As a part of my foray into the POTD project for this year I have been trying to give myself weekly assignments from time to time. This past week I focused on some of my favorite bits of my favorite lady, Kristen.

I tried to highlight the most smoochable parts while keeping things PG-13. It’s been pointed out that any dirty old man would also have these “bits”; the point was really to focus on Kristen’s bits. It was more of a personal project, but here I am sharing it with the world.

Hope you have enjoyed viewing them as much as I enjoyed making these images.

Day 001: “The Lips”

Day 002: “The Hips”

Day 003: “The Knee”

Day 004: “The Feets.”

Day 005: “The Neck.”

Well, my love for photographing ghosts began around the time the old cottage hospital in Grand Bank closed down.  This hospital was the last of the cottage hospitals to close its doors.  I got the idea in my head to take a drive up there and photograph some of the rooms as a way of preserving the history.

The photographs that came out of that wound up having me on CBC radio doing an interview with Jeff Gilhooly.

One of the rooms at the old hospital. The delivery room.

After moving from the delivery room to the operating room, I set up my equipment and prepared to shoot. The trick to photographing this ghost was to remain quiet and use a long exposure (around 8 seconds worked).

This past September, my wife and I went on a crazy long (and expensive) ’stay-cation”.  We headed to St. John’s on the 5th to shoot a wedding, and from there went to Grand Falls, Millertown, Rocky Harbour, St. Anthony, Corner Brook, and finally the tiny fishing village where my grandmother was born and raised, La Poile.  Below are a selection of photographs taken within 24 hours of our arrival on ferry from Rose Blanche.

To get to La Poile, you have to travel via ferry out of Rose Blanche. The ferry trip is about 1.5 hours, and yields great views of the weathered south-west coast of Newfoundland. This lighthouse in Rose Blanche is now a museum. The lighthouse was built in 1871, and underwent a major restoration in recent years. Interestingly enough, on the journey to my maternal grandmother’s former home, I have to drive through Rose Blanche. Even though my father’s family are from the Burin Peninsula, his grandfather was born in Rose Blanche.

The village of La Poile has a population less than 150. Despite being isolated physically, the residents of this quintessential Newfoundland fishing community enjoy such things as high speed internet as well as satellite television.

Spied this last night on The Daily Mail

From TMD:

A German man owes his life to a woman who rescued him from 350 miles away – thanks to his camera. The man lost on a frozen stretch of the North Sea was facing almost certain death when he flashed his camera in the hope that someone might be out watching the same beautiful sunset he had set out to witness. Luckily the camera flash off the coast of St. Peter-Ording near the Danish border was witnessed by a female nature lover sitting in front of her computer in the Westerwald region near the Rhine hundreds of miles away in southern Germany.

She was monitoring a camera set up on the beach to record the vivid sunset. Seeing the camera flashes she alerted local police who in turn sent through an emergency call that resulted in a patrol rescuing the man as temperatures plunged to -20c. German authorities said it was the first incident of its kind where a person’s life had been saved in this way. Police spokeswoman Kristin Stielow said: ‘He was walking on the ice, got disoriented and would probably have either fallen through the ice or succumbed to the cold.

The Best quote from this article is ‘He was not a local – a local wouldn’t have attempted this.  He was boundlessly naive.’ which reminds me of the countless foreigners who’ve been swept to sea at Cape Spear. I’m not one for sticking up warning signs everywhere but it’s just hilarious at times how ignorant people are. As photographers, it makes the rest of us look bad. Example: every time I’m out at Cape Spear, if I’m anywhere near the coast, even if I’m 100 yards away, passers-by will shout at me. I feel like putting a sign on my back that says “LOCAL”.

To be fair to the guy, I don’t know if I’d of had my wits about me to pop my flash hoping to draw attention.

Not only have we changed our look, we’re changing who and what we are.

History Lesson…

A lot of people currently active on the site have joined post-blog, so this info is for you. When we started NLPhotographers back in 2007 it was for two reasons. One was because we were bored and looking to do an online project and two was because as Newfoundland Photographers ourselves, we realized no one was doing this yet.

Initially, this site was simply a message board; a community forum for fellow photographers to network. Over the years the forums grew much like our ideas for this site and before we knew it, we were a proper website, albeit not a very good one, but more then just forums anyway. We struggled early on as we worked with what skills we had and the concepts of what we’d intended the site to be. Figuring out how to implement some of the ideas we had without paying a freelancer designer to do the work for us was a challenge but things have changed.

