photography

Photo drop – storm light

| kirsti

Horseshoe Bay

We rounded the corner on the highway, and crested the hill above Horseshoe Bay on Saturday around 7:30 pm and were faced with this dramatic scene.

Unfortunately, this humble iphone photo doesn’t do the scene justice, and we weren’t able to photograph it until we’d got down into the ferry line up and out to the village – so we lost out on the high vantage point. By that time some of the weird green light behind the mountains, and the edges of pink on the peaks was gone – so I’ll just have to remember that instead.

This cloud blew toward the village and dumped a quick sheet of rain, and by the time we boarded the ferry 30 minutes later, the sky was clear, and the moon and stars were shining.

New work – Art of Craft films

| kirsti

film still | Jinny Whitehead, wood-fire potter

I’ve uploaded four films we shot and produced profiling the process of 4 local Vancouver craft artists, to my website . We created these films as a personal, side project while we designed the Museum of Vancouver’s exhibition Art of Craft and then screened them in a subsection of the Art of Craft “By Hand” gallery. We were inspired by the objects in the exhibition and the craftsmanship that went into making them and wanted to introduce museum visitors to (a small hint) of the artists’ process.

The films can be viewed on my website, Resolve Design’s website, or on Resolve Design’s vimeo account.

Thank you to the Canadian Craft Council for facilitating, to the artists who opened their studios to us, generously accommodating our film making. Also to our talented friend and soundtrack engineer, Jeff Griffiths for doing us such a big favour. Additionally, to Chad Crouch, who’s music ended our long and painful search for appropriate Creative Commons music. Got a film project that needs music? Looking for music to license for a commercial project? Want to buy an album to listen to? Please check him out.

 

film still | Peter Kiss, wood sculptor

film still | Barbara Heller, tapestry artist

film still | Barbara Cohen, sculptural jeweller

New work – Britannia Heritage Shipyard film

| kirsti

I’ve been really behind in updating my portfolio and blogging about recent work. This film is from way back in the spring and was for the Britannia Heritage Shipyard’s new museum. I’ve recently added it to my portfolio and the film can be viewed there. My involvement included photography, editing and photo editing. Full credits listed below.
.

Britannia Heritage Shipyard – These Walls Can Talk

Documenting the historical residential experience at Britannia Heritage Shipyard, Steveston, BC
client:: City of Richmond
creative director + producer:: Darren Carcary
editors:: Darren Carcary and Kirsti Wakelin
soundtrack:: Jeff Griffiths
writer:: Dianna Carr
photographer:: Kirsti Wakelin
photo editing:: Kirsti Wakelin
cinematographer:: Darren Carcary
archival imagery:: City of Richmond Archives, City of Vancouver Archives, Harold Steves

How to Procrastinate #2

| kirsti

#2 Misuse tools

vancouver street during a snowfall | digital photo through Brownie Hawkeye viewfinder

It is snowing again. This might not seem like a big deal, but since it’s snowing outside my window and that’s Vancouver out there, I can assure you it is. It’s snowing on top of the snow that arrived over Christmas and they’re not just those big sloppy pseudo snowflakes usually delivered to Vancouver, they’re the ones that mean business – the small, dry innocuous ones that slowly, deliberately and patiently bury your car and maddeningly delay your bus.

. Continue reading →

How to Procrastinate #1

| kirsti

Charlamange Postcard

Charlemange @ Notre Dame | watercolour, pencil, ink & pencil crayon | 4″ x 6″

 

1. When cleaning the studio become distracted by poorly executed, failed and abandoned sketches or paintings and make feeble attempt to resurrect or fix them.

(I had all sorts of grand plans to paint my own postcards while on my travels last summer. I managed to paint, write and post 2. I got caught in a rain shower with this one, the third, so it ended up a bit destroyed – paint flowed into carefully planned negative spaces, wouldn’t dry fast enough in the damp and smeared during transport, and an attempt to save it with an over-drawing in ink just made things worse.)

Charlemange @ Notre Dame | holga pinhole | fuji pro 400h

 

Charlemange is way off in the distance in the center. The busy square emptied out when the shower hit and everyone ran for cover. This is just afterward, when they started to come back.

A Different Kind of Painting

| kirsti

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I’ve been on a bit of a break from my home studio, having relocated for one week to my grandmother’s island studio where I have a corner of my own to work on larger paintings. I’ve been recharging my creative batteries by chipping away at a sizable oil painting that I’m hoping will be the beginning of a series. It’s nice to just paint and let the painting be what it wants to be rather than beating it into submission to fit the parameters of a project.

At the beginning of the week, a friend came over and we took advantage of the sizable studio space to do some light painting photography one evening. However, the long exposures didn’t play nice with my camera (or card?), prompting a repeated error 99 so everything was shot on her Canon Digital Rebel XT. After a bit of fussy experimentation with too many lights, we figured out that less is definitely more. My photos lean a little heavy on the ‘spitting’ side as I kept getting the trajectory of the light spit wrong and had to keep redoing them (it’s hard to see your target in the dark). As it is, the spit still seems to be emanating from the chin area.

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Rachael’s Show

| kirsti

A friend of mine, Rachael Ashe, has a photography show up right now. I took a few photos at the opening but they don’t do the pieces justice.
The artwork consists of her photos of trees printed on metal plates using a heat press method. The medium has added another dimension to the colours of the Holga prints by allowing specks of metal to shine through here and there. The already ethereal feeling of the images – bare branched trees with a pair of snagged balloons, an orchard at night in winter, red leaves shining against a blue sky – has been heightened through the softening of edges and the textured ink surface of this unique medium.

The show continues until the end of October at Radha Yoga & Eatery in Vancouver.

Trees I have dreamed

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Holgas & Paperbacks

| kirsti

Wood Burning Oven/Yellow Table

Wood Burning Oven/Yellow Table
Holga | Fuji NPZ 800

The Holga is a spontaneous sort of camera and I’m trying to get better at the whole spontaneous photography thing. I’ve just found out that my local 30 minute photo lab processes 120 (thanks for the tip Rachael). Now I don’t have to wait so long to see what new way I’ve managed to damage a roll of film.

Yesterday, while waiting for a roll of 35mm to develop, I wandered around the neigbourhood with my Holga, took some photos, dropped off the roll for developing and went to Vancouver Kidsbooks to kill the half hour until pickup time. I saw that one of the books I illustrated a few years ago is now out in paperback – they had a whole stack on a rack on the outside of a shelf – cover facing out.

As for the photographs, I managed not to destroy a single frame this time and even pulled off of a couple I’m happy with, like the one above. Not a bad day.

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