longer than three or four pages, and as you may have noticed from my many blog posts, the whole idea of editing for grammar and spelling isn’t strongly on my radar, much to the chagrin of my mother – I love to write. Definitely a stream-of-consciousness guy.  With that said (hey, I used “chagrin” in a sentence!), here’s a small blurb on a recent photoshoot with YK Online’s Kyle Thomas, written in the style of Joe McNally. Forgive me:

When The Light’s Boring, Create Your Own Drama

So I have this photoshoot booked with Kyle  Thomas, and I’m mulling ideas for weeks ahead of the shoot.  Kyle is getting pretty well-known in Yellowknife circles due to his passion for “new” media like blogging, Twitter, and Facebook (yeah, okay, not so new at all), and, well…I don’t want to screw this shoot up.  Half of the city reads his posts, and being on the good side of one of his posts can’t be a bad thing.

So think, num-nuts, think.

Kyle’s this techno-geeky guy.  But in a cool way. I’m pretty sure he would choose a free iPad over a free trip to Florida.  But he also loves the outdoors – he is that unusual combination of woodsman and computer nerd.  I don’t know if I know any others. So we gotta do something that involves the outdoors and his arsenal of gadgetry.  That’s a no-brainer.

We set up a time. Evening, of course, so that we can get some decent evening light to throw a little natural drama in the images.  Only I’m a bonehead, and somehow forget – despite living in this city fo six years – that evening light in Yellowknife means going out at about 10 or 11 PM.  Not the 8:00 start that I’ve booked.  Land of the Midnight Sun, indeed.

So we get out to the beach at Fred Henne Park just around the time that the light is about as boring as it can get (considering the direction I want to shoot).  Somehow I’ve got to do something that makes me look way smarter than I am, especially considering Kyle has the camera’s rolling.

The sky looked like this when we arrived.  Not the stuff of legends.

So I know I want to make the sky look different than it does.  More colourful.  Warmer. Cooler.  It doesn’t matter….just not what you would normally expect to see.  The “drama mantra” is pounding in my head.  So what to do?  White balance.  Yes, by manually setting my white balance to the “tungsten” setting on my camera I know that it will mess things up.  With “Tungsten” set on the camera, it’s expecting to see light the temperature of a light bulb. Which means that when you actually have bright, natural sun light it will take a very cool, blue tone.  Sort of like the next picture.

That’s a little better.  “But wait!”, you may say.  “That doesn’t look natural!”.  Well, the thing is, it doesn’t have to.  The beauty of creating images – especially from a creative context – is that you don’t have to follow rules.  Using a flash is unnatural, if you want to take that mode of thinking to the extreme.  We have tools and techniques available to us as photographers, it’s up to us to use them in creative ways.

So in any case, I have a deep, cool blue sky and water.  I kind of like it.  It’s at least a little more dramatic  than my “normal” sky.

But lends to another problem.  I plunk Kyle into the scene and, well, he becomes an extra in a Blue Man Group performance.  Kind of like this next shot.

Not only is he blue, but he’s totally shadowed by the sun behind him.  Strip him down and lose the glasses and hat and he could be Gollum in Lord of the Rings.  Not exactly a good portrait by any means.  So what do we got to do?  And by “we” I mean me, seeing that Kyle’s standing knee deep in water, wearing his jeans, and trying hard not to show on his face what I’ve long suspected….that I’m a total hack.

Flash!  Yes, of course.  Fill in those deep, dark shadows with flash.  Keep the backdrop looking nice and dramatic but hit him with a burst of flash to make him “pop” against the background.  Which is fine, but if I hit him with a normal flash, I’m still set in the tungsten setting, so despite the light, Kyle is still going to be blue.  Only a much brighter blue.  That’s not good.

