Category: Projects

On Butterfly Wings

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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

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

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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.

Sonia

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

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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.

Swirling Twirling Veils of Fabric

Unveil

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.

Inward calm

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.

That's what grace is

The Valentine’s Portraits

Ariane uses her Valentine powers to send out hearts into the world.

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.

Boris is my Valentine

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

Happy happy Valentine's Day

Kay and Ross are Valentines

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.

(Sadface) Be my Valentine

Valentine Smoochies

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

She wears many hats

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!

Mad About Hats

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.

Altered Book: Awaken the Garden of Delights

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Altered Book: Garden of Delights

As mentioned in my previous blog post, I started this altered book wanting to change the look of the folded pages by punching flower shapes into the paper. I was going to do this throughout the entire book but the more pages I did the less effective it seemed as a technique because the punched out shapes did not show up very well. So I changed my idea and decided to work with the flowers I had created with the punch and used these as the centre piece. I wanted the flowers to flow loosely and could not imagine gluing each one individually into the book, so I came up with the idea of stringing them together with thread. Only some of the flowers are directly attached to the pages with glue.

Altered Book: Garden of Delights

I was curious to see how well gluing a ceramic tea cup into the book would hold up and it seems to have a strong bond with the paper around it. I’m excited about this because I have another idea with tea cups that I have yet to explore. The little green bird was added as a finishing touch because I felt the composition needed a little more life and colour to it before I could call it finished.

Altered Book: Garden of Delights

Altered Book: Garden of Delights

I wasn’t sure what to title this but the flower shapes remind me of cherry blossoms and my thoughts these days are turned to spring, starting new things, and awakenings.

Altered Book: Garden of Delights

Materials used: book, paper punch, thread, Japanese paper, card stock, and a metal bird.

Wandering Through the Blue Sky Night

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Wandering Through the Blue Sky Night

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.

Julie

Underneath an Imaginary Sea

Underneath an imaginary sea

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.

Little fish, little fish swimming in the water

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.