Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

©Daniel Menheer

Website Update!

Hello all.

Just a quick note to let you know that I've finally updated my website.  FINALLY!  It's been a long time in coming, but I finally have new images and galleries for you to have a look at.  I hope you enjoy the new images from the past year!

Sunrise in Spirit Sands - December 2011

© Daniel Menheer

Wanasing Beach Sunrise

Hello all!  Today I wanted to share with you something new that I've been trying out over the past nine months or so.  My good friend Cory introduced me to time lapse photography about a year ago and it wasn't long before I was dappling with it myself!  It's always a bit of a dilema for me when I go out to shoot now - do I concentrate on my still photography, or do I try some time lapse?

The thing with time lapse is it takes your camera away for at least an hour or two - maybe even longer if you are shooting the night sky!  Usually something amazing is happening as well, so the dilema is real when it comes to stills or time lapse!  It takes about 500 to 800 images to put together a small video (usually between 15 and 30 seconds worth!), so you can see that it is time consuming, and it will take a bit of time to build up a nice catalogue of video.

Eventually we want to add a time lapse dolly into the mix in order to introduce camera movements while the time lapse is going on.  Hopefully sometime early next year we will have that in our hands - it should be a lot of fun!

Anyway, here is a small sampling of a sunrise I shot while out at the lake with my family this past September.  There wasn't a lot of colour, but the clouds were intense, and the results are fantastic!  I hope you enjoy!

Wanasing Beach Sunrise

© Daniel Menheer

Abstract in Motion

I've been looking for different ways to spice up my nature photography, and one way to do so is to look at things a little more abstractly.  I follow a few photographers who use purposeful motion in their images, so I decided to give it a try for myself.  After about seven hundred images, and lots of trial and error, I think I've figured out the "equation" to give some fabulous results.  Below are some of my favourites from over the past year - I hope you enjoy!

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

Fun Stuff Around the House

I decided to try and have some fun photographing things from around the house over the past few weeks.  I've come across some interesting articles showing how some of this is done, so I thought it was high time I tried it for myself.

First I photographed an oil and water mixture.  I used a low glass dish to hold the liquid in, and propped that up between a couple of chairs so that it was suspended off the floor.  The trick is to have the bottom of the dish completely clear of any obstacles!  I placed a colourful sheet of paper underneath the dish, and bounced my flash off the paper to the bottom of the glass dish.  The results were fantastic - I'm looking forward to trying it again! I'll also take an overall shot of the setup for you to see.

© Daniel Menheer

© Daniel Menheer

Secondly I photographed drops of water falling into a pool of water.  The setup was fairly straight forward, but does take a bit of time to get it ready to go.  It involves having a plastic bag of water suspended over a dish of water (I used a paint dish for this).  I placed a colourful sheet of paper behind the dish, and bounced my flash off the paper.  Lastly I poked a small hole in the bag so that the drop of water was falling in the same location each time.  The tricky part was focusing on the right spot.  You can use a pen or pencil, placed at the same location your drops of water are falling, and focus on that.  It might take a bit of fine tuning, but this will get you pretty close to start.  You're then ready to start the photographic process, which can take some time to get the results you want!

© Daniel Menheer

Lastly I photographed patterns of smoke.  The set up was simple, though I did not have an incense stick to get a nice continuous stream of smoke.  I had to settle for some old candles, which worked okay, but only gave me a small window of time to make some images.  Next I took a headlamp to light the smoke from the side (this was just to help with the focusing!), and set up my flash across from the headlamp.  I had to set up a snoot of sorts on the flash so that the beam of light was focused on the smoke itself, and did not spread to the rest of the room.  Lastly I set up a black sheet behind the candles, far enough back to get minimal fall off from the flash.  Again, I love the results, but I'm looking forward to trying it again with an incense stick in order to get more images to play with!

Out of camera

© Daniel Menheer

Inverted in Photoshop

© Daniel Menheer

Keep coming back to check things out - I'm hoping to try some more fun stuff in the near future!

