My blog is to share my journey as a Nova Scotia photographer / Videographer / drone pilot. I hope to inspire others to peruse their passion and enjoy it! Check out my Instagram @brintonphotography
Read MoreCovering a whale watch tour by Drone Video
Shannon Park Video Tour (A community in ruins)
As a Halifax Corporate Architectural and Head shot Photographer I make time to explore areas and take time for some other passions of mine, one of them is drone work and exploring unreachable areas to document the experience. This video was a pleasure and a heart break at the same time, partly because I love my city of Dartmouth and would love to see it thrive and do better, and also because of all of the valuable waterfront and land that can be used is simply not!
Recently I had the chance to take footage of the old Shannon Park Community here in Dartmouth NS, the scene is something out of a horror movie. Chernobyl has gotten international attention because of it's apocalyptic type feel of abandon streets and buildings. Well Shannon Park is getting the same "feel" to it, and although its abandon and commissioned to be demolished, the memories of families living here are very real.
I posted a video on Facebook of the video below and the comments and memories share made it all worth it, and there is mixed emotions of what could have been and should have been for this community. The reason for the abandonment of this community was dangerous mold and asbestos, that would have costed a lot to remove, and although some people thought it was worth doing, the government didn't.
Below are some screenshots from the movie on some of the worse decay of the community, and I have to say that this was a shocking video to make because of the sheer destruction in this community.
Streets still have the paint markings of a once busy street life.
A higher view of the community with Shannon Park school in the top of the image (still in operation)
A swing set rusting away in the decay, a community filled with children at one time.
Streets are all grown over now.
One of the many walking paths connection each area of the community.
My first visit to the New Halifax Library
Top floor bookshelves.
Today my wife and children wanted to enjoy an afternoon at the new Halifax Library, I'm not much of a reader but I have been looking for a chance to shoot it! So I armed myself with my 14-24 and 24mm tilt shift and off we went. When I came through the doors I was instantly amazed at the shear size of the space, and the design was flawless, but I was a bit confused of how I was going to capture the unique lines and difficult compositions. The top floor got my attention as it does for everyone who first walked out, "wow" and "I'm not going close to the edge" were some of the comments heard as I captured the sunset through the beautiful and panoramic view!
Pano view from the top floor of the sunset
I have been doing interior design photography in Halifax for over a year now, and this place topped my list of the most unique places I have visited. The stairs and curved designs are just some of the great features of this place I loved! shooting straight lines was a challenge, but I managed to get some good images in the short amount of time there.
The stairs are one of the trademarks of the facility
Although I love talking I feel the images will speak for themselves of the different angles of the New Library and what you can see when there. Below is the rest of the images from the day shooting.
Serge Ramelli Interior Design Photo Competition winner
A few days ago I entered one of my interior design shots in a competition on Serge Ramelli's website. I have been following his youtube channel for some time now and he puts out 2 tutorials per week for free and shows how to retouch and photoshop images. What is also really cool about his website is, if you sign up for his newsletter you get all the RAW files and all the past RAW files from all his retouching tutorials for you to try for yourself. I like this guy because he gets you engaged in photography and teaches well. The image below is the one that won the contest for me and I am really proud of it, check it out.
The Vault Image from Spring Garden Place in Halifax ...Click on the image to view bigger
Also Serge put out a video giving me a shout out about my website and my work, it was really good for me as I have been working hard in the last year to make this business work, and also worked hard on my skills to improve my quality of images. I also learned some great tips from Serge on how to enhance my interior design photography and it really did make the difference. Below is the video that featured me and my winning image along with some great exposure for my website and blog post!
Thanks again to Serge for the opportunity to have my work and website featured and doing contests like this, its really good for photography to have this type of stage to get your work out and also learn some great tips and tricks to enhance your photography. below is all of Serge's info and website info!
Serge Ramelli Site info:
Tutorial Website
Youtube Channel
Portfolio
Interior Design Before and after's Brinton Photography Style
This hotel room really shows the power of editing software and the tool available to make any image come back and with amazing results. I really find it disappointing when you come home from a shoot and realize that you missed some valuable thing that you could have avoided, like in this image the bedskirt and bedding were crooked and out of place. check out the result!
This Image is one of my favorites in terms of results for this before and after series, it posed a few issues as the angle and size of room made it hard to capture the whole table while keeping the shape of the room. Shooting wide angle of course can distort your images and making them straight again can be TIME CONSUMING, and even though I was shooting with the best wide angle lens for keeping lines (Nikon 14-24mm 2.8) this one was still a pain. The result was great!
This is the Bar lounge shot that I just shot a few weeks ago, and this one posed a few problems. The first one is airconditioners, they are ugly for any image and do not look good in interior design shots and clients don't want them in their images. This airconditioner was huge and right in my frame which i felt best suited this image, and there wasn't much to work off of to make it look real. The other problem i faced was the lack of light to properly blend the image together, so I took multiple images at different exposures which is well known in Photography as high dynamic range (HDR). While using the HDR image along with a metered exposure that the camera best picked for the scene I was able to blend the two images together to come up with a great result! Check this out.
In this image I was finding it hard to get angles that would rule out getting reflections from the lights behind me and the huge glare from the window. So for this image I used a HDR blend again along with some lightroom adjustments to bring out the rich wood colors and details of the old style furniture. The other problem was getting that light reflection from the picture in the center of the frame and felt it took my attention every time I looked at the image. To fix this issue I scoured the internet looking for a image that would work in the frame as I was unable to remove the flare without ruining the old image within the picture. Check out this before and after subtle but really worked out for me here!
Talking images in a busy environment where the client requires no people and less distraction as possible can seem impossible, but it can be done, as you will see in these images I took recently for a client. They wanted a image showcasing their hotel with the park in view, and the public gardens, lush and full of trees and thick bushes and flowers doesn't give you much of a view from the park outward. So in the mid afternoon on the busiest street east of Montreal, Spring Garden Rd was full of traffic and a steady flow of people enjoying the park!
For this I had to take a bunch of images at different times to make sure that in every photo, parts of the scene were clean and free of all the distractions i mentioned, and then with photoshop layers I am able to blend the images together and remove any power lines and unwanted items for a clean result. below you will see a couple of the images in a mini gallery to see the different shots needed to blend this image together and I was very pleased with the result and so was the client!
Finished blended image with Photoshop CC and Lightroom Adjustments!
So as you can see it's really about getting it in camera and I'm not claiming to have it mastered yet, so because of spending time teaching myself photoshop and editing techniques I'm able to salvage what would have been a spoiled image and make it industry quality for my clients! Thanks for checking out my blog and I will be posting more about these and other tips and tricks in the future!
