Beth and I were at Cairn a couple of weeks ago.   She was leading camp staff training for a couple of hours and I shot the staff portraits.

Here are a couple of highlight images as I have been working on the photos.  It was great to be a Muskoka portrait photographer again!

A couple of times a year I get to be a summer camp photographer – it’s one of my favourite places to be!

I spent a great sunny fall Sunday afternoon in London with Alicia and Conor. Alicia is an long-time friend and canoe-trip buddy of mine (ask her about taking her purse on trip that one time) and it has been so great to get to know Conor in the last few years.   

We shot at a couple of well known London landmarks like the Red Roaster in Old South, The bridge behind the courthouse and at Joe Kool’s.

This is Zoe. She’s very head tilty.

It’s going to be an amazing November wedding! We can hardly wait.

How was your Thanksgiving weekend? I was super-excited to spend the morning on Saturday shooting some promo pictures for our youngest son Spencer. He is working this year on getting out there as a musician and I have been doing what I can to help with promotion.

All bias aside… he’s brilliant. You can listen to some of the music that Spencer has written on his Facebook Fan Page: http://www.facebook.com/SpencerBlakeMusic

We were lucky to have some good weather and got to shoot in Woodstock and out at my Grandfather’s place in Innerkip. He still has a small hobby barn on his property and it seemed like a perfect setting for us to shoot with my brother-in-law, Mike’s, great old VW van.

A couple of pictures of Spencer’s girlfriend Stephanie as the assistant. She held the lights for me while Beth was doing all of the running around adjusting flash power and zoom.

Gotta have some shade:

Sometimes there is just no room for a flash stand…     

One of my pictures was featured today on the national website of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Camp Kintail, one of my clients, used the photo to promote their “Especially Special Night” Alumni dinner. The full details can be found here: “An Especially Special Night”: A Dinner for Alumni and Friends of Kintail. 7 November 2009 | The Presbyterian Church in Canada

(For the Photographers in the crowd: Canon 40D on a tripod, Tamron 17-55 2.8, settings f2.8, 1/3sec. Flash is a Canon 430EX set to ETTL and fired with an on-camera 580EXII, flash is positioned on a painter’s pole and held in position by a my best VAL [voice activated lightstand], Beth.)

As seen at Camp Kintail.

I just realized that I had posted these pictures elsewhere and for some reason had forgotten to make a blog post about them.

It was a great treat to be invited to shoot Andrew and Amanda’s wedding in La Malbaie, QC this summer. Both Andrew and Amanda have worked as counsellors and senior staff members with us at camp and we were so excited to go to this amazing location near where Andrew’s family has a cottage. The beautiful chapel only seats 40 people and is perched on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. It’s pretty significant to his family because the pulpit and stained glass came out of another chapel that Andrew’s grandfather built.

It was great to also get to spend time with Sarah and John. You might remember them from the pictures of their wedding last spring at Acadia University in Wolfville, NS. (Everybody remembers that picture of Sarah in the field of flowers!) Sarah was the minister who performed the marriage and she always does amazing wedding ceremonies.

Take a minute and check out Andrew’s photography. He is really well known for his work photographing rally racing across North America. He and two other guests at the wedding run a website called Flat Over Crest that reports on the Canadian Rally racing season.

A couple of camp star-trails shots:

Camp Kintail

CAIRN (a longer exposure so the sky is lighter, plus the effect of a heavy dew on my lens)

Wow, I have had such a busy summer I didn’t realize that I had missed posting some things to my blog.

It was an honour to be asked to be the photographer at Ashley & Chris’ wedding at the YMCA’s Cedar Glen Camp in Nobleton. I LOVE how relaxed and fun a camp wedding can be! We still talk about how awesome it was for us to have everyone around us for the weekend at our camp wedding.

I am constantly amazed at the quality of pictures from this camera.

Maverick on The Dock

Water Lily I & II

Flowers in Courtyard

Taken around the site at CAIRN, Baysville.