Chloe & Emilie

A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of having not one, but two lovely ladies in my photography studio.    Having moved to a new studio in May, I sent out a call for a patient model who wouldn't mind hanging out and looking pretty while we walked around the new place to see what setups caught out eye. What I got was so much more than what I had asked, that my little tentative exploration turned into a full-blown photo shoot with two amazing women.

First into the studio was Chloe, my lovely dancer friend who can pull off a an intriguing mischievous look with gorgeous effortlessness, and who had more ideas than I could catch up with. I love her bright green eyes in this shot:



There was much moving around, outfit changing, adding and removing of accessories, furniture arranging and fun girliness involved. Towards the end of the shoot, I wanted to recreate a sort of lady's dressing table, so we assembled every piece of dress-up paraphernalia we could find in the studio, arranged it on an antique desk, and started shooting. But in the end, few things say "dressing room" like a shot of a girl's shoes:



You can see Chloe's full set here.

My second model for the day was Emilie, an accomplished dancer and model with a glamorous look that demanded a grand setting. I'm loving the colour contrast in this shot:



I liked having the chair and scarf in the background pick up the bright colours of her dress, so in our second setup, I tried to do something similar - see if you can spot it.



You can see Emilie's full set here.

All in all, thank you both for a fun day of shooting, and for being such good sports about me only just finding my footing in a new space with new possibilities. Unfortunately this first shoot was also my last in this particular studio, but great things are in the works, and I'm hoping to have a new place come September. And after this wonderful shooting experience, I hope my first photo shoot in my new studio is just as fun and rewarding. In the meantime, let's have some fun in the sun!

Flowers and Anniversaries

Thursday, Jeff and I celebrated our fourth anniversary which, Google informs me, was our Flower anniversary. Since this post is about flowers, and since these images would not have been captured without Jeff’s relentless badgering to get me out of bed far too early on a Sunday morning, it seems fitting that this post would be dedicated to him. Happy 4 years!

What you see here is more than pretty flowers. It is, in fact, the result of partial lunacy.



 2 weeks ago, I had the bright idea that Jeff and I should wake up on a Sunday morning to catch the sunrise, and maybe a few good flower shots at the same time. Our previous attempt at dawn-time photography resulted in a few nice shots, but mainly it left us Cold, Tired and Hungry on the Transitway.



On the chosen Sunday, when the alarm went off at 5:30am, I was beyond eager to turn it off and go right back to sleep; flowers be damned. Jeff, on the other hand, decided that since my idea had him awake at 5:30am, I had better go through with it. (Support borne out of resentment is a rare and wonderful thing, isn’t it?) 



So we went out and walked along the Rideau Canal, stopping to catch some photos of freshly blooming tulips, narcissuses, dandelions and other blossomy prettiness. The plan was to make it all the way to Dow’s Lake and take in the full display of the Tulip Festival. About half way, that plan was abandoned; the sun was too high and bright for pretty flower shots, and the Tired and Hungry were setting in. So we swapped the Canal for the Elgin Street Diner, and their perpetual breakfast menu.

Circus shenanigans

A couple of Fridays ago, Jeff and I got in a car and drove to Montreal to see a circus show. Not just any circus show, but the annual showcase of the Ecole de cirque de Verdun, where my awesome friend Corey (you may have seen him here) has spent a couple of years training and learning circus arts.

I've always had a deep admiration for circus artists, for their dedication and creativity in a field that mixes both incredible athletic feats and personal and artistic expression, and is too often overlooked by both areas. So I took advantage of the opportunity to take some fun shots.


Pssst! That's Corey up there in the silks!

For this year's showcase, the school chose to adapt Jack Kerouac's On the road. The show, called Beat played on the theme of constant movement even beyond exhaustion, as well as the various meanings of "beat" and "béat" (Fr, "elated").

There were, of course, impressive acrobatic acts, eye-twisting juggling, incredible feats of balance and strength, some very fun transitions and interludes, and the overall magic atmosphere that you expect from any circus performance.



