Seeing is at the heart of photography — seeing the shot worth taking, and recognizing what has been captured in the resulting image. Like most people, my first real experience of that recognition came through family. There must have been something extraordinary about the moment it first occurred to me that the essence of a mother, father, sister, or brother could be contained within an image small enough to hold in my hand.

My mom kept a large photo album with thick black pages. You could slip a photograph out, study it closely, and tuck it back in. Within those pages, I would meet her parents — my much younger grandparents — her two brothers, and my mom as a child. She had a dog. She and her brothers rode sleds in winter. She had grown up in a two-story house through the thirties, forties, and fifties. I could ask her about these photos, and each picture became a seed for exploring family narrative. The image prompted the question. Mom would tell the story.

Dad was our family’s photographer. He shot with a Canon SLR — first a Canon FD-1, later a Canon AE-1. While prints were occasionally made, most of his work was presented as slides. Viewing Dad’s photographs was a family event. On many Saturday evenings, we gathered in the living room for a slideshow — images of ourselves at home, on vacation, and at the moments that marked our lives together. There was another extraordinary kind of seeing involved here. A roll of film might take two weeks to be developed, so the slideshow offered not only a look back at recent doings but a rare glimpse of the people we least often see — ourselves. We appeared not as we imagine ourselves, but as others know and see us: candid, unguarded, and real. Dad’s effort was twofold — a willingness to recognize and capture a poignant moment, and a careful eye for composition that revealed his family at its best. These images were Dad’s way of seeing us.

Our family narrative lived inside those slides. A Christmas morning, a vacation afternoon, a moment outside the church — all of it preserved. Saturday evenings also brought out slides from Mom and Dad’s travels: England (often), Spain’s Costa del Sol, France (Monet’s garden, Arles, rows of lavender), and Japan (temples, Mount Fuji, geisha in kimono). Each carousel of slides was a small archive of a life being lived.

Photographs of extended family — especially those who lived at a distance — gave us a way to ask questions and gather stories. Around the kitchen table, a photograph could introduce an aunt or uncle not yet met, or bring a departed great-grandparent into the conversation. More surprisingly, you might find something of your own face reflected back in the features of a distant relation — a quiet recognition of shared blood and belonging. In those older slides of Dad’s, in Mom’s black-paged album, the family members I knew were sometimes surrounded by others I could never meet. Again and again, the photograph became the starting point for gathering family narrative.

Cameras and Photography

My introduction to photography came at ten, when my mother encouraged me to try her Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. Even at that age, the camera asked something of you. Loading film without exposing it to light required care. Looking down through the viewfinder to photograph something in front of you took some getting used to. Winding the exposed film back onto its spool, unloading it, dropping it off at the drugstore, paying for processing — each step was deliberate, even ritualistic. And then you waited. A week or two later, you returned to collect your prints and negatives. Sometimes what you remembered taking and what the photograph actually contained were two different things — an early and useful lesson in learning not to be disappointed, and in looking more carefully next time.

For my thirteenth birthday, my family gave me a Kodak Pocket Instamatic. The 110 film cartridges were easier to load and remove, and the camera’s cube flash offered four settings — a step up in both convenience and capability. I brought it to Britain in 1976, and those photographs still survive: the Lake District, Newcastle, Durham, York, and London. A camera carried across an ocean has a way of making photographs matter.

Ten years later, encouraged by my brother, I bought my first SLR — a Canon T-70. The body came from London Drugs in Edmonton Centre; two lenses from Saveco. As my father and brother upgraded through their own Canon bodies — the FD and the AE-1 — their older lenses quietly made their way to me. It was a generous and natural kind of inheritance.

The next chapter arrived with a new child. Our second had just been born when I picked up a Canon PowerShot S110 Digital ELPH — compact, pocket-sized, and well-suited to a busy young family. It was also the beginning of something larger: the era of uploading images and sharing them with the world. At the time, I was a home education coordinator working across a region the size of three small Maritime provinces, making daily drives through northwestern Alberta. I kept the camera with me. When something worth photographing appeared, I took the shot.