Money and how it helps…

Which brings me to the next point: While this site’s beginnings were altruistic and to this day still are; it isn’t free. To put it bluntly, money comes directly from our pockets to give Newfoundland & Labrador photographers a place on the net.

You’ll see a Donate button at the top, we’d greatly appreciate you clicking it at least once… or once in a while… or often… it doesn’t matter :) We also have the option to subscribe to a donation, so every month a small amount, $2.00, will come out automatically. We don’t expect you all to donate at once, but it goes a long way, which I’ll explain in a moment. And hey, if you’ve got some change kicking around in your Paypal account send it our way please!

Secondly we’ve got ads on our site now. It isn’t something we had wanted to do, but frankly, we have to. You’ll see more of this as time goes on, but we promise to keep it tasteful and not distracting, specifically on the forums. I can’t encourage you to click things like Google Ad’s as Google won’t allow that, but just know how far it goes when you do. At least they’ll be content oriented ads, things for photography and most importantly (and some what sadly) not Viagra ads.

As well, we’re still affiliated with BH PhotoVideo, Adorama and Amazon (with more to come).  Now, either no one had been clicking our link (shame on you) or it wasn’t working. PLEASE use our affiliate links when you’re making a purchase at any of our affiliates. If enough people use the affiliates to make purchases, then we won’t need Google Ads on the forums or the need to beg for donations. Remember, every single purchase counts. Even if you’re just buying a lens pen or a cheap filter, click through us to do it. Please!!!! :) You’re donating every time you do and it’s greatly appreciated, not just by us but by every photographer that uses this site.

Finally we’re now accepting advertising from non-affiliate based companies. As you can see, we’ve already got Shane Kelly’s classes/studio there. Shane’s been really good to use since the beginning and he’ll always be a “friend of the show” to quote a certain Mr. Stephen Colbert. If you’re interested in advertising with us click here.

As you can see, we’re practically begging here, but there’s good reason.

What’s new here…

Now, this is a big deal so bear with me. As I said at the beginning, we’re changing who and what we are. And what that means is that we’re not longer just a straight blog site like we used to be. No longer will we have a set group of authors, punching out mostly standard posts with no real influence from their creative side. What we will have however, is the ability for ALL of our members to post content to the front page.

We wanted to get back to our roots, back to the original intent of this site which was to progress local photography. So we decided to figure out a way to allow all of our members to post content, without the discouraging hassle’s involved with the act of publishing itself, “screwing things up” or just needing to learn how.

So what we’re doing is this:

• Anyone can do it: Every member will be able to sign up to the site and once you do, you’ll instantly be able to create content. Whether it’s a simple post about a few website you really like and want to share OR maybe you’d like to do a photo editorial from a recent vacation you took OR maybe you just wanna show off and explain how you shot a great picture using 10 flashes, four Porsches, three super models and a whale. We’re open to everything, so even if it’s video you’ve shot on your new 7d, we want to see it.
• We’ll do the dirty work: The biggest pain of content creation on any professional blogging software is that it offers so many options, often it’s difficult to learn how to just make it work display properly on the page. Which is where we come in; not only will we be approving what hits the front page but we’ll also fully edit and layout (or adjust) your posts. We’ll also have a support section set up in the forums where you can ask questions, allowing everyone to help out and learn.
• Publish: Once you create content you’ll submit it for publishing. It will be “pending” until one of the senior site editors approve it. Once approved, you’ll receive notification via E-Mail that it’s been published at which point you can return to your post, hit the Facebook or twitter buttons on the bottom to share it with your friends and followers. The approval process will be almost instantaneous.

Now if you’re a cynical person this is for you: we give NO favoritism to anyone. Articles might not get published for whatever reason, but we’ll ALWAYS let you know why, with the intentions on fixing it and getting it published in the end. Further more, all of your content remains your own and that’s clear on every page who’s pictures and words they are.

What this means to you is this: sure your site, if you have one, might have some traffic, but ours has a lot and a lot of that is people looking for photographers. So not only do you get to share your stuff with your fellow photographers but also you get to market yourself to prospective clients and everyone else in the world. On every post their will be a section at the top with a short bio, including links, for the author/photographer, all of which is self editable in your profile in Wordpress.

You’ll be able to see a good example of what I’m talking about in a couple days as we’ve got a photo editorial all ready to go from our friend Travis Parsons. It’s a great piece on La Poile, with great narrative and pictures.

You can jump to the writers section on the forums here. We’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have in that section. The keys to remember here are: you create the content, we make it look good on the site, you get the credit and relayed foot traffic to your site… oh yeah, you help the photographers community grow.

