BECAUSE I’M A PERSON TOO!
It’s 2016! Time to make some cheesy New-Year’s resolution which we will never keep. Except this time I’d actually like to keep just one.
A 52-week photography challenge. Sounds simple enough right? Take one picture a week based on one of the 52 challenges set aside for you.
Except it’s January 17 and I’m already 2 weeks late to the party…whoops.
Week 01 – Self Portrait.
When I travelled to Venice, Italy, I saw a store where they demonstrated how to create pieces of art with glass. I was intrigued because being a guy, I am naturally attracted to fire and melting things! So when Shannon invited me to a glass blowing, Christmas ornament making workshop, I jumped at the opportunity! Continue reading
This weekend my wife and I rented a car and decided to go to Gatineau Park for a hike and a picnic, before the winter chill came (I’m a little bit of a baby when it comes to cold weather!). Of course I decided that being in the forest would be the perfect opportunity to take a few pictures, and it wasn’t long before I found a nice little creek!
For Thanksgiving, my wife decided to visit her family in the Okanagan Valley to spend some time with them. She wanted me to go, but I had a lot of work at the time and told her that it would be pretty hard to get the time off to be able to fly out west, and that I would have to sit this one out. Little did she know that I bought my tickets a little bit after her and decided that I was going to surprise the bejesus out of her!
Once she left, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands (husbands will know lol) and wanted to do something creative and fun! At the same time, my boss had started this challenge of waking up at 5am everyday in order to get more done, and I had followed suit (for the record, that ended after exactly 2 weeks!) with the intention of capturing a few timelapses around Ottawa. Continue reading
Marble on my table!
I still find it hard to believe how, the smaller things are, the more detail they end up having! Macro photography allows you to take small things and blow them up (in a picture!) so you can see all those little details you may have missed. I was lucky enough to borrow a macro lens from a friend, as they are not cheap, and after finding all the small things I had in my house, here’s what I have learned about macro photography: Continue reading
A mother and daughter skate on the Ottawa Canal
For the past few years, I have had a very hard time enjoying the wintertime in Ottawa. The cold wind, having to always look at your feet to make sure you don’t trip or slip on some snow, those 5 minutes that seem to last hours while waiting for the bus on a freezing night. It’s hard to imagine how some people love winter so much. But as luck would have it, my wife is one of those people, and slowly, she has been helping me enjoy the season a bit more! Continue reading
We went to Banff for a wedding. Did not imagine the mountains to be this amazing!
Growing up in Mexico, I had only ever seen the mountains out west through pictures in one of those coffee table books my mother had laying around the house, and living in Ottawa, our mountains are like small hills when you compare them to the Canadian Rocky mountains! It’s almost impossible to grasp their size, beauty and the feeling of overpowerment you get the first time you see them with your own eyes. If you have never been out west, and have never experienced these beautiful mountains, then all I can offer you are a few pictures in a feeble attempt to make you feel the way I feel! Enjoy! Continue reading
It happens so fast every year, it’s sometimes hard to appreciate it. One moment, Ottawa is basking in the double digit patio season, the next thing you know, the trees look like they are on fire! Where did all the green go? The answer? To hibernate for a long time! I actually enjoy the fall very much; The crisp cool air in the morning, red and orange leaves coming down like rain on my way to work, pumpkins appearing on the doorsteps of my neighbors, there’s so much to look forward to!
I think my favorite part of the fall though, is Halloween. Every year, people find ways to impress me with their costumes as they stroll down the Byward Market, and every year, seeing the kids trick-or-treat in the neighborhood really makes me happy! We also get to break out the Catrinas we bought when we travelled to Patzcuaro, Mexico for “Dia de los Muertos” (Day of the dead). The holiday focuses on paying your respects to the deceased, with offerings of food, dances, poetry and even some humour to connect once more with those who have passed away. Continue reading
A while ago, I saw a photograph that seemed to mix two separate pictures into one, so that it looked like a person was made up of branches. At the time, I thought to myself “How in the world did they do this?”. Now that I have a bit more practice with Photoshop, I decided to do some research and give it a try!
The idea in multiple exposure photography is to merge different pictures to create something new. There are many techniques to accomplish this, but the easiest one is to simply change the blending mode to something else (Overlay or Soft Light work well), and take it from there! That’s the easy part. The difficulty comes in asking yourself, “What pictures combined will give me something interesting?”. The options are limitless, as long as you have a good imagination!
Every year on July 1st, thousands of people gather downtown to celebrate the birthday of Canada, and every year, I get to see almost every type of Canadian in one party! From the youngest Canadians who are seeing massive crowds for the first time, to the young partying Canadians who know where the best bars are at, to the new Canadians, happy to experience the pride of being surrounded and embraced by other Canadians. There’s the loud Canadians, the serious Canadians, the “why would you bring a stroller into a crowd this big?” Canadians, and the “I LOVE CANADA AND WANT EVERYONE TO KNOW IT!! Canadians (they’re really fun!)
The Chris Quiroz Photography Blog 
