Houlden Studios

(Click the fullscreen button to see these in full awesomeness.)

With the weather finally looking and behaving distinctly spring-like these last couple of weeks it has been time to get out on the bike again. It took forever for all the snow to melt away on trails so I was limited to riding on the roads for a few weeks, but we are in full on trail riding season now.
And why is this exciting?

Because it is time to start making mountain biking images again. Friends Sarah and Marion invited me out for a ride with them last week and I warned them that I would be bringing the camera out with me.

I was pretty excited to get out there this spring as I had added a new camera system to my arsenal this past winter. The compact (and more importantly – lightweight) Olympus OMD E-M5 mirrorless micro 4/3 camera system. I’ve been looking forward to getting out and seeing if this camera can keep up with my mountain bike images ever since I got it.

Why? You ask. Last year, mountain bike portraits involved the Nikon D3s, 70-200 f2.8, 16-35 f4, multiple flashes, light stands and remotes. All of that added up to massive weight in my pack on my back. It really messed with my stability and maneuverability, not to mentioned adding so much weight that I struggled up most of the hills. Not fun. Oh, and the thought of stacking it on the bike with $12000k plus of camera on my back… Well you get the idea.

Well, maybe not, if you haven’t seen how compact and lightweight the OMD system is. Joy!!!!!

Anyhow, got out there we did. Using the PocketWizard Flex triggers on the OMD and Nikon SB900 flashes, we created a number of images during our ride. Most important – the images turned out GREAT. Secondly, the OMD was even easier to use for this purpose than the Nikon D3s. Third? I barely noticed I was carrying around a camera. Win! I’ve been DIY-ing a few things around the shop here to try to get rid of at least one light stand. I think I have that all worked out and that’ll mean even less weight to pack around.

And that means even more opportunities for portraits.

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On family day, my parents asked if I wanted to join them for a snowshoe in the woods up the street. I asked them if I could create a film at the same time. Of course. Perfect.

I had a lot of fun with this project and it fits really nicely into my sports portraiture and filmmaking that I’ve been building over the past year.

Rather than wax on about the process and everything I learned, like how HARD it is to choose a soundtrack!!!!, here’s the film. I hope you enjoy, and please – provide your feedback! What do you think?

Click to see in all it’s huge goodness…

Hey everyone! Welcome back to Time Travel Tuesday.

All of the images this week have been from our 2008 trip to Ecuador. Orchid farms, convents, hand weavers and panama hats to name a few of the featured images. As I’ve mentioned, I am running a personal project this year, well a couple actually, but this one is all about revisiting my catalogue of images over the last 13 years or so and blogging about an individual image each day.

You can follow along and read the stories, learn about the places we’ve visited, people we’ve met and often, the techniques used to create the images. Check it out on my tumblr blog.

Click to see this in its full-size glory!

Hey everyone, welcome back to Time Travel Tuesday.

As you can see, here is another installation of the images I have been featuring on my tumblr blog. If this is your first time checking this out, this is a year-long project for me, each day going back through my archive of photographs and selecting images to highlight and discuss. The end result of this project will be a memory book for us.

In this week’s installment, all of the images are from an Andes tour we took in Ecuador in 2008 and features the Devil’s Nose, rose farming and Tagua Nut carving amongst other things.

As ever, I invite you to follow along on the tumblr blog and learn the story behind each of these images.

Take care!

Good afternoon everyone!

I wanted to share with you the latest project of Houlden Studios. We have been caught by the video bug here at the studio and yesterday we created a cool little instructional film for Quilts by Jen.

You see, Jen has been writing articles for her site every day lately. She is sharing all kinds of great tips, hints, techniques, tools of the trade and information to her quilting community. She actually took some inspiration from David Ziser’s blog – every day has a theme. It helps to focus her writing energies by having an established schedule for her posts.

For example, she writes Technique Tuesday to share some of the quilting techniques she uses to create her fabulous quilts. With Stash Blasting Wednesday Jen creates quilt blocks from her stash of fabric and shows a number of different quilt patterns which can be created with the block.

What we have found is that some of the technique posts are quite involved and lengthy. After last week’s post I suggested she start creating a video tutorial to go along with her explanations on Technique Tuesday.

This week, we put our new Olympus OMD E-M5 camera to work creating a video on a no waste method of creating Flying Geese quilt blocks. It was a fun little project and I was able to put some of the skills to work which I learned from the guys on the Get in Motion video workshops.

I wanted to share this film with you today and I also thought it might inspire your thoughts about how film can fit into traditional portraiture to create something entirely unique.

With out further ado, here is the instructional video we created for Jen yesterday: