A musician from Ottawa answered a casting call for my Broken project; he would be in Toronto, and was I interested in photographing him? Yes, and I am glad I did! The image below won’t be part of the broken series as the object is not visible, but I really like the intensity that comes out of this image!
Interesting guy” he collects vinyl LP records, so naturally he had an interest in real film 🙂 It was also fun chatting about guitars.
Masks are interesting things. Sometimes meant to hide or obscure, in a performing sense they can channel energy and personality into a performance. In this image, the actress is definitely using the mask to channel the energetic and creative spirit that her made her a lot of fun to work with!
I originally purchased the mic in this image for another photo shoot, but when the team for a “Film Noire” shoot saw the mic, they immediately wanted to work it into an image, and I can’t blame them. It’s a real Shure 55 “Elvis” mic, iconic and quite collectable. I am not sure if it can be made to work again, but it would be worth the effort!
This image is from a photo yesterday afternoon with a multi-talented actress/model/poet. It is simply lit, with a simple backdrop, and no funky post processing. And it just may be my favourite portrait from 2011. After years of shooting anything but formal portraiture, then forcing myself to try it this year, it is ironic that it has now become far and away my favourite genre, because of images like this. It is simple on one hand, but on the other there is a lot happening with the model’s expression and her energetic and bright personality. Faces and expressions like this are as much a monument to the human spirit  as any cathedral or crumbling ruin.
Canadian literary critic Northrope Frye was famous for his work The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, about the pervasiveness of biblical themes, metaphors and symbolism in Western literature, and as I worked with this image I was struck by the fact that while the model and I were not consciously trying to do so, to my mind at least we created an image that reminds of of the story of the Annunciation, with the combination of the head scarf, the lighting, and the model’s upward gaze. It’s ironic that at a time when I am at best agnostic (with atheist tendencies), I am still affected by the universality of the story.
On a shoot last week I found I had not brought enough Ilford Delta 400 film with me. This film is my bread and butter for black and white portraits, and so with some trepidation I was forced to dip into my camera bag for some Ultrafine Extreme 400, an inexpensive film I had not shot before. When it was time to process the film I did some research online and was not happy to see various lousy reviews of the film, until I ran into a post by a photographer I know on Flickr who had managed to tame this beast. I messaged him a couple of questions and in a very short time I had the magic formula (Xtol, 1:1 for 13 minutes @68 degrees). The negatives turned out fine (an example is below).
This will never be my primary film (I got it mainly as a cheaper way to test lighting set-ups), but I still got some great shots, thanks to a helping hand from the Internet
I had a shoot in Toronto’s High Park last week with a model named Caitlin. She described herself as shy, but I sensed thoughtfulness and depth: in this image below, I believe I captured her not just looking at a sunset, but seeing and thinking.
I find when shooting people I always like to get in close. This is normally the way to go when taking people pictures, but it is important to also be able to take pictures from some distance, to make the background and setting a more important part of the image. This is what I was trying to do in this image, taken last weekend at HarbourFront in Toronto, in gorgeous late afternoon light.
If you stand say five feet away from a mirror and focus on your reflection with a  manual focus the lens will focus not to a distance of five feet, but rather 10 feet. Even though the mirror is a flat two-dimensional surface, optically the virtual space behind the mirror must be accounted for. I remember being amazed when I learned this fact many years ago. Mirrors have always seemed otherworldly to me.
This image is a reflection in a polished metal sculpture in downtown Toronto, and is a heavy crop from a much large frame. For me it still has the magic of a mirror though.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, the main character Billy Pilgrim has come “unstuck in time.” He jumps around forward and backwards in a nonlinear fashion. It struck me the other day that being “unstuck in time” is the phrase that best captures what I am trying to do photographically; using a mishmash of techniques and materials from almost every era of photography, capturing modern subjects in vintage-looking retro-styled images. I like to pay homage to the various eras of photography, but I refuse to be help captive by the purists of the present or the past. Like I’ve said before, I want it all 🙂
The image below is another case in point; a thoroughly modern young woman, captured by a film camera older than she is by at least a dozen years, the film then developed and post processed using digital technology for a look that hopefully refuses to be pinned down in any era.
My Third Eye 