Another great event took place at Revival on December 11, as Les Coquettes presented their annual holiday spectacular, titled Gala. The performance was based around old Hollywood glamour, with tributes to Singing In The Rain and the silent film era among others.
Their next event is a New Year’s Eve performance at the Sanderson Theatre in Brantford, Ontario. That should shake up that sleepy town a little bit.
Les Coquettes are at it again, with their annual Halloween spectacular — Cabaret Enchanté, happening at Revival on October 23 and 30. Buy your tickets here, or check out the Facebook event here.
Revival was kind enough to loan us their space so we could shoot the ad you see above.
Here’s a behind-the-scenes lighting setup:
Key light was the AB400 in a 24×36 softbox up high on the stand on the right side. Fill flash was the Alien Bees ABR800 Ringflash in front. An AB1600 is that bright spot in the middle of the frame, placed behind the subjects for a wee bit of rim lighting.
Models: Billie Black, Dante Inferno, and Lilli Bubalotovich.
Hair and Makeup: Angela McQueen
Styling, Wardrobe, Art Direction: Catherine Skinner
Poster Design: Sonya
I’ve just returned from Montréal, Québec, where the Miss Hooters Canada 2011 contest was held at the Hooters South Shore location. I went to support my girl Samantha as she competed against sixteen other Hooters girls from across the country. There was representation from Montréal, Toronto, Whitby, Hamilton, Edmonton, Barrie, and Winnipeg.
Congratulations go out to the winner, Cristina, from Montréal. First runner up was Alex from Winnipeg. Second runner up was Alexandra from Downtown Toronto.
I’ve picked out the best photo of each girl to display below, but if you want to see the complete 70 photo set, you can check it out on my Flickr.
Competitors:
Em hates being called Emily. I do it anyway because I like it.
My first encounter with Em was in January 2010. I’d just taken on a new job as photographer at a club in Oshawa called Junction. That’s when I ran into this group of young ladies…
Beautiful gals, all of them, but of all the people I photographed that evening, Em stood out for some reason.
Fast forward a month to February 2010. Junction again.
Well look who it is! Em again. I recognized her from the first time I shot her but didn’t say anything. Running into her twice in two months was more than my tiny brain could handle.
“I must photograph this girl,” I muttered.
Fast forward to November 2010. The Facebook app on my BlackBerry lights up. Friend request from Em… what?!
How did she find me? How does she know who I am? Let’s fire up Facebook Chat and find out.
Turns out we had a mutual friend who was singing my praises as a photographer, and Em wanted to check out my photos, hence the friend request. She had no clue that I photographed her at Junction twice.
After a few months of back and forth communication, we got ourselves together for a little photoshoot in February 2011, exactly one year and one day after our second “meeting”.
Em is an avid viewer of America’s Next Top Model, so she was ready to pose up a storm for me despite not having the unrealistic body proportions on display on that show. Em looks like a real woman, which makes me happy.
It’s so nice sometimes to just hit up the studio with a willing model, a casual wardrobe, and windows streaming with daylight. All of these were shot without any artificial light sources. The tried and true 50mm f/1.8 lens was used for each of the non-club shots. It’s a lens I hadn’t pulled out of my bag in a while — I started out the shoot using my disappointing 70-200mm f/2.8 but quickly switched to the 50mm for something different.
Last week I showed you the poster art for the next Les Coquettes production, The War On Christmas. Below is the continuation of that campaign, as our talented and anonymous designer went to great lengths to devise poster art for most of the characters in the troupe based on my photos. I think they turned out really great and I love seeing my photos come alive in different ways. If you’re planning on coming to the show, don’t hesitate to get your tickets, as the early show is already sold out!
Hair and makeup by Angela McQueen and Blonde Moxie, styling by Catherine Skinner.