The Sturgeon Wrangler

Well... I told you right from the start that I wasn't necessarily going to be the best man for this blogging job.  Sorry it's been so long since my initial post, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to be more dedicated to this moving forward.

A lot has happened in the months since my first post.  I've had a chance to travel a bit, spending eight days on Vancouver Island photographing and taking in the sites.  Thank you very much to my wonderful wife who made that happen for me!  It was wonderful to spend time with only myself to worry about, though I missed my wife and kids tremendously!  I was able to see so much while I was there and I hope to share some of that with you soon.

I've also been doing a lot of shooting with a good friend of mine.  He has been generous enough to send some work my way and it has been a great learning experience.  We've also been working on some personal projects together and I look forward to sharing some of that with you as well.  A few weeks ago I even shot a wedding (which I don't do a whole lot of!), which pushed me in some areas, but the results were great, and the couple are enjoying their memories from the day!

I wanted to come back with a super memorable post for you all to enjoy, seeing as how I've kept you in the dark for so long now!  A number of years ago my friends and I had the opportunity to paddle down one of Manitoba's heritage rivers - the Bloodvein.  For those of you who have paddled the river you know what a pleasure the it is, and I would consider it one of the best trips for the money in the province.

This particular trip we were treated to a rare visit from one of Manitoba's giant species of fish - the Sturgeon. It was sunning itself in one of the pools by our campsite, spending an entire morning there teasing us with visions of hooking on to it with our rod and reels.  After coming to the conclusion that this was not going to happen, I got it into my head that we should see how close we could get to it in the water.  It seemed so docile as it soaked up the rays of the sun that I thought we must be able to get right up next to it.  My first attempt to do so allowed me to touch the giant fish along it's back before it swam away.  It was then that I knew we had to try catching this fish with our bare hands!

I thought I must have spooked it for sure, because it didn't come back for a long time.  We were disappointed to say the least, and so decided to do some play boating in the rapids for the afternoon.  It was then that my friend yelled at us to come quick and see - the monster was back!

I'll let the video tell the rest of the tale - I'm the one in the blue rain jacket with sunglasses.  If you watch closely at the beginning you can actually see the fish swimming away from us (though it's hard at the small resolution of the video).  It's also a bit noisy with the sound of the rushing water and wind, but it's worth a watch...

The Sturgeon Wrangler

Bloodvein River - 2007

©Daniel Menheer, 2007

Welcome

Hello, and welcome to the initial post for my new blog.  I swore I'd never do this... who in their right mind would want to blog about stuff!?  It seemed like such a waste of time!  But here I am... typing away on my keyboard... trying to come up with something to say.

I'll admit right off the top - I'm no writer!  A lot of what you'll read on this blog is going to be random thoughts that randomly come out of my head and onto the screen.  And I'm sure a lot of it won't make any sense!  Alas, there are things I'd like to share that just don't fit into the confines of my website, and that's where this comes in.

A good friend of mine suggested to me a few months ago that I should start a blog about my outdoor adventuring.  You see, I love the outdoors, and that love of the outdoors is what helped spark my passion for wanting to photograph it!  I'm not an adventurer that you would find in one of those crazy, over the top videos from the Banff Film Festival.  No... my outdoorsy stuff is a lot more laid back.  I do a lot of hiking and biking, but mostly I love to paddle.  My canoe and I have been through a lot together, and we've logged many miles through the Manitoba wilderness!  It's from these trips into the great outdoors that I would like to share with you a little of what I get to witness that many others miss out on.

Enjoying a dip through a rapid on the

 Manigitogan River - 2009

So... while I will be sharing some new landscape and nature images as well, a lot of what you'll see here will be from my tripping - both past and to come.  I make no promises as to how often I'll update here.  I would like to have a goal of once a week - but with two kids and everything else that's going on around home, that may be a bit ambitious!  Anyway, it should be fun, and I hope you enjoy.  Feel free to let me know how I'm doing by leaving the odd comment - I'll be sure to check them out.