These are the remaining portraits taken during the same photo shoot as the pink ones in my previous blog post. From the colourful wall of La Casa Gelato Sam and I wandered over to the nearby Strathcona Community garden. This was where I’d hope to shoot all along but I’m glad for the interesting sidetrack by the colour pink.

I’m not sure what purpose is served by the round cement pool I found in one of the garden plots, but I’m guessing it’s a reflecting pool. I’m really glad I found it because it’s a great location. I shot this scene specifically with photo manipulation in mind. I wanted to create something magical and try a slightly different way of processing the image. Along the way I managed to create something that nicely references Alice in Wonderland, which was something Sam and I had talked about ages ago and I’d forgotten.

The final two shots were taken in a different part of the community garden. There wasn’t much else growing at the time because it’s been too cold, but this forsythia bush was happily putting forth it’s first flowers.

At the moment I don’t have anything specific in mind, but I can hardly wait to do another shoot with someone.

When I started the Imaginary Girl series back in September 2009 I’d had in mind to shoot at least twenty-five different women for the project. But over the summer I was side-tracked by other work and the whole thing lost momentum. Only now, a good six months after the previous shoot, have I managed to photograph my twenty-fifth person.

The subject of this portrait is Sam. She recently got married in Vegas and the vintage dress, faux fur shrug, shoes, and crinoline, make up most of the fantastic outfit she wore.

We did this shoot outside on a very cold day and I was really concerned about Sam freezing to death while she posed. Lucky for us the weather was saving the really harsh cold and wind until after we were done, and we just had a long-suffering walk back to my place.

This part of the photo shoot was done against the magnificent pink walls of La Casa Gelato on Venables. We were walking past and I decided to do some “warm up” shots here, because when your model is wearing a pink dress, why not add more pink? The rest of the shoot was at a more subdued location and those photos have a completely different feel. I’ll be sharing them in a separate blog post.

I really found this shoot very invigorating to do. I’d been feeling insecure about my photographic work because I haven’t been doing much of it lately. Now I feel inspired again and hope to continue doing more fun and exciting portraiture in the coming months.

The Imaginary Girl series rises from the creative depths once again, this time with a lovely unposed portrait of Leah. When planning a photo shoot around the ocean I should’ve kept in mind how unpredictable water can be depending on the weather. Leah and I arrived at Jericho Beach to find the waves crashing against the shore and I immediately had to throw my original ideas out the window.

What I came away with from the shoot is so much better than what I’d had in mind. Leah led the way on this one, and most of the shots I love the most are the ones that aren’t posed. She waded around in the water with very little direction from me, and I captured what I could with the camera.

This is the twenty-fourth portrait in the series, and I’m considering moving onto something else after the twenty-fifth. I want to continue working on portraiture in some way, either as a weekly goal or maybe a series featuring men instead of women. I’ve been working on the Imaginary Girl series for a full year now and it’s time to switch things up.

I shot this portrait of Stephanie at the beginning of June and as of the beginning of July it will be in a group show at Gallery Gachet along with the portrait I took of Jess. (How’s that for putting new work to work.) This was taken on Granville Island with the giant leaves of a Gunera plant as the backdrop, and Alice in Wonderland as the inspiration.

June has not been a productive month for working on the portrait series because I’ve had other projects I’ve needed to concentrate on. There are numerous artists calls with summer deadlines coming up and it’ll mean more shows in the future if my work gets accepted. (Fingers crossed!)

I first met Kirsten Chursinoff at Northern Voice a few years ago, when she came up to chat with me between sessions. She recognized me from Flickr and as we talked I realized I’d seen her textile work a few years before at The Secret Garden Tea Company.

This portrait session was very much inspired by the colourful fibre art Kirsten creates with fabrics and threads. She provided all of the objects I worked with and she brought over a large variety of things to choose from. She was also very patient as I placed layer upon layer of thread over her arms and upper body. I wanted these photos to be similar to the portrait of my sister. I was interested in exploring the theme of fibre arts further and feel there are many interesting ways to use thread as a prop.

