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Ottawa Interior Photography: Kitchens by Astro Design

Ottawa Interior Photography by Justin Van Leeuwen JVLphoto

The National Kitchen and Bath Association awards were just announced and I’m happy to say I photographed some real winners this year for Astro Design. Interior Photography can always be a challenge, but working with great designers always means that the results are worth the effort. With varying budgets and styles, each kitchen is crafted to meet the needs of it’s owners, while carrying signature styles of the designer resulting in a unique and beautiful space.

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Commercial Portrait Photography for Hendrick Farm

Commericial Portrait Photography by Justin Van Leeuwen JVLphoto

After waking Fred up for sunrise at my Ottawa Magazine Hendrick Farm photoshoot, he must have thought “I want to do that again” as they brought me back in to work on their custom commercial portrait photography for the team. And, what started off as a dismally foggy day, with delayed portraits, ended as a lovely golden sunset with tonnes of photos for their website.

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Environmental Portrait Photography: Shooting for the Crop

Environmental Portraits by Ottawa Photographer Justin Van Leeuwen JVLphoto

Music Teacher for Career Cruising

Most of my photography work is corporate-commercial which means I’m often shooting environmental portraits, interiors, or whatever for a pre-determined output; like brochures, reports and, most commonly, websites. There’s no doubt that having a strong visual to accompany your website is an important factor of design, and sometimes the framework of that website needs the image to conform to very specific dimensions. This can become complicated as most cameras produce images within a 2:3 frame (some are 4:5), whereas a prevailing website design trend is moving towards very wide-format images. Cropped to a framework like facebook’s cover photo at 820×312 pixels which is more like 10:3. That’s essentially 1/3rd of an entire image taken with a 35mm SLR, so making sure you know the intended output beforehand is very important.

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Editorial Photographer: Rethinking the Art of Living Green for Ottawa Magazine

Ottawa Editorial Photographer Justin Van Leeuwen JVLphoto

One of my favourite Editorial projects last year was a three-shoot series on “Rethinking the Art of Living Green” for Ottawa Magazine. It explored three different home-based (it was for the Interiors issues) lifestyles that are being explored in Ottawa. With a general theme on communal living, we visited an organic farm, a building in the city, and a farm-based development.

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Commercial Photography: Kettleman’s Bagel Co. Food, Lifestyle, & Creative for print

Commercial Photography by JVLphoto Justin Van Leeuwen

I started the year taking commercial photography for Kettleman’s Bagel Co. Their new store, images of their staff at work, and even some food. The owner soon approached me with a really cool concept menu that he wanted to create. It was a highly visual in-store newspaper. Heavy on photography. LOVE. YES PLEASE. LET’S GO.

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