GarthWunsch.com

Posts Tagged ‘digital photography’

Each year the Sudbury Food Bank sponsors an art competition to source images for their annual Christmas Card Collection. They choose ten images which are presented and sold at their Gala Dessert Fund Raiser. Each winning artist donates a framed copy of their submission which is auctioned off during the evening to assist with the work of the food bank. This event is a pretty big deal, so I am really honoured to have one of my images chosen. The artists each receive two very highly coveted and rather pricey tickets to the evening (sells out every year), being hosted this year by Sudbury Fine Cars, our local Mercedes-Benz dealer. My sincere thanks to the selection committee.

David Johannsson (owner of the FrameMaker) and I hung the show this AM. Looks Good. Anxious for tomorrow to get under way.

This is the map that indicates my location in the Cedar Pointe Plaza across from Southridge mall. If you intend to travel to the more distant parts of the city to see some of the other great work, make sure you get the corrected map from the SCARF website at http://www.scarf.ca/ and click on Tour. Although the printed directions are correct, the map was a little misleading and the corrections are posted on the site.

Come on out, rain or shine, and see some really great art… of all sorts.

It’s pretty late in the season for blueberries, but life has been such that I have been unable to get out for the last few weeks, so today I took advantage of NO RAIN and drove up to Creighton. Vale INCO has No trespassing signs all over the place… I’m not trespassing, I’m visiting old memories. Parked at the start of Snider street and made my way up there to Connaught, then NW on Alexander St., past Grey St., then south on George St. to Edward St., the place I really call “home” because that is where I spent my formative years. It was also the birthplace and home of my wife, Arlene Cretzman. She lived probably two hundred yards away, if that, but it took me a really long time to find her

Took a few pics with my iPhone of the handiwork my dad did in or about 1956. The concrete retaining wall and porch foundation he built are still there, but nature is having its way. So hard to believe there was even a house there…the lots and houses were so small, but the community’s heart was so big… and still is.[caption id="attachment_251" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Poured concrete block that dad made for our new front porch entry"][/caption] Made my way through the bush north of Alexander St. and back down Connaught and then decide to take a little side trip down memory lane to the ball field, home of the Creighton Indians and playground to generations of children who made their own entertainment doing things that would, if we were to listen to all the play psychologists and others, should have killed everyone of us off before we reached puberty.
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Long story short… the blueberries are pretty much finished. Got enough for me and my girl to have a little bedtime snack, but I picked a lot of fond memories from the recesses of my mind, not of mansions or manicured grounds, but of real people.
Don’t forget… so far as I know, the annual Creighton reunion is still a go on the third Sunday of September as it has been every year since our first biggy in 1989… interesting note… it has NEVER rained on us on that date since 89.

64 years old… back to school! Just returning from five days at Niagara School of Imaging (NSI) http://www.niagaraschool.com/ . What a blast! Traveling through the fruit belt of Ontario brought back so many memories from my youth when I spent part of a summer picking fruit in the Vineland and Jordan Station area about fifty years ago. NSI was awesome. I enrolled in Marilyn Sholin’s class http://www.marilynsholin.com/

for digital painting. Marilyn is one of only three dozen Corel Paining Masters in the world and she deserves to be there. All NSI classes are small (7 in our case) so you get all the attention you need. Now I have to unscramble my brain and start using what I learned. The hardest part is getting my head around the idea that paintings are a representation of reality (unless you’re my magnificent artist friend Cheryl Battistelli  http://cherylbattistelli.com/ who seems to know every whisker on a cat’s face… I’m sure she counts them Anyway, made some really nice friends and am looking forward to this new expression of my artistic talents.

The iPhone is gluing itself to me… already.

For some time I have been searching the web for a database for sunrise, sunset times (that part was easy), but what I REALLY needed was to know WHERE the sun would be rising or setting on any given day of the year, and know the information for any location on earth, and from any location, even though I was sitting in my office planning my next shoot to hopefully add to my Fine Art Gallery. I couldn’t find what I needed… until the iPhone came into my life, and there it was, Vincent Kekoa’s Sunrise Sunset Pro… and all for $1.99. So now I can lay out the map, enter the GPS coordinates into the app, and know that if I am standing at point X on Georgian Bay looking out at the Killarney Lighthouse, I can know where the sun will be rising relative to the subject on any given day of the year. Thanks Vincent.

This app rocks, pretty, useful… and easy to use. I give it 5 stars.

