In the last couple of years, I’ve been on a quest to be more conscious of the food I eat. To me, this meant adopting the paleo lifestyle, and eating local, organic food as much as budget and availability allows. I have also tried as best I can to sort fact from fiction when it comes to nutrition. It hasn’t always been easy, but in the process, I’ve lost a lot of weight, gained lots of energy, and leveled out my moods. I also feel healthier and look much younger than I did before I started this.
My latest adjustment was to investigate grass-fed beef. From what I can gather from the Internet, grass-fed beef is healthier and more humanely-raised than the traditional grain-fed stuff.
My hunt for locally-raised grass-fed beef led me to Ivan McIlroy and his Wallace Springs Cattle Company. A while ago, I arranged with Ivan to buy a quarter cow of his grass-fed beef. Today, the day finally came when I could pick up my order. I hopped in the car and headed to the farm in North Perth, Ontario to meet the meat, so to speak.
Ivan was great. He gave me a tour of the farm, introducing me to his animals and showing me how they live and what they eat. It clearly takes a lot of work and costs lot of money to raise cattle this way. The price I paid for my quarter cow was extremely reasonable. In fact, as Ivan explained to me, it’s not a sustainable price when compared to what it costs to raise the animals. I believe that many people would pay more, especially if they’re given the opportunity to see the farm and learn about how their food is grown.
After spending about an hour with Ivan and his cows, I headed to the meat packer’s to pick up my order. There was an astounding amount of beef. The order included about 70 lbs. of ground beef, four short rib roasts, two shoulder roasts, nine blade steaks, fifteen rib steaks, and a brisket. There was also a big box of beef bones to be used in soup. I’ll be sharing this order with my dad, but still, it’s a lot!
I really enjoyed my trip out to the country today. I’m naturally a city boy, so it always seems a bit exotic to visit a farm. Have a look at my gallery of snapshots with captions below.
These goats are Ivan’s wife Karen’s project. The babies were adorable, as you can see. Their instinctive love of jumping and climbing was fun to watch.
This two month-old calf was bright-eyed and attentive.
The mother cow was very curious. She was inhaling deep breaths of air, catching our scent. I put my hand out to her nose and she promptly licked it.
Ivan is renting barn space and taking care of these cows for another rancher. They are raised on a feed lot in a traditional grain diet.
Here’s one of the conventionally raised steers staring me down from the doorway of the barn.
One of the major downsides of grain-fed cattle is that they have to be fed antibiotics to fend off infection from the sores caused by the food they eat. Ivan is nursing these two immuno-compromised steers back to health.
Here are some of Ivan’s own cattle. They are raised on grass with a little bit of grain in the winter. To me, they seem happier and healthier than the grain-fed steers in the feed lot.
Here’s Ivan showing me one of the blends of hay that he feeds his cattle in the winter.
When you’re passionate about something, you post it on signs.
Here’s the trunk of my car, overflowing with grass-fed beef. This will probably last a while.
I did a portrait shoot with Ana the other day, to take some photos for her personal use and for use as profile pictures on social networking sites. As with all of the portrait shoots I do, I try to get a versatile range of images to illustrate the many different but genuine sides of a person. She was nervous at first, but as she discovered, photo shoots can be lots of fun. Before we even finished this shoot, she was bubbling with excitement, already plotting what kinds of things to wear in her next shoot! I may have created a photo shoot addict…
Laura and I are continuing to shoot our series of photos depicting scenes from her inner world, like the ones we exhibited at the Birth Your Dreams exhibition in August. We work well as a team. She comes up with these brilliant and beautiful concepts and I refine those concepts to their visual essence. By the time we take the photo, the vision is clear and more powerful than anything we could have come up with on our own.
This time, we shot Laura as a red tree growing in a forest. The concept illustrates Laura’s mission of growing spirit on Earth. There was some setup involved. First, we had to find the perfect stand of trees. Laura had located a spot out in the country where there was forest on both sides of the street. Then, we had to wait for the weather. The vision was to have fresh snow on the ground. When the day finally came, we packed up the car and headed out to that little forest. We drove along this stretch of road slowly a few times, scanning the woods for the right spot for the photo. I wanted to find a spot with mostly vertical trees, with few fallen trunks and distracting diagonal branches. I also wanted the right sized clearing for Laura to stand in, as I wanted her to appear to be part of the continuous forest, rather than feeling like she was wedged in, or was surrounded by too much space. Finally we spotted the right place. Here’s what it looked like from the road.
