Last Sunday I had a great time on a shoot with Mallory: the concept was combining the dangerous/sexy look of the motorcycle with symbols of domesticity: in this image Mallory is holding an old-fashioned egg-beater, one of my favourites from my prop collection.
Mallory is a great actress, and was easily able to create a character that made the concept come alive!
Today’s image is turning into one of my favourite portraits of the year. It is another image of Tara in High Park. The direct low sun made for a magical light, and the variety of reflections in the glass sphere seemed endless.
Today’s image is the first of a couple I’ll be posting from a shoot with model Tara on Friday evening. The shoot featured steampunk elements such as the goggles, and in the image below a parasol that I tried to give a brass effect to. In this image, I asked Tara to spin the parasol, while I used a very slow shutter speed. I think it worked 🙂
The first two images I posted of model Theresa in High Park were to some extent dominated by lines and background. Today I return to more familiar territory: the amazing landscape of human facial expression.
(Mamiya 645 Pro TL camera, Tri-X exposed at E.I. 800, developed in Diafine 3+3)
Expect to see more steam punk images over the next little while! Today’s image is of Ren Brockhouse, who I know through a Toronto theatre group. One of the things that appeals to me about steam punk is how it celebrates technologies that were accessible: things you could build, repair, change or hack with the right tools or know-how. So much of technology today is hermetically sealed away and abstracted; we seem to know so little about how things work, and that is a dangerous state of affairs!
Today’s image is the final one from my recent photo shoot with Shreeti. The first post featured a colour digital image. The second was a negative scan from an instant print. Today, traditional black and white film. I feel each different technology captured something different from the shoot. For me, black and white does the best job of capturing the detail of the lovely clothing worn by Shreeti.
(Mamiya 645 Pro TL, Ilford Delta 400, negative scanned and post processed with Nik Efex pro)
It has been a productive weekend for hand-tinted portraits. Today’ image features Jinxy, an alternative model with a unique and vibrant esthetic.
In my last couple of shoots, I have made a point of using different cameras and technologies at the same shoot, and I am glad I did so — I love the different kind of results I get. As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here is another image of Shreeti, but instead of a high resolution digital image, today’s image is a scan of an instant print (using Fuji FP3000B film in a Polaroid Model 455 Land Camera). Shreet’s look is timeless, and I think the vintage appearance of this print technique captures this, while still retaining her thoroughly modern sensibility.
Last night I had a great photo shoot with Shreeti, a Toronto model of Nepalese background. She brought a number of beautiful Nepalese outfits. I shot film (colour and black and white), some instant black and white with my Polaroid, and some digitals, one of which is today’s image.
I was truck by the intricacies of the outfits, and the eye for detail that Shreeti had for posing and arranging the outfits; she definitely made them sing!
Today is the final post on the photo shoot with remarkable model and Cystic Fibrosis survivor Sarah D. In this image I made no attempt at glamour; Sarah’s surgical scars from her double lung transplant are plainly visible; nothing is hidden.
The clock to me symbolizes many things; from what I have read, various treatments have improved life expectancies, from a median of 6 months (U.S., 1959) to over 47 years (Canada, 2007). The clock can also symbolize the patient waiting for suitable donor lungs to be available, as the race against her condition continues.
The final symbolism was quite by accident — after seeing the image, Sarah remarked that the clock was showing a time of about 8 o’clock, and that this was the time of her surgery which saved her life. A striking coincidence, and a testament to the operation that gave her the physical strength (buttressed by her obvious mental strength) to extend the timeline of her remarkable life.
(Mamiya 645 Pro TL, 80mm f2.8 lens, Tri-X)
My Third Eye 