On Oct. 3 Sunshine Coast photographer, Mario Traina, will be speaking to the Sunshine Coast Camera Club about infrared photography. Traina and his family have owned property on the Sunshine Coast for almost 25 years. He has been a resident artist for three.
Although he now photographs for the joy of it, Traina spent 20 years as a commercial photographer, including working in markets like Toronto and Chicago. “I’ve dabbled in photography since I was 14, enjoying black and white and darkroom work,” Traina says. At 20, he began work in a professional photo lab doing custom printing for professional photographers. While working at a large commercial studio, he became a junior photographer, learning the craft from some of the best in the industry. Along the way he began to build his own client list and taught commercial photography at Humber College. In 1998 he and his family moved to the West Coast where, along with pursuing his own photography, he worked as a representative for various photographic equipment companies.
Traina views his love of infrared photography as arising from his interest in black and white. “Over the years I never used infrared for work, but I liked it as a hobby—even when I was shooting infrared film. While I use traditional composition, lighting and post production software, infrared photography creates another version of reality for the viewer to experience. The medium is perfect to capture the natural beauty of the Sunshine Coast.”
Infrared photography involves the use of specifically converted cameras or special filters to block out visible light. IR filters can allow either some colorization or only black and white. Though Traina enjoys colourized work, he prefers to work with the strictly black and white effect of his 850 nanometer camera which creates dark skies, enhanced clouds, and lightened foliage.
With his colour work available in art cards at Pender Harbour stores and his colour and infrared work available through the Sunshine Coast Art Crawl, Traina describes his work as the “furthest thing from abstract.” He will look for ordinary items like a park bench or canoes and then seek a way to present the subject to leave the viewer in awe of the scene. He likes viewers to easily recognize the subject in an unfamiliar way.
To attend Traina’s presentation on invisible light the public is invited to contact the Sunshine Coast Camera Club at https://sunshinecoastcameraclub.ca/ For enquiries about his work, contact Mario Traina through his website at https://mariotraina.com/.
