Packing Guide to Photography at Fashion Week

It’s hard to know just what to bring on a big trip. Last year I shared my packing list for our trip to Asia, so I thought it would be fun to update the list for our tour of fashion weeks. We were gone for 3 weeks: New York, Toronto, London and Paris. I was faced with the problem of packing just enough gear to cover all the events, but also dressing presentably enough to attend fashion events, which is harder than it sounds.

If I haven't said it before, the Canon 5D III is the best camera I've ever worked with. It is the backbone of everything we shoot and is the gold standard I compare all new cameras too. When we shoot style photos, the 70-200mm is still the lens I trust. Because of it's length it creates beautiful focus separation with the subject and it has the range to shoot a variety of images.

To make up for the massive weight of the zoom, the 40mm pancake is a perfect complimentary wide lens.  Super sharp, light, and cheap. It never feels like a burden to carry and always amazes me with it's image quality. 

If you are a Canon shooter and have any interest in film, you really owe it to yourself to pick up an Elan 7. They are fantastically designed prosumer cameras that you can pick up for peanuts on eBay. I've had mine for over a decade and it's still going strong.

As I fall further in love with watches I can't leave out my current favourite, the Hamilton King Khaki II. Automatic ETA movement, Swiss made, with day and date complications.

Most of the travel photos from our trips end up being taken on small cameras. After carrying the giant 70-200mm for a while, it's a relief to play tourist with something light and easy. The G7x is great for it’s beautiful video quality (and vlogs!) and wifi ability. So when a photo needs a little more quality than the iPhone can provide we can transfer photos between them and post them on the go. 

Even though the quality looks similar between the iPhone and Canon on social networks, the huge advantage of the Canon is being able to crop into it's 20MP images, and shoot raw in case you capture something really amazing. 

Sadly, my beautiful Contax didn't see much action on this trip. Social media and Ania's blog were the priorities so I just couldn't wait for film. Still, I took a few and am excited to see how they turned out. 

As a photographer no one is paying attention to you and that is the way it should be. A monochrome outfit is as much about being practical as it is about style. I heard about a photographer who was new to fashion week and wore a bright orange jacket. He drove every other photographer crazy because when he was in the background of a shot, all you see it a bright orange coat. Stick to simple colors, which for my is black, white and blue.

Photographers don't need a three piece suit to to fit in at fashion events. Just keep it clean and minimal.

Here are my favorite basics I picked up along the way. Frame Denim provided some extremely soft and comfortable jeans at the presentation in NY. COS opened their first store in Toronto and I love their aesthetic. I picked up this shirt and long jacket that I wore almost every day of the trip. There is a limited selection of Kenzo items in Calgary, but in Paris they were everywhere, Ania talked me into their awesome eye print sweatshirt. I've been on the hunt for a perfect every day tee and I may have found it at Birchbox with Bread & Boxers. Finally, it rained in every city we went to you and life would have been a lot more miserable without them. This handsome little Hunter umbrella saved us again and again.

I'm still far from a perfect packer but I think I did pretty well on this trip. Notes for next time: bring a flash and leave one of the film bodies at home. 

California Roadtrip

For Christmas holidays 2014, we took a drive down the west coast. As usual we shot thousands of digital photos, the best of which you can see on Ania's blog. I also shot 6 rolls of film on a Contax G2 and Canon Élan 7n. The film stocks were a mix of Kodak Gold, Portra & Fuji 400H, and they were processed at Caribou Lab.

New York Fashion Week S/S 2015

It was a whirlwind week in New York for us. I got to do some exploring with family, who just happened to be in town at the same time, while Ania had to take out 48 crazy hours our trip to fly back to Calgary for her style presentation for Hudson's Bay. I went to the Killer Heels event, put on by Nordstrom at the Brooklyn Museum. We celebrated our first anniversary (happy one year honey!). We went to the Tommy Hilfiger and J Crew shows, and of course did some serious power shopping.

Below are the snapshots from the week, taken on the Contax T2. The scans from these rolls are so badly done by our local drug store that I have a hard time judging how well the camera really performed. I had to use Lightroom to fix the terrible adjustments the photo lab did, so I don't feel like I got to enjoy the natural colours from the camera or films.

Korea on Film: Portra, Ektar & Superia - Part 1

We had an amazing two weeks traveling around Asia, and captured it on eight rolls of 35mm film. This provided an opportunity to compare a few different film stocks side by side to see their unique colour and contrast traits.

The films used were Kodak Portra 400, Portra 160, Ektar 100, and Fuji Superia 400. All of the Kodak was processed by Caribou Lab in Toronto, and the Fuji at London Drugs in Calgary. Everything was shot using the Canon Elan 7e, mostly with the Canon 50mm f/1.8 and the 40mm f/2.8 pancake lens. The nifty fifty was very disappointing on this trip, missing focus about half the time. We've had better experiences with it in the past, but for a similar price the 40mm way out performs it. 

After our first week in Seoul, we left the SLR in Korea and shot a few rolls on Fuji disposable cameras in Japan, and I love the results!

Impressions: Both the Kodak Portra 400 and 160 performed beautifully, as expected. They are designed for professionals, carry a slightly higher price and deliver excellent tones for every occasion. I find the 400 a little more versatile because that it can stay into the camera until evening. When there is a roll of 160 in there, I know it needs to be finished before the sun goes down.

The Ektar 100 was a fun novelty, but I won't be buying it again. It has so much contrast and saturation that it's better to avoid having any people in your photos, unless intense red skin tones are something you're after. Better left for landscapes.

The one roll of Fuji isn't really a fair comparison, since it was scanned at a different lab with less discerning taste in colours, and is a cheaper consumer film. It took a lot more editing in Lightroom than film should ever need, so I'll reserve judgment for now.

More photos to come from our second week in Korea in Part 2, stay tuned!

Disposable Cameras on our Asian Vacation

When we planned our trip to Seoul and Tokyo, one of things I was excited about was the chance to shop some amazing used camera stores. I had high hopes for finding the perfect film point and shoot but after a few days of searching, we came up empty handed. Instead we bought some disposable cameras.

I hadn't used one since the 90's so I was curious if anything beautiful could come out of these little plastic boxes. I think the results turned out pretty great. The internet told me that disposable cameras have a fixed settings of about f/11 at 1/100 sec, so we used that as our reference point. Occasionally comparing it to reference photos on the 5D at the same settings.

We spent a lot of our time in Tokyo shooting street style in Harajuku, went to Disneyland, and then went back to Seoul to shoot more street style in Gangnam.