Trevin Chow: Photos

My portfolio is growing!

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 23:03:49 GMT

I’m nearly finished my customization of my photo portofolio and uploading a whack of images. I was previously using Flickr, but it didn’t give me a good way to sell my photos directly to people without having some wonky experience where the buyer would be kicked out to a third party website. Additionally, I couldn’t customize my page as much as I could with Smugmug so I could never achieve a really unique look and store-front.

The last 2 months have been filled with

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It really leans!

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 02:49:47 GMT

It suffices to say that I thought Pisa was a dump when Colene and I went there on a day trip from Florence. A quick 1 hour train ride and we walked through one of the most pitiful cities on our
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Chicago Hershey's store

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 18:16:33 GMT

I was in Chicago this past new year’s and did the obligatory walk down Michigan avenue. This street is a people watchers dream — all hours of the day the street is bustling with people of all ages and genders. The Chicago Hershey’s Store is a very popular tourist attraction and was just freaki

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Pearl Jam

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 01:32:34 GMT

Here’s a shot from a Pearl Jam concert when I was in Prague last September that I took hand-held with my
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Nightfall in Vernazza

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:29:17 GMT

I took this shot while traveling through the town of Vernazza in Cinque Terre, Italy. Since I was backpacking, I was really travel weight conscious so I took along the lightest tripod I had. This turned out to be a huge mistake. It was so flimsy that I had a ton of trouble c

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The photography bug has bit. Hard.

Tue, 13 Feb 2007 04:44:20 GMT

For a long, long time I’ve always loved photographs and way back in 1996 I got my first 35mm film camera that I used on a 3 week trip to South Korea and Japan. I always felt dealing with film was not only inconvenient but expensive since you were developing entire rolls of film and finding you only liked a fraction of the resulting photos.

In 1998, I saw a photography exhibit while walking about downtown Vancouver. The exhibit itself was unremarkable, and quite frankly, I don’t even remember the photographer. However, what did strike me was how some of the photographs were able to capture a moment, and even shape the way you perceived it. The photography seed was planted.

Over the next few years, digital cameras were taking the consumer market by storm, but being a starving college student, I was never able to get my hands on one. The promises of a digital viewfinder and no forced photo-finishing costs sounded like a dream come true!

In 2000, I was shocked when I got an Olympus 3030Z as graduation gift from my parents. This camera was just plain bad-ass with it’s 3.3 MP sensor and promises of producing stunning photos. Back then I didn’t know much about taking photographs at all, other than I knew I wanted to shoot photos all the time.

Admittedly, my photos back then weren’t all that great. The harsh reality was that the camera I ha

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Amsterdam street at night

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 02:49:17 GMT

Amsterdam was such an amazing place. I fell in love right away almost immediately upon setting foot on the street out of the cab. It reminded me so much of Vancouver it was eerie. Each street was filled with a mixture of parks and residences, even at the city center. The sweeping and never ending maze of canals also added to the charm.

Here is a shot I took in the early evening shortly after the sun had set. I love the warmth in the picture given off by the surrounding street lights, which is amplifeid sky being lit some by the fading sunlight and the lack of a flash to fill the photo. I also love the rugged baby stoller in the center of the frame -- all ready to go for tommorow's adventures.

Vote for my photo!

Thu, 14 Dec 2006 19:18:29 GMT

Magazines and newspapers have struggled lately figuring out how to merge their print copy with their online presence. Most publications end up re-publishing most, if not all, their content online. Some, like the Wall Street Journal, require a subscription to view more than just headlines.

I've been following JPG magazine for quite some time and recently they changed their model to incorporate their website and community in an interesting way. Instead of their website just being an outlet for reproducing what's in their magazine, they're now getting their users involved by getting them to submit photos online, and the community "votes" on which ones are the best given a specific theme for their upcoming issue. For example, their upcoming issue has 2 themes -- "Street" and "9 to 5". Their primary rule is that photos cannot be altered heavily aside from color correction, cropping, etc. The photos that receive the most votes get printed in their real print magazine.

