Welcome to Larges.ca. The photography website by Steve Large. I am just in the midst of rebuilding the website after a major crash so thank you all for your patience while I get everything back up and running once again. It has not been a total disaster by any means as if nothing else it has given me an opportunity for some long needed website house cleaning.
I have been interested in photography since I was a young boy many decades ago. I had a cheap box camera and would develop photos in an old closet in the basement of my parents house in Courtenay B.C.. Back then we used messy chemicals and I created small negative sized contact prints in black and white. Needless to say, digital photography was all thought of as science fiction in those days. We would sometimes hear rumors of the digital technology but never dreamed that it would develop into what we see today.
As a young man I upgraded to a film SLR camera which allowed me to gain more knowledge of how exposure and lighting worked in order to get good results. You couldn’t afford to take more than a few pictures at a time as everything was chemical based and very expensive to have developed. Most roles of film were a set ISO in lots of 24 or 36 photographs per role. You had to always make sure that there was something worthwhile to shoot before pressing the shutter button.
There was a period for several years where I did not do photography at all. I spent a lot of time working and involving myself in other pursuits such as amateur radio. This later developed into more modern interests like computers, the Internet, and digital multimedia not to mention getting married and raising a family. It wasn’t until my mid forties when digital photography became more mainstream that I started to get interested once more.
I had good experience with my old Canon AE-1 film camera years ago and decided to stick with Canon for all of my more modern digital equipment. I started out pretty basic with a Canon 20D and a 70-200mm zoom lens. Through the years you progress up the ladder as your standards and photography aspirations grow. Today I am using an EOS -1D Mark IV professional camera for my main camera body and shoot almost primarily big glass with a Canon 600mm IS2 lens. The body is getting to be a bit old along with me but the glass is the best in the world for quality optics. I do occasionally shoot with a Canon 100-400mm IS2 which I use as a walk around lens. The 100-400mm IS2 is a great lens. In the hands of an accomplished photographer there are times when it can rival the quality of the 600mm.
When I first started this website it was supposed to be used as a portal for information and events related to our family. However, as more and more people became interested in my photography I decided to dedicate it solely for that. Although the content is mainly about avian subjects (birds) there is also some albums for animals and eventually I plan to add albums for trips or perhaps personal events.
I started with a traditional layout where each webpage was hard-coded and I would modify templates and add content as needed. I did this for years and it was a lot of work and very cumbersome. Around 2014 I switched everything over to WordPress which is more automatic. WordPress works on a system where everything is held in a database and scripts run to build the webpages on demand. The whole thing is much more customizable and has almost unlimited opportunities as thousands of applications are available to do almost anything you want. You can log in and edit from anywhere in the world and your changes are seen by everyone almost immediately. My photos appear on the website through a special App that updates automatically every time I upload a new photo on my Flickr page.