This photo was taken at 4 in the morning in the Dominican Republic. It was a starry black sky with no sign of sunrise, perfect for taking star trail shots. Film SLR cameras (the kind with removable lenses) work far better than digital cameras, however it is possible to take these images with professional DSLR cameras, as long as you can keep the shutter open for long periods of time.

STEP 1. Use a 50mm lens or a zoom lens set to approximately 50mm. Set the camera on the tripod, and set the focus to infinity (manual focus, as it will be too dark to operate auto focus)

STEP 2. Compose your photo so that a foreground object is in the image, such as a tree or building. Make sure it is a fair distance away, and that it does not fill the frame entirely.

STEP 3. Set your aperture (f-stop) to the lowest number (ex. f2.8, or f4.5, etc.). Your shutter speed should be set on the Bulb or Time setting “B” or “T”

STEP 4. With a cable release attached to the shutter, take the picture. The shutter will now be open for as long as you desire. For the first shot, try 10 minutes, then 15 minutes, and if you feel adventurous, a few hours. The longer you keep the shutter open, the longer and more dramatic the star trails become.

STEP 5. When you are finished close the shutter via the cable release. Now go to bed.

An added benefit to waking up before dawn is that your long exposure may pick up some early morning pink and red pre-sunrise light. In this photo I was fortunate enough to have the sky dark with shooting stars, but the bottom part warming up with reddish light. You will need to experiment with sunrise times; start your long exposure well before you see any hint of morning light. Good luck!

See more of Mark’s photos here.

In compositional theory, certain geometric shapes are often used by artists to guide the viewer’s eye throughout a picture space. Triangles, circles, arches, and curves have shown up in countless images throughout the history of photography and painting, and the “S” curve is one that bears mentioning.

While this image of a spiral staircase is an interior, S curve compositions can be found in any location. Look for elements within a potential picture space that aid in allowing the viewers eye to follow the winding path from a starting point to an ending point. In this photograph, we naturally begin our exploration of the photo at the bottom, working our way up the banister until we reach the top of the image. While not always the case, the viewer will usually begin a photo with an S curve viewing from the bottom left to the top right.

Other geometric designs within your compositions can evoke a sense of authority, empathy, rigidity, and countless other emotions. The S curve composition has a sensual feel to it, slightly dangerous and very compelling. The next time you have a camera in hand, keep an eye open for visual pathways that mimic this serpentine geometry.

This scene in South Korea was too good to pass up, but conditions were less than ideal. It was noontime with direct and very harsh sunlight, and 40 degrees celcius! I knew that the only way to get a good shot out of this was to put a blue filter on the lens and underexpose to mimic the look of moonlight. This trick has saved many of my travel photographs, as there are times during traveling where you can’t wait around for beautiful golden hour sunlight.

If you are a digital photographer and you don’t have a blue filter, you can do the same thing by using the indoor light (incandescent) white balance setting. Often this setting will be indicated by a lightbulb icon on your camera dial. Luckily after your shot you will be able to preview the image, and decide if the photo needs more or less blue color cast. If you can adjust contrast within your camera settings, higher contrast will mimic the look of moonlight better than normal contrast settings.

See more Mark Hemmings photos here.

The house Hemmings built
Published Tuesday July 20th, 2010
Telegraph-Journal
Saint John, NB

By Zoe McKnight
(Pictures by Kâté Braydon/Telegraph-Journal)

It’s mid – afternoon on a Friday in July. The sun warms the Kennebecasis River and shines on the back porch of Greg Hemmings’ cottage. His one-year-old daughter Kaya chews on his cell phone, his parents just arrived for dinner and his wife, Jessica, is inside getting ready for the evening.

It’s a family affair at Hemmings House.

Greg, 33, and Mark Hemmings, 36, are the brothers behind Hemmings House Pictures, a Saint John media company. Mark was an established commercial photographer in his own right and Greg operated a film and television production company. The two merged in 2009 to create a multimedia enterprise. It is the largest of its kind in New Brunswick, but still in the expansion phase. Unlike many small ventures that might hope to make it in the big city, the Hemmings are rooted firmly in place.

“We’re always looking for more ways to bring work here. We want to become, and I say this in a nice way, a media empire … simply because we want to hire people, keep people in business, keep Saint John vibrant, and to have people doing what they love here. Plus make a decent living for ourselves,” Mark says.

“Why not go to a market that is a cool place to live, like Saint John, that has very low overhead … and find your niche there? I’m glad we did because we’re actually expanding while other companies are decreasing.”