The submitted photos are breathtaking and if you feel like voting for my photo that I submitted for their next issue, feel free :)

http://www.jpgmag.com/photos/30218

Rio Maggiore

Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:07:57 GMT

On my vacation to Europe, my sister and I spent a couple of days in Cinque Terre were I got some of my most beautiful shots. I love this shot in particular due to the stark contrast between the buildings and rocky mountain side. I would have loved to have had a wider lens but this turned out nice nevertheless. One of my favs from the trip.

2 Peas in a pod

Sun, 05 Nov 2006 01:36:20 GMT

I've always believed that wonderful things happen when you least expect them. My sister got a Holga for her 25th birthday this past summer. The person who loaded the film had it on the wrong setting so all the images taken were overlapped with subsequent ones. With this "mistake" we end up with this great photo of my sister and I. One can only wonder what I said to her to elicit that reaction in the left frame :)

2 peas in a pod

Sat, 04 Nov 2006 17:36:12 GMT

I’ve always believed that wonderful things happen when you least expect them. My sister got a Holga for her 25th birth

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Visions of Long Island

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 12:36:55 GMT

2 shots from my most recent trip to New York city, taken while on a side trip to Long Island city. Lon

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Visions of Long Island

Mon, 28 Aug 2006 07:36:35 GMT

2 shots from my most recent trip to New York city, taken while on a side trip to Long Island city. Long Island City was a paradox to me -- what a striking difference from Manhattan with low rises and the widest assortment of business from butchers and printing presses to french cafes and man-made beaches.

First HDR shots

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:31:01 GMT

I've been experimenting recently with 2 photo techniques called High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) and Tone Mapping. It basically boils down to taking multiple shots of the same subject using exposure bracketing, and combining them all into a single photo so you get the complete range of exposures. This allows you to get a fuller dynamic range out of a scene so both dark and bright portions of a photo are exposed more optimally.

I've found that using a 3 shot method with auto exposure bracketing of -2/0/+2 works best for me so far. I was up at Kerry Park yesterday to take some photos of the Space Needle and here's the results of the first 2 of these types of photos.

For this image, I increased the strength of the tone mapping and amped up the color saturation to give it a more "dreamy" feel which I think works well for this shot:

There is an alternate technique which uses a single RAW image to derive the triple exposure, but I didn't like the results as much as with the triple shot technique.

I have a few more photos of essentially that I'm going to experiment with more over the next few days and I'll either be posting my shots up here or in my "HDR" set on flickr. If you like these, let me know..

Yaletown Waterfront a la Lomo

Sun, 06 Aug 2006 02:08:20 GMT

The Lomo LC-A was a camera born out of St. Petersburg, Russia that has a lens that distorted the edges while keeping the center of the frame sharp. The lenses also have a very high sensitivity to light often causing over saturation and defects in exposure. The camera has a freakish cult following.. just search for "Lomo" on the web or Flickr and you'll see what I mean.

After seeing some photos recently taken by a Lomo LC-A camera, it reminded me again how much I love their high contrasty look. Since I don't use film at all anymore in favour of my digital SLR, I wanted to try to re-create the look using photoshop. After several unsuccesful attempts, I found a great tutorial over at digital-photography-school.com. Using that technique plus some tweaks of my own, I'm getting some great results. Here's one attempt at Lomofying an image I took while up in Vancouver, over the Yaletown neighbourhood where my parents live.

Yaletown waterfront a la Lomo

Sat, 05 Aug 2006 19:08:47 GMT

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Blast from the past -- Photo of the day winner

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 22:53:45 GMT

I was scrubbing old emails from my inbox and I stumbled upon an old email back in April 2005 that informed me I won "Photo of the Day" over at Imaging-Resource.com. On a whim, I submitted this photo I took of myself.. pretty cool.

http://www.dailydigitalphoto.com/cgi-bin/potd/potd.pl?day=9&month=4&year=2005

Note: Yes, I'm pretty much bragging here, but com'on, give me my 2 seconds of glory :)

Blast from the past -- Photo of the day winner

Sat, 25 Mar 2006 14:53:32 GMT

I was scrubbing old emails from my inbox and I stumbled upon an old email back in April 2005 that informed me I won “Photo of the Day” over at Imaging-Resource.com. On a whim, I

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