Lilli Bubalotovich, La Minouche, The Barback, Georgie Gates, Billie Black, Charity Dawn, and Dante Inferno
I hate Christmas, so it’s only fitting that I’d be involved in this production. What you see above is the promotional poster for the next Les Coquettes show, taking place on December 12, 2010. It’s based around a 1940s USO theme, which should be fairly evident from the poster. All seven performers above were shot separately on a grey background, cut out, and then composited on to the poster. Have a look at what we started with:
That mailing tube made one heck of a good candy cane substitute. Tickets are on sale now — I expect to see all of you there!
I’ve been shooting with Les Coquettes for almost two years now, but speaking as a fan, our annual Halloween show is not to be missed. This year was no exception, and we extended the fun and nakedness across four performances on two nights. Enjoy some highlights from the show below, and if you like what you see, don’t forget to come out for the Christmas spectacular — The War On Christmas — on December 12th at Revival.
Our fans are the greatest and many of them arrived for the festivities in full costume:
I’ve shot for some clubs in Oshawa, off and on, since last year. A few weeks ago I showed off some shots from Junction, and now here’s some of my favourites from Karma. Karma has some strangely fantastic lighting — big diffused square panels filled with pink and blue lights that line the booths. It wreaks havoc on my white balance, but it makes for some amazing photos.
A few months back, DJ Storm of Oshawa club Junction emailed me to ask if I could come out that way to take some pictures on their Sexxy Saturday club nights. Shooting in a club presents a huge assortment of challenges, the most difficult of which is the low light levels. Creating light where there’s none is not the easiest thing in the world.
The DJ booth is a good place to stake out the joint and figure out where my best vantage points will be throughout the night. It also affords some cool photo ops:
Even though the disco ball, LEDs, and other lights provide for some nifty effects, their levels are all very low. The above picture was shot with the camera set to ISO 3200, an aperture of f/2.8 and a shutter speed that is barely hand-holdable at 1/25th. If you click through to view the image on Flickr, you can see the full EXIF header by selecting “More properties” in the lower right.
The Nikon D300S that I shoot with is pretty effing good in low-light situations, giving very useable results even when it’s jacked up to ISO 3200.
The shot above adds some flash to light up the DJ booth in the form of a Nikon SB-800 with a LumiQuest Pocket Bouncer attached. I’ve slowed down the shutter speed even further, to 1/6th. This allows more of the ambient light into the photo, but the short duration of the flash still keeps the main subjects relatively sharp.
The two shots above are much the same as the DJ booth shot, with some added flash and slower shutter speeds of 1/8th and 1/10th, respectively.
The shot above is by far my favourite of the last few months, for a few reasons. One, the bearded dude looks angry and therefore funny. Two, he’s the most prominent thing in the photo, staring right at the camera, isolated from the sea of people around him. You’ll notice the orange glow this whole photo has, despite using flash. This was taken much closer to the disco ball than the previous photos were, meaning the light was more intense and the slow shutter (1/8th) picked it up a little more than before.
Dragging the shutter on the above photo helped to convey a sense of movement, but the flash still kept much of the important parts sharp. Looks like he’s in the middle of a pelvic thrust.
I love these last two for being totally impromptu club pictures. The first dude held the finger pose for only a split second as he danced around, but I snagged it. The group in the lower photo had no idea I was even there, as I just held my camera up high over my head to capture their ridiculous faces.
Turns out DJ Storm also needed some photos of himself for some promotional posters, so we went into the studio a few weeks ago and banged these out:
I used a High Pass filter technique in Photoshop to give them a slightly more dimensional look. You can read more about the technique on Dustin Snipes’ blog.
My favourite gal-pals (and a few boy-pals) from Les Coquettes did a little three-day run of a show titled The Long, Hot, Summer.
Illustration by James Smith, based on photos by moi. L-R: Charity Dawn, Dante Inferno.
Bread & Circus was the venue — a tiny little 80-seat venue in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. It’s much smaller than we were all used to — “backstage” was more of a hallway than anything else, the spotlights were dim, and shooting in such a cramped environment was challenging to say the least.
The upshot was that I had three days to get it right, so I was able to plant myself in a different spot every night to get a variety of shots from all angles.
See the whole set on Flickr!