The 12-member staff divides its time between advertising photography, television production, short films, documentaries and ‘filmmercials’ for the web. They have licensed shows to CBC, Bravo! and Rogers Sportsnet, and have filmed professional wrestling, arctic climate change, classical music in South America, New Brunswick bluesman Matt Andersen and the New Brunswick Youth Orchestra. Just to name a few. The company has won numerous awards, most recently at the nextMEDIA Interactive and Pilots Awards at the Banff World Television Festival in June.

The Hemmings brothers fell into the media business separately but together. In 1997, a summer job took Mark to Japan with his grandfather’s slide-film camera and he came back with remarkable pictures, even though he had no experience with aperture or shutter speed.

“So I said, ‘OK. I will become a photographer then.’ And a couple of weeks later, I was working in the movie industry as a photographer. This hardly ever happens, but I was thrust into working as a professional almost immediately.”

Around the same time, Greg ran into an old sailing buddy during first-year university. That buddy happened to be Andrew Tidby, who was attending film school at Niagara College in Welland, Ont. He inspired Greg to join him.

“I got in and I found my passion,” Greg says. Later, he and Tidby formed Hit! Media, a precursor to Hemmings House Pictures before it was incorporated in 2005.

Today, Hemmings House has ad clients all over the world including car companies, Olivier Soaps, NB Power, Irving Oil Ltd. and Saint John 225. Mark alone has worked in 15 countries, and has made countless return trips to Mexico, Hungary and Japan, where there is a satellite office. But most staff are from New Brunswick and trained in-house. Producers even make an effort to use local composers in soundtracks.

These days, Greg leaves much of the actual filming to Mark and other videographers. As CEO, he focuses most of his energy on attracting new clients. A recent graduate of UNB’s exclusive Wallace McCain Institute entrepreneur and leadership program, Greg says he has learned how to properly run a business.
He credits his “true-blue entrepreneur” father with instilling in him an independent spirit.

“I never in my life ever thought I would work for somebody (else),” Greg says.
When asked if he has ever considered leaving the Maritimes for more bustling locales, Greg was emphatic.

“This is where we all wanna be. That’s it.

“If there’s a need here, which there is, then we found our niche and there’s no reason to go to the big cities,” he says. Everyone at Hemmings House feels the same commitment.

Steve Foster, 26, producer and manager at the Saint John office, agrees.

“We’re in this for good, one way or another. I don’t mean in this industry. I think we’re in Hemmings House for good. There is a certain culture here that can’t be replicated that is hard to define. But there is certainly something special here and all of us share it,” Foster says.

Hemmings House Pictures recently moved into newer, more professional digs on Wentworth Street.
The space still has that new-office smell with a freshly-painted black, white and lime green colour scheme.

Framed prints of Mark’s photographs lean against the walls and are stacked on tables. A large print of a cameo silhouette rests by the door. Awards and trophies are displayed on a side table in the studio. Light stands and softboxes are carefully arranged as if a photo shoot were just interrupted.

There are lots of windows, tiny potted plants, and Macs with 20-inch screens. The outside is nondescript. The inside is warm, practical, arty.

It’s almost as if there is an esoteric quality to the Hemmings House culture.

“No one here went to school for this industry, except for Greg, yet we all do it professionally. It feels like there is something more, something worthwhile here… I think there is a reason we are all here,” Foster says. They are more like a family than colleagues, he says. It’s not unusual to find them at the office on holidays.

One cameraman used to hitchhike to New Brunswick from Prince Edward Island to volunteer on shoots.

To Greg, workplace culture is a huge part of creating and retaining talent. All his life, he says he has encountered the attitude that “you can’t get good quality production here.”

“I’m talking about my industry, but there are so many other industries that suffer because of this attitude … and that has to stop. If our customers dry up because of that attitude, then we will collapse and there won’t be any creative workforce left.”

At the cottage, patriarch Don Hemmings says brain drain is a problem in this region.

“Those willing, keen bodies have been exported out of the Maritimes since the Maritimes was invented,” he says.

“It doesn’t take rocket science, in today’s wonderful digital era, to operate out of the Maritimes.” And there is not enough of that, he says.

Ten years ago, Mark says he heard “the faint whisperings of digital,” the mobility of which allows anyone to transfer images and sounds instantly. Saint John’s lower cost of living and smaller media market means that Hemmings House Pictures can be a bigger fish in a smaller pond than Toronto or New York City.

And with the advent of digital cameras that shoot both still and moving images, the market is changing to the advantage of small shops that, at one time, would find it impossible to finance a television-quality camera.

This gives small production companies a foothold in the TV and advertising industry and makes the “big guys” nervous, Mark says.

Digital technology means that Hemmings House can, and does, make pictures with one foot in Scotland, Japan, Transylvania, Venezuela or the arctic and one foot in the Bay of Fundy.

And despite all the globetrotting, there is no intention of leaving home for good.