Find it at http://www.appstorehq.com/sunrisesunsetpro-iphone-41877/app

Find iPhone apps at AppStoreHQ

until the next time, Garth

I Finally took the plunge and purchased an iPhone! Not so much that I really needed a cell phone, (never had one before) but I suspect that, like my other really good tools, (iMac, Nikon D700 etc.) in a year from now you won’t be able to pry it from my hands. That being said, the cell phone has already been useful for conveying my excuses (reasons) as to why I’m coming home late… again. I got caught in a huge thunderstorm the other day, lucky me. Great clouds… and a rainbow to boot. The rainbow was forming over one of Vale INCO’s operations buildings, the old Iron Ore Recover Plant, and seeing the local labor strife is adding to the already difficult economic times of Sudbury (like everywhere else), I thought the rainbow was a nice symbol of promise for better days ahead… hey, worked for Noah!

These images were made with my Canon G9… It’s small and good. I try not to leave home without it. Great for such occasions when I’m not toting the full camera bag of Nikons.

a la prochaine, Garth

PS just want give my webmaster a big thank you for the redesign work he is just completing. Note to photographers… I know I’m a good photographer and I know a fair bit of Photoshop, so I thought I could also be a web designer… couldn’t do it… wasted a lot of money and time getting frustrated with Dreamweaver etc. Hired James… sticking to photography… same goes for accounting! James specializes in Wordpress layouts for photographers.You can find him at http://big-red-couch-web-design.com/

If you’ve seen “The Bucket List” then you might relate better to some folks I’ve met this year. In May I was camping in Killarney and met Michal and Janine from Switzerland. They travel a lot and are presently on a five month cross Canada trip by car… then there’s the Italian couple I happened to meet today in Sudbury. They are traveling Montreal to Vancouver on a bicycle built for two, and hauling a trailer. It’s longer than a lot of smaller cars on the road these days. Their blog site is http://www.salitedelvco.it/blog01/ It is written in Italian, but just by looking at the pictures, you can tell these guys travel a lot. I think they must have been born on a bicycle. Cycling across Canada isn’t part of my personal Bucket List (I do have one) but I respect these folks for their undertakings. Welcome to Canada… enjoy.

Friday, June 26, 2009, last day of classes at George Vanier Public School also marked the last day of the school, well at least the original school. I thought it would be useful, interesting, fun, maybe even important to photograph this passing moment of time. I never attended this school, but our daughter did… all of her public school years, and so did most of her friends. The school has been very much a part of our community, but it is not “gone”, it is just changing. I don’t know if the building is coming down or not, but a brand new “George Vanier” is being constructed right beside the old one. They say it will be a “green “school, but right now, it’s a really blue school… insulation on the insulation.

I was deeply rewarded for the small effort of getting to the school at the proper time, because just as the kids were racing out, a gentleman assisted a very elderly lady around to the back of my truck so she could witness the end of an era… the lady was former teacher Grace Murray. She taught her entire career at GVPS. I was honoured to witness her silent vigil, and I greatly respect her for it. I never met this lady, at least not that I remember, but I think her obviously substantial effort to attend the last exodus of “her students” speaks volumes of the kind of person I believe she must be. Memories can be wonderful things, and I’m thinking she has lots of them. Thanks.

Well folks, this blog and all the related stuff is finally starting to take shape, at least in my head, because I am now starting to understand this cyber gobble-de-gook a little better (some days a little less than others). It’s hard when your hair turns white! I really owe my web designer a big vote of thanks for taking my hand when the quicksand was just about to engulf me. If you are into getting a photo oriented blog on the go with Wordpress, then go visit James at http://big-red-couch-web-design.com/ Tell him Garth sent you.

For those of you looking for my new samples and all that good stuff, please be patient. I have just signed up with a really great web and print company (Pictage). It took me a long time to find a company that does all they do, and do it so well. It is the brain child of Gary Fong, photographer and inventor of a whole bunch of stuff. They will be hosting my online galleries where you will be able to view and/or purchase images you are interested in, whether they be weddings, portraits, special events etc. You will select the images you want, add them to your cart, and then Pictage will print them and ship them off to you directly. They will come from the United States, but there is no import duty on photographs. Because they are listed in US dollars, I will be setting my web prices lower to compensate for that difference. I would dearly love to find a Canadian company that can do all they do, but so far no luck. The closest is from Silvano Imaging in Toronto, but even theirs is an American subcontractor. Oh well, at least it’s not “made in china”. I have nothing against the Chinese folks, but I sure do have a gripe against all the junk they are contracted to build and then we throw into our land fill sites in two months.

Although you are at garthwunsch.com, this is just the gathering place for several web domains of mine. www.avenuetwelvephotography.ca lives here ( www.a12p.ca for short). It is the home of my wedding and portrait business.
www.landscapes-north.com is my Fine Art site and it will eventually move in here too. For now, if you would like to browse my Fine Art images, please click on over to www.pbase.com/garth_wunsch

This weekend is the reunion for Lively High School… I think they call it something different now… longer name that I always screw up… but it’s still Lively High School Looking forward to that. Should have some pics to post next week.