Paul Wishart Photography

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Paul Wishart Photography

Welcome! Paul's passion for photography, wildlife and nature can be felt in every one of his photos.

05/16/2026

I missed the start of the solar storm last night, but happy to have been able to capture part if it regardless!

The Aurora was barely visible by eye in Stratford, just a slight brightening on the northern horizon, with the occasional line here and there when the pillars were at their strongest. Thankfully the camera sees much more than I can!

May 15 23:31-23:44
Nikon Z9 - 35mm f1.4
2.5s f/1.4 ISO500

01/04/2026

Harlequin Ducks - Toronto

It's been ages since I got out for some wildlife photography, and even longer since I posted some!

Shootout to for suggesting the location and for the lovely hike 🙂

01/02/2026

Wow what a year!

I started off 2025 with my first ever, solo photoshoot and first time working with Flower, . We'd planned on a Jan session in the hopes of having snow, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. We had a blast regardless and some creative editing helped add snow to a couple edits 😉

In February, , , and rented out a small studio to play with different lighting setups and modifiers in our combined arsenal of equipment.

In March I attended a cyberpunk photoshoot hosted by . Armed with some old yongnuo light sticks, a beauty dish with a speedlight and blue gels, I came away with a number of fun shots.

The summer was incredibly busy in my personal life as we bought a new house, packed everything up with toddler and cat in tow, and moved back to our hometown of Stratford in May. Despite that, renos on both houses and eventually selling the Hamilton house at the end of August, I managed to squeeze in some photoshoots.

Early May brought some beautiful Cherry Blossoms, and I met at Kariya Park for an Apothecary Diaries photoshoot.

I attended my first big convention, Yeticon, in June. While I was only down for a day, I managed to get a number of photos with various cosplayers.

In July .dxll & reached out about setting up a Black Lagoon photoshoot. I did some location scouting and we got some great shots photos outside the St James Cathedral.

October was a busy month to say the least.. I solo'd my first wedding as a hired photographer and helped & capture lovely moments from their beautiful wedding.
dxll & and I teamed up for a couple small photoshoots throughout the month as well.

In November, hired me to be their official Cosplay Photographer, which was another big first for me! I used the opportunity to test out a backdrop idea, and built a custom backdrop for the event. Over the 2 days I worked with around 200 cosplayers, and delivered 1200 edits across 110 individual galleries!

12/31/2025

When approached me about being their official Cosplay Photographer, I knew I wanted to do something interesting and unique.. Enter The Light Wall!

This backdrop was heavily influenced by the YouTube collab video between & as well as John Gress's original tutorial (clips from his video are at the start of this reel).

Their builds used 2 4'x8' foam core boards, but I wanted to go larger but still needed it to be able to fit it in the back of my RAV4. To keep costs low I decided to use 3 sheets of 4'x8' 3mm Hardboard for the walls and scrap wood for the supports. For additional support, I added gridwall legs on the ends and a backdrop stand along the long edge. To keep everything sturdy, but still easy to put up/tear down, I used threaded bolts and inserts to attach the Hardboard to the support beams.

Once the wall was standing solid, I used painters tape to block out my cuts. The design was loosely based on sci-fi panels, with some triangles (by request of ) and Triforces for fun. I expected the tape to pull off as soon as I started drilling the pilot holes for the jigsaw, so I painted a quick first pass around the tape. While the design looked cool at the end, it took quite a while to get the design down and cut..

When it was all said and done, the build took me around 40-50 hours, though a good chunk of that was trouble shooting how to make it all stand without crushing someone if they nudged it the wrong way.. cost of materials was about $150.

I'll do another reel soon demonstrating the lighting setup as well as a recap reel showing some of the 107 cosplayer photoshoots taken with this Light Wall 😊

06/05/2025

Not something I do a lot, but I couldn't pass up an opportunity to go all out on this composition edit of from our Viper Valorant shoot last week!
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Swipe through to see some closer details, the original photo, the color edit, background, edit reference and photo data 😊 Edited in Capture One and Photoshop
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Many thanks to and .cos for helping during the shoot 👏👏👏 Keep an eye out for photos of them from this session too!
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08/15/2024

Bees!! I found this bumblebee on a recent visit to the 😊

I'm quite happy with these results, as well as the capture technique I used. I'd recently seen a reel of a guy using a high frame rate to capture a series of photos within a couple seconds of an ant rearing up. He was using a 5x microscope objective and got some fantastic details on the live ant, in a natural setting.

The Z9 maxes out at 20fps raw, which sounds like a lot, but with live subjects, it can still be difficult to capture a stack without much subject motion during the day. It can however do frame rates of 30 (full res 45.7mp), 60 (1.5x crop 19mp) and 120 (full frame, 11 mp) fps in JPG.

I opted to try the 60fps with the added crop, and triggered bursts when the eye was roughly in focus. It was quite windy that day, so with a manual focus lens, the subject moved in and out of focus quickly, but the 60fps grabbed enough frames typically to do a good stack.

Here are the results.. each stack is between 60-130 frames, compiled in Helicon and touched up in PS with basic color corrections. Check out my previous reel post to see how I created these images 😉

08/14/2024

I'm quite happy with these, as well as the capture technique I used. I'd recently seen a reel of a guy using a high frame rate to capture a series of photos within a couple seconds of an ant rearing up. He was using a 5x microscope objective and got some fantastic details on the live ant, in a natural setting.

The Z9 maxes out at 20fps raw, which sounds like a lot, but with live subjects, it can still be difficult to capture a stack without much subject motion during the day. It can however do frame rates of 30 (full res 45.7mp), 60 (1.5x crop 19mp) and 120 (full frame, 11 mp) fps in JPG. I opted to try the 60fps with the added crop, and triggered bursts when the eye was roughly in focus. It was quite windy that day, so with a manual focus lens, the subject moved in and out of focus quickly, but the 60fps grabbed enough frames typically to do a good stack.

Here are the results.. each stack is between 60-130 frames, compiled in Helicon and touched up in PS with basic color corrections.

08/13/2024

The hummingbirds are back at the 😊 More shots to come (and more visits 😉), but this is one of my favourites so far!

Scroll through to see the crisp details as well as the full framing and capture details!

🤖 AI usage: Adobe Camera Raw aiDenoise used to reduce noise and enhance close up details.

.excitement

08/12/2024

I had a wonderful time exploring the yesterday. There's always lots of interesting insects and flowers to enjoy, and even more so at the macro level!

Here's one of far too many (managed to fill a 256gb card doing this) focus stacks. I decided to test out the Z9's high frame rates utilizing the 60fps JPG mode which also includes a 1.5x crop. I typically shoot Raw, which is limited to 20fps on that camera for the ability to push details in post production, but recently saw a video from another macro photographer using high frame rates in this fashion. Given the results here, and with the oodles of other shots I took, I'm not missing the raw functionality much at all. Despite the crop factor, there's still a ton of detail.

More examples of this workflow coming soon!

Enjoy 😊

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Hamilton, ON

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http://www.paulwishartphotography.com/

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