“I love Saint John. I don’t know what it is … I never want to live anywhere else but here,” Mark says.
“My destiny is here. And I don’t know what that is yet. But something is pulling me here and keeping me here and it’s a good thing.”

Jon Williams is one of our freelance photographers, and I thought it would be a cool idea to display his images of our home town Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada. I love these photos . . . they are very gritty and raw, and show a very intriguing side of our downtown core. Here is one of the images, my favorite:

Please take a look through them, there are a lot of gems there for residents and those who have never visited our city:
http://site.hemmingshousepictures.com/Albums/jons_saint_john.php
One photo is of a building wall with an old faded Coca-Cola sign painted on the bricks. Our city has many painted signs that are just barely legible. It would be great to make a collection of these old signs, before they fade forever.
Great work Jon, thanks!

I was shooting interiors for a nice cafe called Magnolia in my home town, and just as I took a picture through a window a customer walked into the frame. I was slightly annoyed at first, and just about pressed the delete button, but realized that it could actually work as a viable image:

It is wise to keep images in the camera until you have had plenty of time to judge the photo’s worth when back at the computer.

Here is another interesting way to use your new Nikon or Canon video DSLRs:

We have been doing web films for clients lately, and they have been very fun. This one was for Olivier Soaps, shot in the mountainous Nagano region of Japan.

To see more work by Mark Hemmings, click here.

In late fall we finished a very cool project where we were hired to do a time-lapse of a Potash Mining tower being constructed. While this blog post may not be of interest to many of you, the great thing about films like this is that it is within every photographer’s grasp. The entire production was done on a Nikon D300 and Nikon D90, both cameras being prosumer models, and not too expensive:

As our company grows, we continually desire to stretch our creativity by pushing inexpensive (but good) equipment to the limit. While this philosophy will have its detractors, the bottom line is that so far we have received very favorable responses from our clients. Their desire is quality at a low price, ours is quality with as much profit as possible. This is often accomplished by the balancing act of reducing expenses as much as possible without sacrificing on the technical and aesthetic side. Essentially, if you can do the job with the camera that you have, instead of buying the newest and coolest, save that money and reinvest it into your company. Eventually you will need to upgrade, and at that time you will have the savings to do so.

To see more work from Mark Hemmings, click here

This post has two parts to it – a review, and then instructions on how to photograph artwork.

Canvas on Demand sent me a free 16×20 for me to do a review. I sent one of my photos of Budapest (Buda Castle at Sunrise), and I was very impressed. The colors are excellent, the frame is thick wood, and the canvas material is substantial.

The above stretched canvas print is of a photo that I took in my studio leaning against an easel with a white backdrop (more on that to follow). Here are some more images of the canvas print:

I have no complaints, it arrived quickly, and the photo looks like a painting! The canvas was well packaged for shipping, and it will find a nice home in our new photo studio that we are opening next month in Saint John. Here is their website: http://www.canvasondemand.com

So . . . perfect time for a quick and useful tip on how to photograph artwork the easy way. Here is the set up, using the 16×20 large canvas print:

1. Place two strobes or normal flashes in front and to the side of the artwork.
2. Place the artwork at an angle so that it will be facing you straight on when you take the picture.
3. Don’t worry about using an easel or stool to lean the artwork on, this will be cut out later.
4. Choose f8 for your shutter speed, and around 1/200 for your shutter.
5. Take the photo with the flashes bouncing off the white ceiling (as shown in the photo).
6. The bounce will create a soft light, and the angle of light hitting in the artwork will keep reflections at bay.
7. If the photo is too light or dark, adjust the flash power, or your f-stop accordingly.
8. Take the image in photoshop or another editing program, cut out the background so that only pure white is behind the artwork.

Have fun!
To see more work by Mark Hemmings, click here: www.hemmingshousepictures.com

While filming some scenes for a client in Mexico, I came across a stunning view that would be tough to replicate:

When filming with a Video DSLR camera, you can usually (depending on the brand) take a printable still photo at any time during your filming. For example, I was shooting this scene on video, but realized that I would want it as a high resolution RAW still photo as well. I simply clicked the shutter button, the camera immediately switched to still photography mode, and I got my shot. The only downside to this process is a break in your filming, but it is worth that minor inconvenience, especially when fleeting moments happen before your camera.

Hemmings House Pictures is a full media production house, which means that we use and have access to very expensive equipment within our audio, video, and still photography departments. What is fun however, is finding new technology and pushing it as far as we can take it. This TV commercial for Olivier Soaps was done on a normal Nikon D300s photo camera:

http://www.hemmingshousepictures.com/site/?page_id=1251

We have done many more commercial films utilizing the Nikon as well as the very fine Canon 7D, which I will post soon. I love the fact that my two passions, photography and filmmaking are finally coming together!

To see more of Mark Hemmings work, click here.