Favourites; every photographer has them.

Favourite images, some took hours or even days to plan out and execute. Others happened so quick there was no time to plan anything. But they all have one thing in common; everyone of them is an image you will never forget.

As I come across those favorite image I am going to prepare them for the internet and tell the story of their creation. I’m going to tie them all together under the category “Favorites” on this blog page.

This is the first image.

I believe it was the late 1980’s. I received a call from the plant manager at a Komdresco. They were a local company here in Cambridge, Ontario. We sat down and discussed the scope of the project. In summation the plant was going to be completely modified and upgraded and they wanted a series of photographs that would illustrate the plant before all the changes were made and again after the upgrades had been carried out.

We decided to make a bigger statement about the difference by shooting the before images in black and white and the after images mainly in colour. In order to try and keep the perspectives on some of the large equipment I utilized my 4×5 camera with swings and tilts.

This image of a welder was lit with a combination of available light and 3 Bron Impact studio strobes carefully balanced with the available light. Shooting in black and white meant we didn’t have to worry about mixing colour temperatures between the shop lights, filtered daylight coming through the windows and the studio strobes.

The tonal range of the image, the detail from the 4×5 negative and the lighting make this one of my favourite all time images.