I had a question yesterday from Shelley about how I took this shot. I’ve been meaning to tell you that I recently got a remote control for my camera. I had a remote for my SLR camera years ago and it came in so handy.

Previously I had used the timer on my camera to take shots that I was in, like this or this. I found this to be a bit tricky because you need to have something in the frame to focus on. This is difficult, if you’re by yourself and shooting against a white wall. The other thing you can do is position yourself within arm’s reach of the camera. Also pretty limiting.

I got the remote about a month ago and you may have noticed that I’m changing up locations for my clothing photo shoots. In this photo, I used a tripod in my backyard. But very soon, you’ll see shots of me in High Park, on the West Toronto Rail Path, who knows where! Most of the time, I just find a bench, table, tree stump or other suitable object to put my camera on. Once in a while, I actually take my tripod along. At any rate, I’m getting much better natural lighting, more interesting shots and having way more fun creating these photographs.

The great thing about the remote is that there are two settings. The first setting has the camera taking a photo as soon as you press the button. This is great if you are trying to reduce shake on your camera, rather than pushing the camera’s button. (especially in low light situations) The second setting has a timer, giving you time to hide the remote and position yourself within the frame. With the remote, you can focus the camera from a far distance.

The remote came with a handy little pocket that slides onto my camera strap. The pocket is black and rather ugly, so you may be seeing a customized and cute remote pocket very soon!

Liberty of London Summer Challenge : Project #1
Camera Strap in ‘Zain’ Tana Lawn Cotton

My first Liberty of London project is a simple one, but damn, does it ever make me happy. When I got my Nikon camera last year, the first thing I wanted to do was make myself a new camera strap. I cringed every time I looked at that black and yellow strap.

I planned on making a new strap from scratch and this is likely one of the reasons why this project was so slow to get off the ground. As I thought about where I would get all the right hardware to do this properly last week, I realized that it would be much much easier to just re-cover the existing strap. Sometimes there’s no need to go building something from scratch when you can just hitch a ride on something that works perfectly fine.

How could I resist having a posh Liberty of London camera strap? I chose the print called ‘Zain‘, which seems to be perfectly suited to being a camera strap, don’t you think?

Since this project requires only a small strip of fabric (approx. 4″ x 20″), it hardly seemed painful at all to cut into this precious fabric. I cut the fabric along the selvedge so that I could use the finished fringe as my exposed edge. I ironed fusible interfacing on the back to make it a bit sturdier. Next, I pressed a small fold along the two short sides and then put a layer of ‘Steam a Seam 2′across the back of the fabric. I carefully wrapped the strip around the existing camera strap, overlapping the fabric with the selvedge edge showing. Using a hot iron, I pressed the fabric covering the strap to activate the ‘Steam a Seam 2′ and glue the fabric to the strap. The last step was to sew/quilt concentric rectangles along the length of the strap to secure the fabric to the strap.

I’m so happy. It’s the prettiest camera strap I’ve ever seen and it will be perfect for Paris. We leave a week today!