In 2006 I moved to a DSLR — a Canon EOS 30D — paired with an 18-55mm kit lens and a 75-300mm telephoto. It earned its keep at family holidays and school yearbook shoots, though its CompactFlash card and slower processor eventually became limiting. Two upgrades followed: first to the Canon EOS 60D, then to the Canon EOS 5D Mark III. The 5D Mark III remains a remarkable camera. It is paired with three L-Series lenses — the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II, the Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L, and the Canon EF 24-70mm — along with a Sigma Art 50mm f/1.4, a lens with a well-earned reputation for rendering beautiful light and precise detail.

My constant companion these days is the Ricoh GR III — full-frame sensor, genuinely pocketable, and consistently impressive. Many of the photographs in recent posts were made with this camera.

In My Camera Bag

Camera Bodies Canon EOS 5D Mark III · Canon EOS 60D

The 5D Mark III serves as the primary body — a full-frame workhorse valued for its dynamic range, low-light performance, and reliability. The 60D brings the versatility of an APS-C sensor and a articulating screen, making it a capable second body in the field.

Lenses Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 · Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS · Canon EF 16-35mm f/4L IS USM · Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM · Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM · Sigma 10-20mm f/3.5 EX DC HSM · Tamron SP 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Di VC USD

From the Sigma’s sweeping wide-angle reach to the Tamron’s commanding telephoto extension, the kit covers a broad focal range. The Canon 50mm f/1.4 and the two L-Series zooms — the 24-70mm and 70-200mm f/2.8 — form the core of most shoots, offering a balance of sharpness, speed, and beautiful rendering in available light.

Lighting Canon Speedlite 580EX II

A powerful and versatile flash unit, the 580EX II handles everything from fill light in bright conditions to the primary light source in darker settings, with reliable TTL metering across the Canon system.

Post-processing

Raw files are processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Classic, which serves as the organizational backbone and primary editing environment — handling everything from initial culling and exposure adjustments to colour grading and export.

From there, a suite of specialized tools extends what’s possible. The Topaz Labs collection — Studio 2, DeNoise, Sharpen, Adjust, and Mask — brings AI-assisted precision to noise reduction, fine detail recovery, and selective masking. For creative finishing, the DXO Nik Collection offers a deep set of options: Color Efex for colour and tonal effects, Silver Efex for black-and-white conversion, Analog Efex for film-inspired treatments, Viveza for targeted colour and light control, Dfine for additional noise management, Sharpener for output sharpening, HDR Efex for high dynamic range processing, and Perspective for geometric correction.

Together, these tools support a post-processing workflow that moves from technical correction to creative interpretation — with each image finding its own path from capture to completion.

Image Presentation

A finished photograph deserves thoughtful presentation, and there are several routes worth considering depending on the intended result.

For high-quality prints ordered from a distance, Technicare Imaging in Edmonton delivers excellent results to your door — a reliable option when access to a local lab isn’t practical. For gallery-quality work, Precision Imaging, also in Edmonton, exceeds expectations: their prints are exceptional, and their framing and delivery service makes the entire process seamless.

Mixbook has proven to be an outstanding platform for photobooks and cards. For those of us in northern Alberta, the ability to design a Christmas card well ahead of the holiday season — during the quieter summer months, when the pace of life allows for it — made an enormous difference. By December, when teachers are at their busiest, the cards were already done.

For premium coffee-table books, Blurb Books consistently delivers beautiful results, with a range of paper and binding options that suit both personal projects and professional portfolios.

Finally, there is something deeply satisfying about producing prints at home. Working with a Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000 allows for direct control over the output — from colour profiling to paper selection — and the process of framing prints or mounting them to foam board for presentation adds a hands-on dimension to the work that no outside lab can quite replicate.