Peter Belanger

I have fond memories of visiting my parents at work. They may have seen their offices as unexceptional, but I thought they were a wonderland. Their everyday office tools were fantastic objects that held much intrigue for me. So many different types of pens, paper, copy machines, snacks, and my favorite—the staple remover. 

Now that I’m a dad, my own kids visit me at work. My studio may not be a traditional office, but it is my place of business. What I view as everyday tools, they see as amazing playthings. Wooden apple boxes become large legos, stands become rocket ships, carts are cars, large backdrop tubes are matchbox raceways. They even have a contest to see who can make the postage scale read the highest. Seeing my studio through their eyes is incredibly refreshing and exciting.

 

 

 

I’m obsessed with camera apps on the iPhone. I love running a photo through different apps and seeing how different they can become. No one camera app works for me. I need several in order to find the one that will work best for that situation. Here’s a list of the top ten camera apps that I keep coming back to.

Here’s the original unaltered photo from the iPhone.

 

 

Hipstamatic
I use Hipstamatic all the time, it’s my number one camera app. I love the very original images it produces. Great borders, color and contrast….what else can I say, I love it.
On the other hand, I do wish I was able to import a photo previously taken.

 

ShakeitPhoto
What makes this camera app great is it’s lack of options, point and shoot at it’s best. When I need a great looking photo fast I use this app.  Another nice thing is that you can shoot an image with the app and it also saves an original version of that image in your library.

 

TiltShift Generator 
When I don’t want to drag my 4X5 around, I’ll use this app to produce a similar selective focus effect. The interface on this app is really well done and a pleasure to use.

 

lo-mob
I love the selection of retro film border in this app. The newest version now lets you turn on borders and effects. This is great when you want to use an photo processed in another program and use a border from lo-mob.

 

TrueHDR
HDR is always fun to play with. TrueHDR does a great job alining the photos and keeping the detail.

 

PictureShow
What makes this app unique is you can add type to your photos. It’s like sending someone a postcard. The interface is nice and simple to use. It has standard pretest like Lomo and some unique ones like multi exposures.

 

SwankoLab
This app is made by the creators of Hipstamatic. There are endless possibilities for effects, which is why I’m glad you can import a photo. I take a photo with the iPhone camera app then bring my pick into SwankoLabs for processing. Unlike Hipstamatic I can try out different effects on the same photo until I find one I like.

 

CameraBag
This is another simple and fast camera app. The options are simple, straight forward and render nice results. They also make a desktop app for the Mac which is fun to use.

 

Pano 
Panoramic images are awesome and this app is great at stitching everything together. It works best with things at a distance. You can see in the photo below that the car in the foreground didn’t stitch together well.

 

QuadCamera
When just one photo won’t tell the store I use this app. The downside is even when the capture rate is set to slow, it’s still a little too fast for me. I need more time to think about the next photo.

I’ve been wanting to try out a Steadicam for my Canon 5D Mark II for awhile now. I wasn’t sure which kind to get and the more research I did the more confusing it became. I finally concluded that the Merlin Steadicam was the best fit for what I needed.

I’m a strong believer in renting something before you buy. Everyone that I spoke to said that a Steadicam was something that needed lots of practice and it wasn’t something you could rent for the day. I went against my own advice and bought the Merlin Steadicam. When the Steadicam arrived I thought I was going to pull it out of the box and start filming (duh, see above about the warnings regarding practice).

I spent most of the day learning to balance the camera. Setting up the camera was much harder than I thought. Once I got things configured I went out and started filming. My assistant Michael and I tested walking, running, panning, and walking on stairs. Things were looking good, but we wanted to test something that combined all the challenges at once. We found a block-long flight of stairs to test on that would work perfectly. We needed something to track as we were testing, so of course I volunteered to ride my bike down the stairs as Michael filmed.

I was very impressed with how smoothly things looked considering we didn’t have much practice. If this had been filmed without the Steadicam the movie would have been extremely jumpy and unwatchable.

The purpose of the movie was really an exercise to see how the Steadicam would perform in a difficult situation with very little training. I was very happy with the results and am excited to see how much better it will look once we REALLY figure things out.

You can also watch the video on youtube.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbiVNb7I65Y

 

I love finding cool and fun apps for my iPhone. I just found the iTimeLapse iPhone app. You know I love making time lapse movies. It’s a great app with lots of advanced features. Here’s a test movie I made of my walk to work.

I’ve posted before about finding time to photograph casually. Well when I’m on vacation I have a similar problem. My kids are still at that stage were they need my attention every waking hour. I’ve been working  better at taking a second here and there to shoot things as I’m out and about with the kids. Here are a couple photos I took from my recent trip. Unlike my last post I kept my camera gear to a minimum. This time I only took the Canon 1Ds MarkIII with a 24mm-70mm lens. It worked well for most of the situations.

 

 

 

Before I had kids I would take time to go out and photograph for myself. The joy of this was I had lots of time and no pressure. Now that I have kids, it’s really hard to find the time to shoot for myself. I see lots of things that I want to stop and photograph but with kids, I have other agendas. The other day, we were at a fair and I wanted to spend the time walking around photographing but I had to be a dad and enjoy the rides with my kids. Don’t get me wrong, I love the rides! We found one roller coaster with no lines and no adults allowed so the kids rode it over and over again. This gave me about 15 minutes to photograph the things right in front of me. It wasn’t what I was hoping for but I was still happy with the results.