Next, we had to unpack all our stuff, including camera, tripod, lenses, costume, chair, mirror, props, etc. We had to tread carefully, approaching the scene from the side and back so as not to disturb the beautiful fresh snowy landscape in the foreground. We set Laura up on a chair to give her the extra height required by her tree costume. I tested the composition and exposure while she was still wearing her winter clothes, because we wouldn’t have much time to shoot with her in the costume before she turned into an icicle. It was cold!
When we got the composition we wanted, I locked the camera down on the tripod, and we got Laura into her costume. The long skirt and red top were held together by fabric ties and plastic clamps. It’s not exactly comfortable or easy to wear! In fact, after we got her all strapped in, Laura was pretty much immobile.
I worked pretty quickly to get the exposures I needed. I took three bracketed exposures of each shot: regular, 1.5 stops above, and 1.5 stops below. I used continuous drive and a shutter release cable so that as little as possible would move in between the exposures. In contrasty scenes like this, I think it’s a good idea to bracket because it will allow you to merge the details from the various exposures to end up with something with wider dynamic range. It’s not exactly HDR photography, but more like the techniques that film photographers like Karsh used to use when sandwiching bracketed negatives to create richly tonal scenes under difficult lighting conditions.
I also shot at f2.8 and at f9.0. Normally, I love shooting f2.8 because I like to isolate my subject. But, in this case, the forest was as much the subject as the trees, and I had a feeling I’d want to make use of the extra depth provided by the smaller aperture.
Shooting done, we got Laura out of that costume and bundled up again in her winter jacket. I’m sure that was quite a relief. When I got the images back to the studio and into the computer, I was glad that I’d shot all those bracketed exposures as well as the f9.0 shots. There was very little work to be done on the photo to make it “perfect.” I emphasized the brightness and misty atmosphere of the forest by using a low-contrast process of the over-exposed bracketed shot. This also gave Laura’s skin a lovely translucent quality. I brought detail into the costume by masking in the regular exposure. I didn’t need the under-exposed version. I cloned out some of the excess branches and debris to keep everything as vertical as possible. Light sharpening brought out the detail in the bark of the trees.
The photo looks amazing at high resolution. I can’t wait to present it in an exhibition in some huge format.
Every year I head down to Carrboro, North Carolina for the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, hosted by my good friend Zach Ward and his Dirty South Improv Theater. The festival has been around for 10 years now, and has grown immensely in the four years that I’ve been attending. The little town of Carrboro now boasts a world-class festival that includes stand-up, sketch, film and improvised comedy. Those who know me know that I’m a big fan of improv, and enjoy performing as well. So, it’s always a pleasure and an honor that Zach asks me each year to combine this passion of mine with my passion for shooting.
Shooting live events is not something I do regularly or professionally, but shooting improv is a real joy. The challenge of capturing the very peak of a spontaneous moment under trying lighting conditions is a real test of my photography abilities, and keeps me thoroughly engaged in the moment. The festival is packed with some of North America’s most talented improvisers, and there’s no shortage of these brilliant improvised moments to shoot.
I return from the festival each year creatively invigorated, nourished by friendships renewed, and loaded with gigabytes of images. You can find this year’s selection in my portfolio. However, there are a lot to sift through. I’ve collected my favorites in the gallery below.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not a big fan of winter. When the snow starts to fly, I go into hibernation mode. I used to ski, which made snow somewhat tolerable, but I tore my ACL while skiing in deep powder in Squaw Valley, California. That did nothing to improve my attitude towards snow. Lately, I’ve been making an effort to enjoy the white stuff. Today, we got lots of snow here in Hamilton, and I couldn’t help but stare out the window as it iced the barren branches of the neighborhood trees. I decided to take a photo to capture how winter feels to me: melancholy, yet admittedly beautiful in its way. Maybe I can be rehabilitated?
