These are a few of the shots I took of Lauren a few weeks ago, when she came over for a portrait session in the old apartment. We had a lot of fun using the pocket doors as a backdrop and Lauren was terrific in front of the camera.
Vintage Glamour
Category: Portraits
Tangled Threads
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.
A Vibrant Embrace
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.
Nature Is An Infinite Sphere
Since starting this portrait series back in September, when I’m out walking I find myself constantly scouting for interesting locations to do more shoots. I was out on a walk in Stanley Park when I came across this wonderful tree. I knew it was the perfect spot to photograph Jess, who I’d just asked the day before to pose for me.
It’s a beautiful old tree with multiple trunks and you can climb inside and sit amongst them. I explained to Jess that when I use natural settings like this I’m trying to convey a connection between nature and the person posing, not just use it as a backdrop. For me nature is a place to recharge, clear my head, and become centered. I think Jess captured this beautifully.
In mid-April when I took this photo, I ran into Jess in the middle of a two month sabbatical she was taking from her job. She had a wonderful attitude and emanated positive energy. When I asked her what she was up to she said something to the effect of, “hanging out, spending time with friends, learning new things, and just enjoying life.” Her words made me realize I hadn’t been enjoying my own life, and this probably goes back farther than before the art-focused sabbatical I’ve been on for the last few months. Talking with Jess was like a splash of cold water in the face. It woke me up and made me realize I needed be more conscious of taking pleasure in what I was doing, of making time for fun, of letting go, and of enjoying my life. And so I have been.
Nature is a way for me to recharge, clear my head, and become centred, but the influence of good people around me can do this too.
Between Imagination and Attainment Lies Longing
This is my friend Nicole Dextras, a skilled and talented artist in her own right. I consider her one of my mentors and I really wanted to include her in my portrait series. Like most photographers, she’s not a fan of having her picture taken so I’m really glad she agreed to sit for me.
It was Nicole’s suggestion to pose with the Camellia bush in her yard and the late morning light I found myself working with at the time was perfect. We started out with Nicole posed in front of the bush but I didn’t want the flowers to just be a backdrop, so we tucked her into the leaves. The portrait was so much stronger once she became part of the bush and she looks very at home in there.
The title is a play on a quote by Kahlil Gibran – “There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing”.
On Butterfly Wings
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.
Blossoming
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….
Let Your Heart Guide You Like a Lantern in the Dark
I really wanted to do a portrait full of eye-blasting colour because so many of the portraits in this series were shot against our plain white wall. This one features Sonia Ryan, the Coordinator of “Things” at Bootup Labs. Sonia was very keen to do a photo shoot with me. She came over with beautiful sari fabric to wear which (luckily) was nicely complimented by the rich red of the background. Neither of us knew how to properly put on a sari so we did a lot of careful draping with the fabric and I secured it at the back with clamps.
About the title…when trying to figure out a title I google words related to the photo and see where that takes me. This is how I often end up with wordy titles, but it works.
Dreams Soar on the Wings of Imagination
I love my portrait series, but oh does it ever take a lot of energy to come up with ideas and then wrangle people to do the shoots. I’ve been wavering on continuing with this project at all, but then I keep producing work I really like because of it.
This portrait features the lovely Shelly Roche. She came over to pose and did an admirable job of holding onto the strings I’d pinned to the wall and pretending there were birds attached to the other end. Originally I had planned to use Yuuki as the flying bird subject but I nixed that idea knowing how tricky he is to photograph when still, nevermind trying to photograph him while flying. I settled on the pigeon population of Granville Island for my birds and pulled this together from about five different shots. The results of hours of hard work are pretty magical.
Canvas Printing by Opus Art & Design Media
I was very excited when Opus Framing and Art recently announced their new digital canvas printing service. I’d been considering canvas printing for some of my recent photographic work so their timing couldn’t have been better. I selected two files from the portrait series and took them in to Opus to test out their print services. As you can see by the photos they did a fantastic job.
The colours and level of detail in the prints are really fantastic and the texture of the canvas plays nicely with the illustrative qualities of my work. Opus stretches the canvas in-house with a choice between 3/4″ or 1-1/2″ stretcher bars and four different styles of folding the corners. I went with the larger stretchers because it makes the finished print more substantial and I can hang it without a frame. I am really thrilled with these two prints and it’s only a matter of time before I have the rest of my portrait series printed on canvas as well.
I can’t say enough good things about the staff at the downtown location of Opus (which is the only location to offer this service) who are very knowledgeable and helpful. They were really great about answering my questions, and I was shown samples of digital files of varying quality printed on the canvas to give me an idea of how things would look. They also have their monitors calibrated to the printer for perfect colour accuracy. It took a week for my files to be printed and stretched, and they gave me a call when everything was ready. It’s a great service with even better results – especially when you start with high quality files.
As a side note, I had been planning to use Kickstarter to create a campaign to fund the cost of producing the canvas prints of my portrait series. I want to put together a show of this work but not beggar myself in the process. This morning as I started looking into it I discovered I need a US bank account and address because Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments Business accounts to receive funds and this is part of their policy. Now I’ll either have to figure out a way to make it work for me or come up with some other means to raise money to fund my art. Any suggestions?