Which means I have to use a full cut of CTO gel (a nice little $1 piece of deep orange plastic across my flashhead to counteract the white balance setting and “warm” up Kyle accordingly).  The flash shines through the gel and whatever that light hits will take on the colour of the plastic.  If I used it with a “normal” white balance, Kyle would become Mr. Pumpkin Head.  Too warm.  But with the cooler white balance setting he becomes warm, but not bright orange.  Kind of like the colour of setting sun.  Dramatic.  Which means that I just have to get Kyle to “work it”, and give me some poses, and we have our shots.

This one was shot with a normal white balance, and has a Lasolite Ezybox softbox mounted to camera left (with a Canon 580 Speedlite); natural light on the right for fill.

After we got the beach shots, we had time to try out one more quick location.  A knew of a rocky point close-by, and as luck would have it, it was later.  And later meant that the dramatic light I was hoping for at the beach materialized, which meant I could breath in, breath out, breath in….and leave my lights in my truck.  Clearly a natural light scene.  Why over-think it when there’s beautiful light right in front of you.  Mother Nature is beautiful.  Follow her lead sometimes.

So I chucked Kyle out onto a point with the directions “don’t fall”.  And as I walked away from him, swatting mosquitoes the size of Boston Cream doughnuts, I thought to myself, “hey, never mind him….you’re the one about to head waist deep into the water, on slippery rocks, with a $5000 camera”.  But inside voices always say silly stuff like that.  Thankfully my practical side won out, and as I swatted mosquitoes with my free hand, waist deep in water, I thought, “wow, this is a pretty beautiful night for a photoshoot”.

And the funny thing is sometimes the shots we least expect to capture please us the most.  For whatever reason, this was one of my favourites from the shoot:

For the better part of this week I’ve been tasked to cover (including the lead-up to) the annual Mine Rescue competition – a yearly test of skills between the various northern mining operations. These competitions aren’t just about showcasing skills – the lead-up and actual competition are used to help hone the talents of the men and women competing, skills that might be put to use in a more serious situation some day. Mining risks are real, and having highly skilled, brave, dedicated people to know how to react in a safe manner is paramount.

Here’s some images from an afternoon spent with BHP Billiton’s surface and underground mine rescue teams as they spent practicing their fire extinguishing skill-set in preparation for the weekend’s competition; I myself completed training in this very location (Giant Mine, on the outskirts of Yellowknife) about 7 years ago, when I was an employee of Nunavut Power, so it was incredibly interesting for me to come back and document the exact type of exercise I once went through.

I’ll most likely have more photos to share from the actual competition in the weeks to come. Good luck to the BHP team this weekend!

Dave

This particular shot was photographed on Niven Lake, on June 6, 2010.

This Is What I Do from Dave Brosha on Vimeo.

I am a northern Canadian freelance photographer and writer based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

I’ve wanted for some time to do a “behind-the-scenes” – to show what an average photoshoot looks like. I love what I do and I thought it would be a fun idea to show “why”.

Similarly, I’ve also always wanted to do a stop-motion video. When I saw the fantastic work that grade 11 student, Samantha Lillian Hefford was doing, here in my own city, I thought “why re-invent the wheel”. Her stuff rocks, I have so little time. It was a match made in heaven.

This video covers a recent photoshoot I did of Aaron “Godson” Hernandez, the Canadian North’s best-known hip-hop artist. Aaron’s a great guy, a true talent, and he’s having me do the album art and design of his upcoming release.  This video is as much about him, and about the talent of Sam, as it is about what I do.

Thanks to the following people, who made this possible:
- first and foremost, Samantha. Kudos. You are a shining star.
- Aaron. Thanks for letting me disrupt your shoot somewhat for this little project.
- Andrea Nilson, my assistant. Great job, as always, assisting.

Check out more of Samantha’s work here: facebook.com/pages/Samantha-Lillian-Photography/397351855332?ref=ts

Babies are art, simply.

