Photography as Art

When MayB and the Guy got hitched back in September of 2009, my friends Alf and Svetlana (Sveta) did the photography for the wedding.  You can see the wedding album here on shutterfly.

Free Lense PhotoGaphics  website is here and their photographic art work is featured on Etsy here.

Alf is a very good photographer.  He is also a professional leather worker, drummer (makes his own bongos), computer buff and all around good guy.  He was running his father's shoe repair when I first met him more than 20 years ago.  Not many shoe repair shops play CBC radio.  I went in one day and they had it tuned to Gilmor's Albums which was a live CBC radio show MC'd by Clyde Gilmor which had run for 40 years and featured music from his own albums.  I did a double take as Mr. Gilmor had been dead for some time.  That got a laugh.  It was on tape.

Sveta is the artist.  An incredible photographer especially of children and babies.  She is a totally a people person and can catch the true character of the person in her photos.  When I first met her, she was running an NGO called Sunny Wave in Kyiv.  Sunny Wave was a number of young people who did Art Therapy with young children with cancer at the National Children's Cancer Hospital.  Sveta started taking pictures of their activities and art work.  She got many thanks from parents who commented that they were happy memories.

Alf needed a holiday about 10 years back so took three weeks to see Istanbul and Kyiv.  My tales of travel, especially to these two cities had inspired him, he says.  So Sveta says this whole thing is my fault.  He was flying from Istanbul to Kyiv on a red-eye flight.  Sveta, who had worked in Turkey as a tour guide, had missed her earlier flight and was on the same plane.  She did not feel safe taking a taxi home by herself so talked Alf (a perfect stranger who looked harmless, she said) into splitting the cab with her and dropping her off first. She offered to tour him around Kyiv for a couple hours the next morning as a Thank-You.  And, as they say, the rest is history.

So please check out their website and look at their portfolios.  If you need photographers for a family reunion, baby pictures, a wedding, funeral or other joyous occasion, give them a call.  And have a look at the artwork Sveta has created from their photos on Etsy.