(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.

Click to view larger

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!

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:

Click to see this in its full-size glory!

Welcome back to Time Travel Tuesday.

I had full intentions of posting some portraits after last week’s Time Travel Tuesday poster, but life got in the way again and here we are on Time Travel Tuesday again. I hope you’re enjoying these images as much as I have been enjoying going through my archive and finding these gems to share and talk about.

This week I shared a couple images from a patterns photo walk, an Outback Rodeo and then we started into some of the photographs I created when we visited Ecuador a few years ago.

I invite you to follow my tumblr blog for a daily photo-story!

Take care and we’ll catch you on the next post!

Click to see this in all it’s full size glory!

I thought it would be kind of neat to post a collage every week of the images I have selected for my Looking Back series over the past 7 days.

To that end, here is my first “Time Travel Tuesday” post which will be a recurring weekly feature on the Houlden Studios blog.

Of course, you don’t have to wait for Tuesday to see which images I have selected over the past week. You can follow along on my tumblr blog or keep an eye on the photos and caption snippets in the sidebar of this blog. The past five days of my retrospective series are show in the sidebar. Click the date at the end of the caption snippet to go to tumblr and see the image full size and the entire text.

The stories posted along with the images are a combination of a description of where, when, what the image is about as well as, often, a discussion on what makes the photograph work compositionally or why it fails or just how it could have been stronger had I spent more time on it, or the conditions been different, or what have you.

Most of the images are being selected on their compositional merit, but here and there I am selecting an image as a conversation point or because I want to highlight a particular event or point. The end goal of this exercise will be the publishing of book of photographs at the end of the year. A personal publication to be sure – hence why some images will simply be images highlighting an event.

Anyway, I hope you’ll join me on tumblr each day or on Tuesday’s when I publish the weekly roundup here.

This past summer we got together with the Greens to create their family portraits. I had found this huge field of Queen Anne’s Lace in a farmer’s field left to fallow for several years. I thought it would be a perfect place for their portraits. What I hadn’t anticipated was how difficult it is to walk through Queen Anne’s Lace, despite how pretty it is. Regardless of the walking challenge, we created some truly wonderful portraits for them. Of those portraits, this one is my favourite by a long shot. Sure, we have some really nice portraits of them looking a little bit more towards the camera than this one but there’s a powerful pull for me in this image.

Every time I look at this image, I wonder what they were talking about, what stories they were crafting about the field of wildflowers. I also feel a sense of them embarking on a journey into an exciting future or adventure.

For sure I’ll share some more images from the Green’s session in the future, but for now, I just want this single image to stand on its own, without the distractions of other images.

Portrait by Luca Ragogna

Well, that’s the end of 2012 I suppose, eh?

Not a bad year, really.  We had some great events in the first half of the year – Fighting Cancer at the sugar shack in early spring and the Pet Event at the OSPCA’s Walk-a-thon in June.  Met some fabulous families as we created some really beautiful portraits for them. Some of these portraits have already been featured, some are still waiting for the final reveals to the families and some are withheld out of respect of the privacy wishes of our clients.

We also had some huge fun working on some mountain biking portraiture, most notably working with the fabulous crew at ProAction Mountain Biking Club.  I’m already looking forward to working with them again this year when biking season opens up again.

So, what’s on tap for 2013?

We have a huge list of ideas in the concept stage. From a Sugarbush Pet Calendar and Book Project to really getting deep with sports portraiture. (Hint, if you know a teen athlete who’d like to model for us, let us know as we’re seeking models to get this thing kicked off.) We’ve opened the conversation with Team Hardwood to help them with their fund raising efforts for the Nordic Ski team there. Planning for some more OSPCA fund raising events and I’m quite sure we’ll be back at the Sugar Shack again this year for some more fun and laughs – thinking about how we can mix that up for something really different this time.

Oh and lest I forget, Jen’s good friend Ruth Blanchet of Arbee Designs has double dog dared us to take on 365 Day Challenges. What’s that? Well, Jen has committed to blog on her Quilts by Jen site every day of 2013!

And me? Well, I’ve made two 365 day commitments (what on earth am I thinking!!!). First? I’m going to post a photo everyday for the next 365. Not necessarily a new photo, this isn’t a “take a photo-a-day” challenge, instead my challenge is to review my archive and every day highlight a photo that hasn’t seen the light of day since it was taken. For some of you, that means, yes, finally I will be presenting images from our fabulous photo trip to Ecuador! Yay!  At the end of the year, I’m going to print a book of all 365 photos. Fun. I need to decide in the next 11h and 45min if I’m going to do this chronologically or just go archive-diving each day. Hmmm. Chaos or system?

Second? A couple days ago, I discovered Cubeecraft. Cubeecraft is a website that presents folding paper crafts and in particular, cube shaped characters from pop culture (video games, movies, etc) like this one of R2D2:

R2D2 Cubeecraft

For some crazy reason I decided that I would print, cut, fold, photograph and present a new Cubeecraft every day. Oh dear! Anyway, I’m not going to clog this blog with those images every day. Instead I’ll be starting up a Tumblr feed for them, so stay tuned for the link.