All in all, a great way to spend an evening, and I was very happy to be a part of it, even if my most athletic activity that day consisted of sitting up and lifting my lens :)

For the full set, click here.

Mom

This post is an unapologetically gushy tribute to my Mom.

 Last week was my mom's birthday. I'd been threatening to get her in the studio for a long time, and I thought this was a good time to celebrate and show off my mom's boundless awesomeness. So we got together for a little portrait shoot. For those who haven't yet had the privilege to meet her, my mom is perhaps the kindest and most sincerely caring person I know. And this is going on more than just the infinite patience it must have taken to raise me over the last 27 years (and counting).

 

 I've always known my mom to be a beautiful, stylish and expressive lady with more of an artistic streak than she might like to admit. I also knew her as a fairly reserved person, so I wasn't sure how she would feel being in front of a camera. Turns out, my mom is a closet model. Especially when you give her a hat.

 

You can see her, above, giving me the "I'm not sure whether I'm amused or deeply unimpressed with you" look that I got a lot as a teenager.

All in all, my mom is a rock star in and out of the studio, and a fun day was had playing with make-up, pretty dresses, and hats. After all, how can you go wrong with hats?!



Happy birthday, Mom!

Photo walks

A couple of years ago, Jeff and I took a photographic leap: we joined a studio and invested in some studio lights. The world (inside our heads) has never been the same since. While Jeff didn't take as much of a shining to the whole studio thing, I've invested quite a bit of energy into learning how to work those damn lights; it's a process, and it's an ongoing and occasionally very frustrating one at that. But it can also be amazingly rewarding, which is why I've been posting the best (or even least embarrassing) results of my shoots on here.

 The downside of all that is that, until recently, I'd rarely ventured outside the studio with my camera. That changed about a month ago, thanks to the lovely folks at the Ottawa Street Exploration flickr group. They organize monthly photo walks throughout the city, in hopes of cataloging some of the lesser known local spots and getting a few good shots in at the same time. The first outing I joined was on St. Patrick's Day; we explored the ByWard Market and encountered its many festive and not-so-festive inhabitants. My favourite shot from the day has really nothing to do with St. Patrick (or his day), but more to do with the loveliness of taking a walk on a warm day in early spring:

 

 The shot that proved most popular, however, was one of two sales ladies from The Bay, presumably on their smoke break:

 


Check out the full set here.

For its April outing, the group decided to head to Chinatown. There was relatively little activity on the Saturday before Easter, so most of us took to shooting the inanimate side of things. Still, I did manage to snap one guy having a smoke on his front step. It makes me wonder: why do smokers always seem so deep in thought?
 

With the days getting longer, we had to cope with much brighter light and harsher shadows than usual. So I thought I'd make the best of it and play with some shadows:

 

 Full set here.

 All in all, I had a great time joining these photo walks and I'm looking forward to the next outing with this exceptionally fun and supportive group of talented photographers.

Shameless self-advertising

For everyone who had been waiting for my Cuba photos with bated breath, you can now find them here.

I would love to go into stories about the awesomeness of outdoor showers at sunset, under palm trees, with live saxophone music in the background, but I'll refrain.

In other news, I recently had a reason to be in front of a camera, for a change. I recently had the pleasure of contributing a series of articles to Ambition in Transition, a blog offering career and lifestyle tips to 20-somethings caught in the transition period between study and employment. Joining their team required, aside from the implicit brilliance (this is the shameless self-advertising part of this post. Did you guess?), a headshot to go with it. This is where Jeff came in.



Jeff is one of the rare people who can point a camera at me and not have my facial muscles contract into a mix of deer-in-headlights and a young Elmer Fudd. Which is good, considering I'm neither a herbivore, nor am I hunting wabbits (be vewy, vewy quiet). Anyways. Above and below are my two favourite shots from Sunday's shoot. Big thanks to Jeff, once again, for his endless patience and the lovely photos!