They don’t need studio lights, dramatic angles, make-up artists, wardrobe, or someone saying “now look over here ….perfect!” to look good. They just do. They are about is perfect as we’ll ever be as people, and a person can learn a lot about what it means to be alive just by looking at a baby. They don’t judge. They don’t hate. They just love. And want to be loved.

I can remember the first few times I photographed babies I was petrified. Petrified of waking them. Touching them in any way – thinking that it was possible that I could break them. This was, of course, before the first of our own two sons were born, and since then I’ve learned so much as a father, first, and a photographer. I’m now more comfortable with babies and always feel rejuvenated as a person following a session, especially when I know that we (for it’s truly a team effort between baby, parents, and the photographer) captured something special.

Here’s a “few” of my favourites from a session earlier in the week. Ryan…Teresa….your little baby girl is art.

Over the course of a couple of hours, we bounced around several spots in the warehouse, trying different themes:  from simple elegance to more gritty back to an older school look, in which Jacqueline wore a dress from the 50s. Jacqueline’s a timeless beauty, and she pulled it off wonderfully.

Model: Jacqueline Rocher
Make-up: Nicole Garbutt
Assistant: Andrea Nilson and Jessica Mitchell.

Click on any of the photos below for a slightly larger version.

This was one of my favourite shots of Jacqueline; we were just going for simple elegance. She's lit by a combination of light bounced off the floor and the surrounding ambient light.

This place had really elegant light, but I still needed to light Jacqueline so that she "popped" against the setting. For this one, I used a single Elinchrom beauty dish, positioned to her right.

Again, beautiful natural light (the sun setting over Back Bay) lit the setting with a real magical quality to it. For this, and to prevent harsh shadows, I bounced my beauty dish off the floor from quite a distance back to hit her gently, but still with "pop"

Sometimes when I do shoots I can get carried away with overthinking studio lights. Sometimes, the natural light does a beautiful job directly on its own. Here, I noticed this nice little pocket of soft, natural light hitting the floor. Jacqueline, luckily, wasn't afraid to get a little dirty (it was pretty dusty up there; I ended up filthy by night's end).

Next, I wanted to "grunge things up" a little; this one, again, is light by a single Elinchrom studio head, diffused by a large Elinchrom Rotalux softbox, camera left (and held by my assistant, Andrea, who replaced the light stand that snapped in a braindead play on my part moments before).

We found this crazy machete sitting amongst piles of ancient stuff lying around this cool location. Same lighting as the last.

I thought Jacqueline looked quite "Kill Bill" in a few of these. Feirce.

Fuller, similar view to the last. Shiny red works so well with studio lighting; again, going for "pop".

I wouldn't mess with her.

Final shot, and one of my favourites of the night. Natural light....

About a month or so ago I had the opportunity to fly up to Alaska for a great assignment:  a company had seen the work I had done for BHP Billiton Canada’s Ekati Diamond Mine – specifically my underground mining photography – and wanted me to capture their own unique underground environment.

Underground mining photography has developed into somewhat of a specialty of mine,  but I can still remember the first time I went underground:  I was silently terrified about doing a poor job.  To this day, it’s one of the more particular forms of photography I’ve found myself doing; specific shots can sometimes take 20-30 minutes to set up and shoot (opposed to most commercial shoots where I can literally get hundreds of different perspectives of a subject throughout the course of a shooting day.  Really, the principles of underground photography aren’t dramatically different than photographing a lot of night-time subjects:  longer exposures, and taking advantage of whatever forms of light are available to you.  If there’s none, create your own (I lugged back and forth about 70 pounds of studio gear through this half-mile shaft over the three days of shooting.  Needless to say, I was exhausted, but elated at the opportunity to travel to a place I’ve always wanted to explore in greater detail.

Here’s a small sampling of the shots, both underground and otherwise:

The wider angle perspective of the shot below. Used a polarizing filter on this one.

Now, just missing someone to sit with and sip a coffee.

Couldn't resist a little sitdown to just take it all in.

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