Chunyaxché Mayan Ruins at Muyil, Mexico

A new year, a new blog, a new website, so how to begin?

Perhaps at the beginning.

Ahhhh Mexico, the warm temperatures, beautiful beaches, wonderful people and of course the mosquito infested jungles that house the Mayan ruins. The photo I’m posting here to begin the blog was the inspiration in my journey to start photographing some very interesting places in a brand new way. Oddly enough this location is not that far from the impact site of the comet or asteroid that hit Earth 65 million years ago which in itself was one heck of a beginning of a new age. Come to think of it, without that cataclysm dinosaurs would still be roaming the planet and I could not have taken this photograph. So thanks to an explosion that caused the extinction of most life on earth you are now able to see a cool photo of a Mayan pyramid, a fair trade I’d say.

I was in Tulum and Merida on a lifestyle shoot for the stock photo agency I was working with at the time called Jupiterimages. Two weeks of shooting in Mexico in December while it was freezing cold back home in Montreal is not such a bad thing, however counting over 150 insect bites on your body after only an hour or so in the jungle, not so good. It was getting towards the end of the day when my team and I arrived at the Muyil ruins and it was getting dark as we began setting up for a series of shots. My models had flaked out on me that day and I had no one to shoot so I ended up photographing my producer Dominique (a very good sport) all day. It was a relaxed day driving around looking for interesting backdrops for some eco-tourism type images. My editor had asked me for some images with a small person on a big background and the pyramid shown here was used as the backdrop to one of the photographs we did that day.

We had more time to experiment that day than I usually would have on a stock shoot so I decided to try some new techniques I had been looking forward to using. HDR or High Dynamic Range photography is a way to use multiple exposures to create one image. This requires a tripod, a camera that can bracket exposures, some photoshop and other software skills to come up with the final result. So I spent the day taking photos, always keeping in mind the fact that I was going to work on them as HDR images. The results were far more interesting than I had expected and this inspired me to continue working with HDR photography for the last year. In the days, weeks and months ahead I will be posting new photos here from all kinds of different places that I have been fortunate enough to visit. It was my wonderful and amazingly brave friend Vivian who was my inspiration to take this change in direction with my photography and I’ll always be grateful for her love and encouragement. Sadly she passed away from cancer last May but yet she still finds ways to be a positive force in my life and inspire me on a daily basis. Thanks Viv, I love you.

I’ve never written a blog before and I’m curious to see how it evolves. Of course the main focus will be to showcase and talk about the new HDR images I have done but I’ll also be talking about photography and the industry in general. I’d love to hear your comments on the photos as well as suggestions of interesting places that I should try to photograph. So please post comments, subscribe by email or RSS feed for notices of new images being posted and pass along the site via Facebook, Twitter or email  to anyone who you think might enjoy seeing some photography done in a new and interesting way.

Thanks for stopping by, I’ll be back soon with a new photo. Hopefully there will be no mass extinction events in that time. :^)

Enjoy more fun photography and stories from the road: