Kyle Thomas

The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)

Northern Photographer Mittens!

We have all experienced it, we take our mit off to take that great shot and in the mean time our hold had freezes. Well what if I told you I found a solution that only freezes your trigger finger. Wouldn’t that be great. Well the good news is, I did find a solution.

Photographer Mits

Photographer Mittens are what they are called and I will tell you how to get a pair. First thing you need to do is print off the blog post I linked to below. It is the instructions, yes you need to get these made. The second thing you will need to do is find your Grandmother, Mother, Aunt, Wife, friend, child, a knitting group or a slave. Once you have secured said person, force them to read the instructions – oh and I would make sure they knit before you force this upon them. They might start to protest, but simply start dropping hits like “they’re for my birthday” or “Christmas is coming soon, I wonder what Santa will bring?” Those should win them over. If not ask…. nicer?

Knitting and some more – free patterns: Photographer mittens.

I thought these were perfect for those of us in Northern Canada. Although you may need to make them a little thicker for those all night Aurora adventures. They are from Norway so you should be fine. If anyone tries this, please let me know and share how they are.

Plane Window Photography

Honestly I wonder how much time people put into plane window photography and I’m talking about commercial passenger plane photography. I have seen some unbelievable shots from photographers taken from their window seat on their way to there next destination.

I have always wanted to try it but couldn’t because of room. I’m a big guy and when I fly Air Canada Jazz there isn’t a lot of space to spare, especially when I’m beside someone. I’m not going to take the time and make an ordeal of pulling out my backpack with my camera in it just so I can fire off a few shots.

This time though, yes I’m currently flying while typing this, I don’t have anyone beside be. SAWEEET! So just as we were taxiing onto the strip I pulled out my camera and set it beside me. I really wanted to start taking photos as we were taking off, but thought I shouldn’t annoy the flight attendant man.

As we started to reach altitude I started firing away. It was a nice feeling knowing that I had an hour and a half to play with settlings, but then I realized a problem. My window was badly scratched, smudged and just dirty, so my picture weren’t coming out great. Because I’m awesome or rather my MacBook Air is awesome I was able to quickly put the photos on it to preview them better. As you can see there are a lot of discrepancies in the photos. They are neat, yes. To my standard, no. So that is why I wonder how some photographers take amazing plane window photos. Is it because of there top notch gear? Is it hours in photoshop? Or are they just sitting by windows that are cleaner?

I won’t know the answer unless I keep shooting and trying different things, that is how we learn after all.

In the Sky

Mountians from the Sky

YVR in the Sky

Seamless White Background Diagram

Just came across this diagram of how to make a completely white background. I don’t have a full lighting kit, so I can’t actually try this, but it does go along with my lightbox tests.

Highkey

This is for reference for when I get a lighting kit.

Shoes take the spotlight

Hello Shoes, yes shoes. As we all know I got myself a nice little lightbox to try to improve my food photography. I slowly am but I also got the opportunity to try out some product photography thanks to friend Brent Hodson.  The objects of this shoot was of course shoes. They are from a local shoe store and for a print ad that will be running in the Northeast News. Yes, I am a little excited that some of my very own photos will be debuting in a print ad.

I found trying to get the same results for every shoes was more difficult than anticipated. Shoes were different sizes, and we placed them differently and as a result the light created different effects. My lightbox was a little to small for this job as you can see by some of the imperfections in the image below. These imperfections can be managed in Photoshop, which I used for the most part, but I see I have missed some spots. Thankfully they were cropped for the ad and minor imperfections were taken out.

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This was not the final ad, but you can get an idea as to how it was laid out. We shot 12 pairs of shoes in all.

G2G Shoes

This was a fun shoot, because it really challenged me to try and get the same result over and over again, which proved to be difficult. I certainly want to do more of this.

Oh Deer, Oh My

Deer are very common in the area and I don’t actually like shooting them, because it is hard to be different with them. Unless of course you are 5ft away. I am also breaking one of my rules and posting more than a couple images of similar subjects.

I have found that if you are serious about promoting your work online, you need to only post a few shots at one time, not 30 of the same bird or deer you see on the side of the road.

Anyways, their were 7 deer in this field and a mom and calf close to me. As they were curios about why a man with one giant eye was walking towards them, they started perfectly still.

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