I had the fantastic pleasure of shooting just about every show during the the 2010 Wreckhouse Blues and Jazz Festival in St. John’s this past summer. I discovered a lot of good music and got to photograph a lot of fantastic acts such as Alex Cuba, Morgan Davis and Matt Anderson, to name but a few.

Also featured below are Banda Brazil, H’Sao, Dominic Mancuso, Rowdy Blues, Planet Earth, Lori Cooper, Treasa Levasseur, Rich Brown’s Rincethealgorithm and probably some I’m forgetting.

H'Sao performing at The Majestic

Alex Cuba performing at The Majestic Theatre

Click here to see the other 100 or so images from the Wreckhouse Blues and Jazz Festival

This is an image that I’ve had in mind for a while but hadn’t actually remembered to go shoot.

The trick with this is that you can’t just open the shutter for a long period of time, like 30 minutes. If you were to do that, the light pollution from the city would eventually over power the stars and you’d have nothing but a glow of city light and very few stars.

So how do we do this? Well to start you’re going to need either a body capable of interval shooting or a cable release with a shutter lock. Once you’ve got one of those, you’re going to need to shoot a LOT of images, all at the same settings, over the course of 20-30minutes (or longer really, longer the better).

Once you’ve got your 100 or so images, each a long exposure, you’ll be combining them in Photoshop to form one image, like the one below.

The spinning stars above the city of St. John's

This image is made from 95 images, each 30 seconds in length at f/2.8 ISO200. Body: Nikon D3 and 24-70 lens, cropped to 8×10, shot from Cape Spear, Newfoundland

In this photo you can see the stars which make up the big dipper, planes landing at St. John’s International Airport (CYYT), a boat going out to sea, the car lights from Signal Hill, Fort Amherst and the East End of St. John’s.

So what’s Labour Day weekend without a Saturday spent watching my friends break their bodies over all kinds of fun architectural finds.

Like the last skateboarding post, this post will feature Sean Power, Khris Stamp and Neil Blackwood.

Back Smith, Sean Power | Nikon D3 & 16mm Fisheye

Kickflip over the massive gap, Sean Power | Nikon D3 70-200

Khris Stamp with the bs lip while da by's watch

Flipping through the sky | Nikon D3, 16mm fish, sb800 l/r

One more angle of that.

There’s a couple more in here, check ‘em out!

You’d think any day with weather such as it was on this very day would be a good thing.

But it was not. We essentially spent most of the day making [sometimes rude] jokes with one another and wishing it would get cloudy, just a bit, to cut down on the harsh sunlight which was ruining all of our photography fun.

In the end, it was an alright day. We had a lot of laughs and even got some decent pics in the end.

Oh and we had a deep fried Mars bar from the chippy on the side of the road in Brigus.

I highly suggest you have one.

Hope you like!

Hibbs Cove, Conception Bay

The lighthouse at Green Point

After all that fun was over, we decided the clear skies could at least allow us an opportunity to do some star trail photography so we took off for town and made our way to Cape Spear.

Cape Spear Bunker | Nikon D3, 14-24 on 20mm @ 20min exposure.

When I was just getting started in photography one of the best professional photographers in town took a few minutes out of his extremely busy day to review my “portfolio”. It was mildly embarrassing, but he let me down easy. Looking back on it now, I laugh at myself for thinking it would go differently. He was very correct though; I had some nice pictures, but his words were true “you need to tell a story with your photographs”

Now, in the context to which he was speaking, as a newspaper photographer, I thought that his words were somewhat askew. “Surely, as a hobbyist photographer there wasn’t much I could gain from heeding his advice” I thought. But then it hit me one day: as photographs go, every good photograph I’d ever seen told a story or conveyed a message. Whether it was the famous photograph from atop the Empire State Building of the workers eating lunch on the beam or the infamous photograph from the Vietnam war of a South Vietnamese officer executing a suspected Viet Cong officer, the upshot is that the best photographs are those which convey a story.

Usually, telling the story involves people and now every time I see a scene I begin looking for people who may be about to step into it. Figuring out exactly where I’d like them to be when I snap the frame. As opposed to a boat on the side of the harbor, it’s a sailor boarding the boat, late at night, silhouetted by the harsh harbor-side lights, perhaps about to set sail on a long journey home to Spain.

The words from the more seasoned photographer echo every single time I’m about to shoot a photo.. “tell a story”.

So now I do every chance I can.

Me and Dad taking in the stars at the cabin

This is a photo of something I grew up doing my entire life: sitting out on the wharf at the cabin with dad, watching the stars, satellites and planes go past. This is probably one of my most favorite photos I’ve ever shot. I just wanted to share the thoughts that went into making it and maybe give you an idea of what truly makes a photograph.