About Me

Hi, I’m Rik.  I’m a landscape photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.   I was always fascinated by the quality of light whether it be from the sparkly & frosty winter days of Northern Ontario, the big prairie skies of Alberta or the mountains, beaches & cityscapes of the Vancouver region.

I love photography because I’m moved by the things I see around me –  the quality of light that can seem magical at times or just makes you pause and look.  Photography can be a very creative form of expression, and it’s a great way to explore the world around you.  It’s not easy teaching yourself to record something that’s so changeable just as it’s not easy to learn other forms of expression such as painting or dance.  At times I’ll be out shooting with friends and point something out and they’ll be amazed they never saw it in that way before.  You really have to just stop and look around you.  It’s a journey that I love taking – it means taking life at a different pace and looking at the things around you in a different way.

I started the journey with basic cartridge camera using 126 film and I was hooked.  I moved on to the Pentax K1000, a fully manual SLR film camera which I got in my late teens then on to the Canon A1, Canon’s advanced amateur camera at that time.  I moved into digital with the  5Mp Nikon C5400, an advanced compact camera which I still own.  I’ve been a Nikon fan ever since and moved up to the Nikon D200 SLR then more onto the Nikon D7100 and now the full frame Nikon D810.  Cameras have their limitations and I use the tools available to make my vision come true.  The type of equipment you use affects the outcome as do other tools like Photoshop.  Keep in mind that all images are processed, which means that they’re either processed in camera by the camera, in a lab with chemicals or in Photoshop.  I prefer to not let the camera do this as I would lose too much valuable information that way, so I use mostly Photoshop or Lightroom.

I like to capture the light as it really is, as you can see in my treatment for HDR images.  All photos are representations and imperfect in nature and all photos are processed slices of reality.  Cameras record both a moment in time and also record only half truths which are open to interpretation.   My HDR images are done in Photoshop and that is done to work around the light gathering limitation of all cameras but this requires the most amount of work, ranging from 2 to 30 hours per image or any value in between.  The result if done right can be so sublime or ‘wow’.  My goal is to not just show you what it looked like at that time but to also leave you with a sense of what it really felt like to be there.  That is the most intangible aspect of photography and the hardest to master.

Rik Morel