Peter Belanger

I’ve just completed the opening photo for Macworld’s annual Editors’ Choice Awards. It was a huge puzzle, because I had to take so many different photos and piece them together. The process of assembling the images is the big moment where you find out if you’ve envisioned things correctly. As it turns out, just before I took the set of the red carpet down, I decided the photo needed more depth. I took another shot of the red carpet going into the photo rather than straight across the frame. Thankfully, I was able to make this change because when I photographed the people I had them stand to the left, right and center. This gave me the flexibility to move the people around and play with their final positioning.

Recognize that hand holding the award? It’s mine. I don’t normally use my hands in shots, but because of scheduling it just made things easier.

Rob at Macworld will be adding some words to the awning in the final design phase, but other than that the image is pretty much complete. Keep an eye on news stands for the magazine sometime in mid January.

Here’s a link to the sketch that the photo was based on. http://www.peterbelanger.com/posts/46-the-sketch-that-started-it

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.

After working on the latest cover for Macworld Magazine I wanted to show what is involved in making a cover. I focused on the three main areas: the photography, photoshop and design. I chose a time lapse format to convey lots of information in a small amount of time. The only drawback of time lapse is that since half a day goes by in 30 seconds, the  whole process seam so easy! Lots of details were left out of the design process (like the cover meetings and rounds of layout options). I began to photograph the design process after the layouts had already been narrowed down to just three cover designs.

On the technical side, for the time lapse video, I used the Canon 5D Mark II with a 24mm-70mm zoom. I chose the 5D because of its great image quality with high ISO’s. Canon’s sRAW1 gave me the flexibility of a RAW file with the file size of a jpeg.  The actual Macworld cover was taken with a Phase One P65+ digital back attached to a 4×5 Sinar X camera with a 65mm lens. 

Many thanks to Rob Schultz for allowing me to invade his office and literally shoot over his shoulder.

The music was used with permission by The Brokenmusicbox. You can see more of their music at http://www.myspace.com/tbmb

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.

When I travel, I am often compelled to photograph unique buildings or structures. Sometimes they speak to me with a strong American style, other times I just see an aesthetic or composition that appeals to me. The places are full of history. The photos below were taken in Charleston, South Carolina. It was so hot and humid I had to drive with the air conditioning off. If I didn’t the camera lens and the P65+ digital back would fog up as soon as I stepped outside into the hot air.