Johann Wall Photographer

This isn’t my photograph.. it’s on their site but this shop sells the really sweet Linus bikes and other great bicycle things. If anyone knows me, they know how much I love bicycles.

Great shoot at Mt Washington! 4 days of awesome people and snow and sun! These are the stars up to no good.

(They are actually on the right side of the sign though)

I liked this movie a lot and then I saw someone made a video for the PM’s new song ‘Vampire’ from some of it… The movie is called ‘Let the Right One In’

I forget that photographs don’t always come when you are wanting them and when you forget they are suddenly there. ( not ads.. those happen no matter what ! )

My Dad was a vice principal and grade 7 teacher his whole career and when he was about to retire he got transferred to this inner city school for the last 2 years. He moved around a fair amount because he liked to but I think he was hoping for something a bit less difficult or more prestigious for his last assignment. It seemed like a demotion.
The thing is he is such a great teacher and loves his students and teaching so much that he was able to do all kinds of things for this class and transform the school in ways that he never would have in any other place. He set up programs, got funding for all the kids to have proper shoes ( some were coming to gym class in rubber boots ), would find ways to hold events where he got tonnes of awesome food donated that he could send home with students, held amazing activities days etc.
It ended up being the greatest gift he could ever get after a long career of teaching.

I took these photos and a lot more during the turkey trot day.

I got it for a European trip as a sort of hunter s style travelling outfit.

Once again this morning I am reading a long blog about how magazines are going to be disappearing or morphing into online additions, that advertisers are leaving because now it’s easier to get the ads out and they don’t want to pay, how news is out there in real time ‘ before lumbering outfits like the new york times even think up a catchy headline ‘.

I don’t know, I like reading some stuff on the web for sure but I still read magazines and prefer to in a lot of ways. I don’t buy a lot of them and never really have. I basically choose from a selection of good ones and the one that has some amazing photographs and articles I am interested in, I buy it. I like grabbing a good magazine on a trip. Sure I could get the laptop out or my iphone and read something, but it’s a lot nicer to just open up a physical copy of the magazine look at the pictures, read the article or story. I can cut out photos for my notebook or a collage. Words too. Pass it on to someone else to read; which happens all the time in my building with a stack appearing at the end of the month near the front entrance for people to look through and then pass along again. I keep a lot of them as I like going back to issues and rediscovering things. Part of that is because I like photography a lot, of course. But a lot of people must or why else would there be so much photography in them. I think, like some of the economics problems, it’s all these people who shout out their opinions louder and louder until people start believing everything they say. Things are definitely changing but I think they are just expanding not destroying. Now the photographs are needed for more things. Print and web. Sometimes you get assignments just for web and since that can change quicker than a monthly print addition it might mean more work for an editorial photographer. And I am sure the advertisers are paying a lot to be on those pages. Probably more than in print, as potentially more people stop by to have a glance.

I wanted to stick to photographs and that on this blog of mine but I felt like writing this morning.

Not very pleasant I’d imagine. Though the staff are excellent. I was surprised ( not sure why so much ) by how cool they were while I was hanging out with them. I got the full tour, beginning in the loading area where the wagons roll in to drop off the evenings pickups. From there it’s a search at the search station. Firearms are stored in the firearms locker. The second in command locked my tripod in there to mess with me. Then you enter the main facility and the holding cells are actually like closets. They are tiny. I was expecting a long hallway lined with cells with bunks and and that. There was something like that on sub level 2 but not upstairs. They also had giant keys which I though were there for show but are actually what you use for the cells. I can’t show the photographs as they haven’t run yet. So I’ll put this one entirely unrelated of my desktop. Nice photos though. Some shots of a film on teens and the other is the lovely Jessica from the Willowz who I have known since seeing them at the Brickyard here years ago.

I don’t mind getting up early but sometimes it’s difficult especially when your brother shows up with two tickets in the 20th row for a Canucks game. And they’ve lost 9 in a row at home. The game is tied at 1:24 remaining and Burrows gets a pass through which he takes down the ice and with his classic backhand to the high corner scores before a packed stadium.  Anyways back to 6 am at the CBC. Monocle does these interesting weekly radio broadcasts and for the first time outside of London they had it in Vancouver with Tyler Brule and some guests. We photographed it in black and white using lamplight with that George Clooney movie in mind. The CBC studios are pretty cool because they’ve been around a long time and I think they didn’t do much since the 70′s in there, so there are a lot of pieces of equipment and details that reflect this. I took a few detail shots while I was there. And the people at the CBC are amazing. I’ve done a lot of work there over the years and each time I meet someone new I feel like I’ve made a friend. Thanks especially to the sound engineer Grant Rowledge.

I took a lot of photos of Avril Lavigne around this time.. right after a Nylon feature. This was in Victoria my hometown. I like these cause she looks like a kid.

All the Grafton Hotel’s rooms now have my photos in them… for this assigment I was asked to create a body of images that were sexy without being too explicit. Here are a couple shots of how they were displayed in large format. See what you can do with my photos ! Japan are you out there ?

This is my good friend Mia Thomsett who was out from Toronto yesterday. Her work is her.

I love it !!

Alfa enroute to Japan..

Alfa the designer is doing some kind of Trinidadean sun soak here. He did this a lot. It looks like I told him to do this for some kind of stock shot but I didn’t. I wouldn’t. He just does it.
He’s in Tokyo now baffling the Japanese now.

James Nachtwey.

This is a link to the project James is going to unveil on October 3rd. The idea I hear is to show the power of photography in the digital age. I think it’s powerful in any age even if there are a lot more images. There are photographs that everyone can fall in love with, want to keep somewhere close by, put on a wall, keep in a book, bookmark on your laptop, show someone else .. so anyway it’s a good idea and I’ll paste the link here…

This is Patrick our new German striker. We’re importing players now. We’ve have Dutch, Hungarian, Chinese, French, Swedish, Austrian, CANADIAN. Japanese next.

drawing by Kato.

This morning I got a message from Hikaru Hayashi that he added my site to his. His site looks awesome. I put the writing about my work through translation and it came out – ” Being casual, somewhere the photograph which has the familiarity. The music scene, it is the portfolio of the photographer who participates in the field whose width such as commercial and fashion is wide. ” This is what I am going to use to describe my work from now on. I could never have put it this great.
You can check out his site at www.sophistry.fm

yep here goes. this was lying on my desk so its got scanned and dropped in as the first photo on my new blog.