Shiny Pretty Things

Happy New Year! (First post of the year, so it's required, no?)

Since my last post, I had a lovely holiday (thanks for asking), and I hope everyone else did as well. I spent a week in Cuba, which far surpassed my expectations; photos will be posted shortly. In the meantime, however, here are the results of a more recent shoot - I know, chronology is not my strong suit!

Jeff decided it would be fun to do a little jewelry shoot, just for fun. So I rounded up a few of my shiny things, and our good friend Diana was also nice enough to contribute a few of her pieces. Jeff took a very methodical approach and focused on one thing at a time or a few like things together.

Then I go in... and promptly turn our little staging area into a girly mess.



This is, admittedly, busier than my shots tend to be most of the time. I think this is probably the first time that I've had, all in the same shot: velvet, paper, china, shells, various precious and non-precious metals, pearls (of the artificial variety), silk, beads... and there was much more outside the frame, believe it or not.

After that was done, I decided to try a few simpler setups, starting with a pair of gold earrings.



The Papery is a great place to get cool paper to serve as interesting backdrops for jewelry, for much cheaper than fabric.

Finally, I borrowed Jeff's setup to take a few photos of my newest ring. In retrospect, it probably needed a better cleaning first, and I need much more practice lighting gems.



The ring is sitting on what looks like wood, but is in fact the side of an Ikea basket. Props to Jeff for thinking that one up!

Cups? Cups!

As I mentioned in my previous post, one of my favourite things about sharing a photography studio is getting to play with what the other photographers keep in the studio. It's a little like sharing a giant toy box, and a little like going "shopping" in your friend's closet; except, you know, with a much more mature, sophisticated and photographic twist.

... Yeah.

One of our members kindly contributed an espresso machine to the studio. I don't drink espresso (any any other kind of coffee, really), but that didn't stop me from being excited about it, because the machine had these really cute little cups that looked like they needed to be photographed. So one day, after an unrelated shoot, I did.

At first I tried some white-on-white stuff, then experimented with grey and black backgrounds, going for a monochromatic theme, but everything looked deeply uninspiring. On a whim, I leaned a gold reflector against the table on which I had the cups set up on a piece of black plexiglass.



When that didn't turn out too bad, I decided to ditch the black and white thing and add a bit of colour into the mix. The cups are still on black plexiglass, against a grey background, but this time with a bunch of red beads (from a random necklace we also had around the studio) spilling out of one of the cups.



When that worked as well, I decided to try a similar thing with blue. This time the cups are on clear plexiglass, with a sheet of bright blue paper underneath, and the blue beads spilling out of the cup are yet another prop necklace we had around.



I think I only stopped because I ran out of necklaces.

Doing this completely impromptu shoot was a lot of fun and reminded me of a side of studio photography that I love: taking things and playing around with them until you make them look good. They might not always be the most significant or groundbreaking of subjects, but there's always a way to make the mundane look extraordinary.

Ever been inexplicably drawn to shoot something apparently insignificant? I'd love to hear those stories!

Maria

Another post in the Embarrassingly Overdue Photos series.

Question: what happens when you put 2 girls in a room with a bunch of make-up, an umbrella and a camera?

Answer: An awesome photo shoot, some cool photos and a lot of cleanup.



Back in (gulp) August, my friend Maria and I got together for another photo shoot. It is my deeply held belief that most girls have at least one really great dress that they bought with high hopes but don't have a chance to wear or, worse yet, have no good photos in. Add to that our love for make-up and Maria's innate modeling talent, and it was already starting to sounds pretty good.

And then it got better. One of the things I love about sharing a photography studio is that everyone uses different equipment and there's always something new to borrow and experiment with. This time, Guillaume had brought in an amazing umbrella that I was itching to put in front of a camera, rather than in front of a light.