New Features…

On top of all of that, we’ve also got a few new features here.

Twitter: on the right side -> When you use the hash tags #nlphotogs in twitter.com it will appear on this site to the right. Use this for ANYTHING photography related you post on twitter and want to share. We’re about growing, expanding and progressing everyone’s photography and sharing is where that process starts. Now you might be thinking “well I’ve got twitter and everyone I want to share with follows me already”. Not so fast, just because someone follows another doesn’t mean they see everything you post and certainly adding those hashtags can only increase traffic to your tweets.

Flickr Group: Our flickr group is as active as ever and now with it’s added functionality on our site (better placement, lightbox, link backs to original) it’s an ever better idea to add any and all of your flicks to that group. You can click here to join and add your stuff today! We’re also planning to further advance this feature and begin using the flickr group more to run challenges/contests/top 10’s, etc.

Post Comments: Our blog comments no longer require an account. This is great because as non-blog-members no longer need to go through the hassle of signing up just to comment on a story. On top of that, all recent comments will now display in the sidebar.

Latest Forum Posts: On the right their is a live feed showing the most recent forum posts. This is mostly out of convenience but it should also spur on more chatter in there. More the merrier!

Webcams: They’ve been updated, considerably, and now they’re even more convenient on a device such as the iPhone.

Sociable: Every post on NLP will have the links on the bottom of itself to easily share that post to facebook or twitter, making it easy to share your content with others.

Business Directory: I’ll get into this more later when it’s properly launched, but it’s pretty self explanatory (and free for now). Essentially thanks to Google Analytics, we know already that a lot of the traffic that hits our site are actually not photographers, but potential clients. A business directory is an easy way to give back to our users and serves a great feature for people looking to hire.

RSS: Both the front page blog and the forums now have RSS. This is big, we’ve always had RSS on the front page but having it on the forums is brand new and frigging awesome.

Lightbox: LB is installed on the front page again, which for you content creators will come in handy (LB is what happens when you click on a picture on a page and it opens in a new window full size while darkening the background).

Google Maps: We’ve installed Google Maps in Wordpress (our CMS system for the front page) to allow uses to pinpoint exactly a place they’re talking about on a map.

Speaking of the forums…

We’re making changes there too. We’re in the process of testing a new theme, one which will allow our users of massive 2560×1440 screens to take advantage of the real estate while viewing pics (no more overflow, yay!) . But at the same time, one which will allow our users on smaller resolutions to still be in the game.

We’ve added “recaptcha” to the mix too for new sign ups. This is awesome, if you’re not aware of the recaptcha project, essentially it mixes one regular squiggly captcha word with one unknown word from an old book, news paper publication or other document when an OCR cannot figure out. So not only are you entering some miscellaneous text when you’re signing up, you’re also helping to digitize the past and back up history.

We’re also working to add a couple other features to the forums as well, but I won’t lie, the process of adding modifications to PHPBB is never a certainty so we’ll wait till they’re online to let you know about them.

"Crossroads" by Travis Parsons

For those of you on screens 1280×1024 and up, you’ll notice an image in the background of our site. This is new and it’ll be something we can change now and again; there will be a thread in the forums.

In case you don’t know who Travis Parsons is, he’s easily one of NL’s best photographers and is a very active member of our site.

You can check out his website, Vinland Photography.

In case you’ve not noticed, there’s been some minor changes and they’re coming fast and furious.

We spent the last day and a bit working till all hours of the morning, drinking countless beverages in the process to get this site in a position to be revamped.

The intention is to get every aspect of the site back in line with what our original intentions were and to bring the new features we’d discussed so long ago.

The forums, after some minor issues this morning, should be working A-Ok now. If you see any errors OR IF YOU CANNOT REGISTER, please email me directly colinpeddle@gmail.com and we’ll fix it asap.

Registration for the forums currently requires ADMIN APPROVAL, which we can do via the awesome iPhone in a matter of seconds. So if you sign up, wait 2-3mins for the approval to come and you’ll be good to go. This is because of spam issues we were having.

Ignore any problems you find with front page news section of our site, it’s currently under massive repairs but should be fully functional by tonight.

Cheers,

Colin & Matt

Just wanted to point out that one of NLP’s very own, Travis Parsons from Grand Bank has been published in this month’s issue of Popular Photography. The specifics are that it’s a section on portraits, which is fitting for Travis because he’s a bit of a portrait king in these parts.

I’m pretty certain this represents the first time anyone from Newfoundland has been published in Popular Photography (leave a comment if I’m wrong).