Swirling Twirling Veils of Fabric

February 23, 2010

I’ve fallen a bit off track with my portrait series the last few weeks because I’ve been very focused on other things. It’s also been tricky scheduling people during the Olympic craziness. This portrait features Andrea and was taken towards the end of January.

I bought three large pieces of transparent fabrics from Dressew in different colours to use as props for this shoot (and beyond). It was fun to figure out different ways to use them in the portrait, and I especially loved getting Andrea to move the fabric to create swirling bits of colour around herself. It was a hilarious part of the shoot, but the results are beautiful.

The Valentine’s Portraits

February 15, 2010

For Valentine’s Day I invited some of my friends over to pose for a Valentine-themed photo shoot. The idea was inspired by the work of Katie Sokoler and her “kiss in your pocket” flip book.

I cut hearts from red and pink paper to create a background, and picked up sparkly hearts and red tulips for props.

I asked people to ham it up for the photos. Valentine’s Day is afterall one of the cheesiest holidays ever, and standing in front of a wall of hearts calls for anything but serious expressions.

The portraits all turned out awesome and everyone looks very cute and funny. I love it when an idea comes together so well. A full set of my Valentine’s portraits can be found on flickr.

She Wears Many Hats

February 3, 2010

I think I’ve mentioned before that with the portrait series I’m trying to explore ideas I originally shot as self portraits. I’ve always wanted to redo the Mad Hatter shot of myself from two years ago because it’s a great idea and I felt I could do it better – and incorporate even more hats. And now…voilà!

Shai of Pome Studio is the model in the updated Mad Hatter portrait. I chose her because she’s not comfortable having her photo taken (typical for most photographers) and my thought was I could hide her under the many hats. It turned out to be the perfect concept for Shai because she’s a hair stylist by profession, and she knits lovely hats for sale at Pome (five of which were used in the portrait at the top of this post). In the final concept shot I used sixteen or seventeen hats, most of which were borrowed from friends. The hat pile was far too precarious to balance on it’s own so I had to call in Boris as the hat wrangler to prop things up from the side with a broomstick and remove it from the shot in post processing.

Wandering Through the Blue Sky Night

January 9, 20101 Comment

I love how this portrait of Julie came out in a wonderfully magical way that didn’t occur to me when I took the photo. As I was processing the shot I started imagining stars in the background and the blue backdrop became a midnight blue sky. Boris came up with the title after finding the lyrics from a song by Melissa Ferrick.

It’s been a month since I shot this portrait for the series. I decided I would only do one in December because it seemed like it would just be too crazy a time to try to scheduling people shortly before Christmas. But a whole month break from this project feels too long. In the meantime, even though I haven’t been shooting I’ve been working on ideas and figuring out who to photograph next. I can’t wait to get started again.

Underneath an Imaginary Sea

December 17, 2009

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.

Kay and Betsey Johnson

December 16, 2009

When Kay came over to be photographed for the series a few weeks ago she brought a selection of Betsey Johnson dresses and crinolines with her to wear. They were all pretty specular but I loved this one the best because of the bright mix of colours. I usually ask my portrait subjects to bring a few different items to choose from and wear during the shoot. Part of the fun of inviting women friends over for these photo shoots has been getting to see their clothes.

The funny thing about the shoot with Kay, that I didn’t really think about beforehand, was that it didn’t really matter what she was wearing. I was shooting with a specific idea in mind and her clothing was mostly hidden from view. Towards the end of the shoot I decided the fantastic outfit just couldn’t go to waste and did these shots with Kay seated on the floor to showcase the dress. I love how this gave me the opportunity to try a different perspective from my usual style of portraiture.

Green Balloons

December 7, 2009

It’s been a few weeks since I shot this portrait with Siobhan so I can no longer remember where the idea came from to use balloons as a prop. There is a store around the corner from my apartment that sells about a million different things including balloons that you can get filled with helium, which was lucky. I really enjoyed buying the balloons for the shoot. Walking home with them looped tightly in my hand I felt like an excited little kid and I wanted to run and skip along the sidewalk while laughing out loud. I’m glad balloons can still feel so joyful even though I’m a grown up.

Siobhan was an excellent model and working with balloons made us both laugh a lot. I decided to scrap the original idea I had in mind for this shoot – Sio standing on the chair and floating with the balloons – because I didn’t want to go all crazy and photoshoppy. Also, despite the fact that the ceilings in our apartment are about 12 feet high, I STILL didn’t have enough room to compose things in camera that way I wanted.

I’m having a lot of fun inviting lovely female friends over to my home studio to pose for me. Everyone has taken to my invitation with enthusiasm so far, despite any misgivings about feeling unphotogenic. For this shoot I put together a flickr gallery of balloon images take by other photographers. You can check it out here. I really like using the new gallery feature for inspiration.

Last Colours of Autumn

November 22, 2009

My friend Kai was the second out of town guest in Vancouver during the month of October, and of course I made sure to take her portrait for the series. Kai has a red winter coat just like I do and I wanted to include it in the shot. I hadn’t intended to fill the whole scene with red, but with coat, umbrella and Japanese Maple tree all in gorgeous shades of my favorite colour, red ruled the day. (As it should.)

The Japanese Maple I had in mind for this shot wasn’t fully turned at the time, so after I took a few shots and wasn’t satisfied with the results, Kai suggested another spot with red trees. She’d just happened to be in the Queen Elizabeth Park area a few days before and noticed a whole street with them. This turned out to be the perfect spot to shoot what I had in mind and it was wonderful to see so many Japanese Maple trees covered in red leaves all in a row.

Threads & Needles

November 18, 2009

In September I kicked off my new portrait series with a bang by shooting four of them in one month. In October I decided shooting two a month would be a more reasonable pace, and both subjects ended up being people from out of town. My sister Kathryn was in Vancouver visiting for eight days over the thanksgiving weekend so I took advantage of the timing to include her in my series.

The idea behind these shots was based on a suggestion by my friend Susie. She liked the idea of emphasizing my sister’s very thick and curly hair by making it crazy and nesty with birds and bugs in it. Since the only way I could pull of that idea was with a huge amount of photoshop work, I opted for something less elaborate but that still made use of her hair. My sister is a knitter so I went with knitting needles and yarn. I ended up having to string the yarn into different corners of the room for the shoot and then Kathryn had to sit VERY still while I took photographs. It was hilarious and we finished with the moustachio’d shot below.

The yarn draped over Kathryn’s shoulders is made by a local Vancouver yarn company called SweetGeorgia Yarns. Felicia Lo is the owner and she makes beautiful yarns in rich colours that even a non-knitter such as myself can covet.

So Many Books, So Little Time

November 3, 2009

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.

Canvas to the Imagination

Rachael Ashe – Art | Craft | Life

Category: Portraits