The results were some great shots, a few Singing in the Rain moments (minus the rain), and I hear Maria got a good arm workout out - seems enormous umbrellas get heavy after a while!

You can see the full set here.

Eventually the black dress on black background got a little old, so we switched it up with a bright red corset for a different look.

DJ shoot

Playing catch-up on old shoots again. And when I say 'old', I mean 'this summer, when life was lovely and weather was fantastic, staying inside writing blog posts seemed like endless tedium not to mention a waste of perfectly good sunshine, but now that winter is here and all I want to do is hibernate, I feel a bit silly posting photos that are over 5 months old'.

So.

Back in June, I did a photo shoot with a friend of a friend who also happens to be a DJ. He had seen the results of my RoMagazin shoot and liked that we used a big pair of headphones as a feature, so he wanted to do something similar. A couple of the results are below, and more are in the Flickr set.

Copyright

I interrupt the long silence on this blog to ask you: photographers, how jealously do you guard your copyright?

This post brought to you from Art Works 2011 and Strobist

Yesterday, I attended Art Works 2011, a fantastic conference seeking to endow artists with a little more business sense. I could go on and on about the great speakers I had a chance to hear and meet and the wealth of information I managed to capture, but for the sake of brevity (and our 3-minute attention spans), I’ll cut to the chase. One keynote address was provided by Jennifer Dickson, a highly regarded Ottawa-based photographer. In her speech, she advised all artists to guard their copyright ferociously against “thieving bastards” and copycats. In particular, she recounted an instance in which a student had presented her with a portfolio; the student had mimicked Dickson’s style and dedicated the portfolio to her. Dickson was neither touched nor impressed; on the contrary, she saw the work as copyright infringement and reprimanded the student for it.

On the other hand, David Hobby of Strobist recently published a post defending Justin Lanier’s reproduction of Dan Winters’ portrait of Bono, arguing that many artists learn and develop their own style in part by mimicking the style of their masters.

As much as I detest outright copyright infringement and the disregard of intellectual property, I’m with David on this one. There is – and rightly so – a difference between claiming someone else’s work as your own, and mimicking a style or technique for your own education and improvement. I’ve also been known to reproduce some of my favourite images; far from trying to become or upstage the artists I admire, adding those techniques to my repertoire is helping me find my own style, by picking and choosing the elements that speak to me and adding my own twist to them. And I know that if I dedicated any of my work to a mentor who discounted it and cited copyright law to me, I would change mentors in a hurry.

What do you think? Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery, or should we all find our own path without crossing those of the artists we admire?

Cars!

I will freely admit that I am just about the farthest thing from a car buff you can get. I usually tell cars apart by colour or size, and asking me to identify the make and model of any vehicle will be just about as successful as asking my cat to do basic math: I'll likely tilt my head to one side and look cute until you give up and give me a treat.

That being said, I'm not altogether insensitive to automotive aesthetic, a discovery I made recently during a visit to the Canada Science and Technology Museum.

A couple of cars caught my eye, so I made it my mission for the day to explore the limited angles allowed by the museum exhibition and get a few good shots out of it. This led to some awkward contortions around signs and fences, and I'm sure the museum floors are just a bit cleaner after my visit. I'll let you be the judge of the results:

Salsa

Dance photography holds a special place in my heart. It's not just because dancers are generally beautiful people. It's not just that dance gives them a grace and self-confidence that photographs beautifully. (Although these are both excellent reasons to get a dancer into your studio right now.) What keeps me coming back to dance photography is the ability to capture the feel and emotion of a dance.

We recently had two salsa dancers in our studio, France Trottier and Chris Feist, for a "just for fun" salsa shoot. Big thanks go out to both of them for being the inspiring, expressive and exceptionally patient models they were. Here are the results:







See the full set here.

Behind the scenes tidbit: music usually plays an important part in my shoots. People respond to music in amazing ways, and more often than not this alone will allow you to capture a drastically different side of them than you might expect. For a dance shoot, however, music is all the more important, so we were doubly grateful to Chris, who is also a fantastic (salsa) DJ. Check out his Facebook page here.