The final shot is a composite pulled together from two photos. I created the set using spools of thread and a cute pincushion Kirsten brought over, and then had her pose separately holding the giant scissors made by Peter Kiss. It all came together nicely in photoshop – after a few hours of hard work that is.

Sometimes I don’t have a clear idea of how I want to photograph the person I’ve asked to pose for one of my portraits. This was the case with Kristi, though I did know I wanted to use a natural setting.

My original idea was to use her garden as the setting, but it was too early in the year for the garden to have much growth. I decided to improvise and scouted around for a location near her home just before the shoot. The ivy was located at the front of her house and proved to be the perfect setting for the portrait. The vines were thick enough to crawl into and I disentangled a few and layered them over her body.

I like the smaller series of nature portraits that is slowly taking shape within the larger body of work.

I really should do a better job of blogging the portraits I’ve been shooting because when I write about them weeks later I’m never sure what to say. I’m so much better about this with the altered books.

This particular portrait session was very exciting because it presented the opportunity to work with Petrina as a model, and with Shai as a hair stylist. I’ve never worked with a stylist on a shoot before and Shai did a wonderful job styling Petrina’s hair and wrangling the butterflies.

I’ve wanted to do a portrait with butterflies for awhile, and since there was no way I could get real ones I settled for brightly painted fake butterflies. Dressew was my source for butterfly fakery. They have a have a whole section of them in the basement along one of the back corners, which was a pleasant surprise for me to discover.

This portrait features the lovely Casey. She came over to my home studio a few weeks back and did a great job of pretending there was a cherry tree in her hand. As I’ve mentioned before, the shoots I do often require lots of pretending on the part of the model, which can be hilarious. It definitely was in this case. At least it keeps things fun.

As I was working on the post-processing for this I started wishing there was something more in her hand for the tree to rest in. I briefly considered having Boris pose with a pile of dirt in his hand so I could add it into this shot (sans his hands). I decided I didn’t want to go that far with adding elements in photoshop, as it ends up being a ridiculous amount of work and the shot doesn’t REALLY need it. I’m sure Boris was relieved….

When I came up with the idea to do a portrait with goldfish swimming around my friend Kay, I realized the only way I could pull it off was to get real fish. I needed to be able to photograph them under the same lighting conditions I would be shooting Kay in order to make the fish shots and person shot match. So I went out and bought a pair of goldfish with the long term plan they’d be a permanent fixture in my home. Luckily Boris was okay with the acquisition of more pets and took it upon himself to name the orange fish “Buri“, while I named the speckled brown fish “Astrid“. (Not that either of them get called anything other than fish or fishes most of the time…)

The above image is the result of many hours of work in photoshop, cutting out multiple shots of individual fish to bring together and playing around with colour. I asked Kay during the shoot to pretend the fish were swimming around her and this was one of the expressions she came up with. It was very cute and perfectly suited to holding her breath under an imaginary sea.

This shot of Kay with the goldfish and bowl was early on in the shoot as we were just getting warmed up. It’s cute but I definitely don’t love it as much as the top shot.

Monique Trottier was the fourth person I photographed in my portrait series. She is a voracious reader of books and writes reviews of some of them on her SoMisguided blog. Of course I came up with an idea to photograph her with books – lots and lots of them.

The concepts I came up with for her shoot ended up being the most complicated so far and have required extensive post-production in photoshop to construct each of them. I had two ideas, one is the above shot with a tiny Monique sitting on a tall pile of books. The other idea is still in progress and involves EVEN more books than this one. Neither image worked as I’d originally planned and shot, which was frustrating, and I was going to reshoot until I finally came up with a solution. Sometimes art is about problem solving.

I love the final version of this shot because it’s cute, colourful and came out even better than I’d been picturing it in my head.