Yoga with Diana

Some people are blessed with exceptional talents. Others, like myself, are lucky enough to be surrounded by these people.

One of my ridiculously gifted friends is Diana, a many-faceted artist who, in addition to sharing her passion for dance and the arts with the world, also teaches some of the most inspiring (and butt-kicking, all truth be told) yoga classes in Ottawa.

Jeff and I were thrilled when she accepted to model for a yoga shoot. Since Jeff was the mastermind behind the shoot, you can see most of the highlights here.

However, I had one idea to explore as well. Rather than the omnipresent warrior/lotus/dancer pose on bright white background, I wanted to see whether a low-key, mostly black on black image might bring out what I love best about yoga, which is the opportunity for peace and introspection it allows into our hectic lives. To me, inner peace isn't the exuberance of a brightly lit white expanse, but the quiet comfort of a dim room in which we let our own light shine from within.

The result:



You can see the complete set here.

Behind the scenes tidbit: to get these shots, we had to improvise a platform for Diana to sit on, out of a step stool, a piece of hard plastic, and a sheet of black velvet. Probably not an ideal setting to meditate or pose, which is just one more reason why Diana is beyond awesome. We hope, in time, she forgives us :)

RoMagazin

RoMagazin is a Romanian radio show, produced by my lovely friend Maria and her brother Alex.

They were in the market for some promotional shots to jazz up their web site (check it out, if you can read Romanian). Jeff and I were looking for new models to melt under studio lights. The result: a few hours of fun, with a healthy dose of sibling rivalry, and some decent shots, some of which you can see below.










Check out the whole set here.

Jeff

Question: what do photographers do when they're bored and there are lights around?
Answer: they model for each other.

Jeff is a man of many talents. On here he's mostly mentioned as my boyfriend and fellow photographer. In real life he's also an amazing salsero, an aspiring chef, an avid gamer, an overall wonderful human being and, I suspect, a bit of a closet model.

So when we got a new set of studio lights and needed to test them out (read: figure out how to make them work), he put his best pouty face on (don't tell him I said that) and we had a fun shoot.

We really wanted to get a shot of Jeff in salsa mode, so Jeff put on his favourite salsa shirt, and showed off some of his moves.



Then, just as we were running out of ideas/steam/patience for the lights, Jeff found an old film camera that was laying around in the studio, and decided to use it as a prop. His best attempt at a MySpace self-portrait:

Corey & Melanie

Resuming the "catching up on older shoots" thing, next up is a shoot Jeff and I did with Corey Tomicic and Melanie Mastronardi, two amazing models and dancers.

The aim of this shoot was more playing around with lights, getting some practice with headshots, as well as having fun with a white background and two amazingly creative people.

The results:









For more photos from this shoot, check out this Photoshop album.

"The Little Show" conclusion

As I mentioned last week, the arts & architecture gallery had a miniature photography group show this past weekend, to which Jeff and I contributed some shots.

I'd like to thank everyone who dropped by to check out the show, and support local artists as well as the fantastic local gallery that made it possible for all of us to put some of our work out there. The show was a success, and a great experience for me and hopefully everyone else involved as well.

I'm also happy to report that all 3 of the photos I submitted to the show were sold. We photographers are fragile souls, so validation that we don't suck is always deeply appreciated.

Below are the 3 photos of mine that found new homes thanks to this show:

Maria

During my summer/fall posting hiatus, I've been fairly productive photography-wise, so I thought it might be good, now that the cold weather is keeping me indoors so much more, to update this space with some of the results of my summertime efforts.

First up is a shoot with my friend Maria as the willing and very able model. The main point of the shoot was for me to play around with my new lights, try for some headshot-type shots, and have fun with it all to the beat of DJ Tiesto.

Some of the results are below: