The studio is in Bowmanville, which is a long trek for me, but totally worth it. A couple weeks ago, I shot a familiar face for those of you who follow the blog — Samantha. I’ve only processed one shot from the shoot so far:

The pose and outfit was Sam’s idea. I lit her with an Alien Bees 1600 strobe in a Photoflex softbox, up high to camera right. The background is dark grey seamless paper, lit with a Nikon SB-800 on a tripod. The SB-800’s zoom head was set to about 135mm, for a narrow beam of light across the background, just enough to give Sam some separation.

But I also did another fun time-lapse video:

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The video is composed of 2,290 separate pictures, glued together using QuickTime Pro (version 7, as they’ve stripped this functionality out of the newer versions). I was using my ancient Nikon D70S tethered to a MacBook Pro running Sofortbild. Because the D70S doesn’t have an intervalometer built in, the Sofortbild software is necessary to accomplish pictures at set intervals. Despite setting the intervals to one second, I ended up with photos that were five seconds apart. I suspect this is due to the D70S’s slow buffering, processing, and/or transfer speeds, but I don’t know for sure as I have no real way to test it.

Music: Anger (Rare Force 2 Meg Mix) by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

It took about 30 shots to get this one. Self portraits are something I’ve never been good at, nor even interested in. However, after shooting a model today in the studio, the light streaming in from the windows was too good to pass up.

The biggest challenge was getting myself in focus, since I can’t see myself through the viewfinder. I put a Nikon D700 on a tripod with an 85mm f/1.4 lens. After a few attempts at guessing the focus and failing, I eventually removed the camera from the tripod and brought it with me to where I would stand for the portrait. I then pointed the camera at the tripod and focused on it, to simulate the distance. Initially I was trying shots at f/2.8 because I wanted to make sure the depth of field was shallow enough to throw the background out of focus. This left very little leeway for any mistakes in my distance from the camera, as even an inch or two closer or further away could render myself blurry. I eventually bumped up the aperture to f/4 which gave me a bit more room to play with, without impacting the background too much.

The light was very, very warm as the sun was setting, but I cooled it down and desaturated it using Adobe Lightroom.

I can’t believe I’ve only ever talked about my friend Maya once on the blog before. Maya recently (like ten minutes ago) joined Flickr and you can see some of her work by clicking above. I met Maya waaay back in 2002 or so when she was a customer at my store and dropping off the odd roll of film here and there with some stunning images on them. I later hired her to work for me. She’s an energetic free spirit, having lived in Toronto and Vancouver (and soon New York City!) in the last couple years. In addition to being a stellar photographer, she’s also a fantastic model and actress, which means I’ll have to shoot her again before she heads down south. And now that I have a new Nikon D300s with HD video, maybe she can be my guinea pig for some video experiments too.

What has impressed me most about Maya’s photos over the years is her ability to do so much with so little. She started out with the most basic of basic digital SLRs and has very minimal amounts of lighting gear. She shot many of her photos in her Vancouver apartment (screw you, expensive studios) and makes trips to the thrift store part of her everyday life. Maya even has a blog devoted to her frugal ways: Frugal Artist.

To see more photos, check out Maya’s website.

Kelly would want you to.

I’ve posted photos from this shoot before, but now you can glimpse behind the scenes to see how it was done in this time lapse video.

Model: Randall Lome. Music: “Lovely Allen” by Holy Fuck.

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Heather is a friend of mine who takes pictures and today she opened her brand new studio space in Bowmanville, Ontario.

But before we talk about that, you need to know more about her!

Heather friended me on Facebook about a year ago, after realizing that we had each shot two of the same models. We hit it off right away, sharing our best photographic stories and insights. With Heather based a fair distance away from me in Oshawa, our first real-life meeting didn’t happen til many months later… at Hooters. Yes, Hooters. We had fried pickles and they were delicious. Hush.

She doesn’t like talking about herself on her website, but she’s a bit more chatty on her blog. And if you like what you see there, join the Facebook fan page.

Heather is a hardworking mom and fabulous photographer, so when she asked me to drive the 70km or so to Bowmanville and photograph her grand opening, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.

There were tasty treats from Custom Cakeworks:

Check out this crazy nice wallpaper:

The size of these windows makes me very excited:

Mayor of the Municipality of Clarington, Jim Abernethy, even came out for the ribbon cutting:

I’ve been bugging Heather a lot about when I can start using the space to shoot in, and I’m glad the answer is… now! I hope to get in there before the end of February and have a whole bunch of brand new content for everyone to see.

Photo: Ryan Visima (moi); Layout and Design: Jake; Models: Georgie Gates (Dana Bondy), The Carpenter (Dave Lapsley); Makeup: Angela McQueen

The goal was a Harlequin romance novel level of cheesiness, and I think we hit it big time. Check out the lighting setup:

Dana and Dave are on a dark grey seamless backdrop. The main light was an Alien Bees 1600 in a 24×36 softbox. The rim light was a Nikon SB-900 at full power, with a warm orange gel, to simulate Dana and Dave being lit up by the romantic fire that rages behind them. The reflector in the bottom right corner actually wasn’t to reflect any light at all — we used it as an impromptu wind machine. La Minouche (Catherine Skinner) waved it furiously for the better part of half an hour! The image was also flipped on the horizontal axis in post, which is why the diagram doesn’t match up with the light sources in the photo.

Back to Les Coquettes… It’s an exciting season for a couple reasons. First up is a new venue, the Lower Ossington Theatre. The shot above was produced in one of the rehearsal facilities at the LOT.

I recently got a new camera (Nikon D300s), so my old Nikon D200 has been relegated to backup status. That makes it perfect for things like time lapse videos, so I made a little behind-the-scenes magic for your enjoyment. It stops just short of where we actually started shooting the poster content. The camera’s intervalometer was set to 4 second intervals and I took 1,486 shots between 8:00pm and 9:40pm. It’s being played back at 24fps.

The second exciting reason is a new venture in tiered ticket prices and fundraising. The layout of the venue provides some flexibility in terms of seating, so there’s three different price levels — proceeds from the upper price tier are going towards the Toronto Youth Theatre.

Best of all, Love Story is being presented twice in one night — each show being slightly different from the other. Want to see a bawdy night of burlesque and then have a romantic Valentine’s dinner after the show? Go for it — the first show is at 7pm. Prefer to eat first and be entertained later? That’s cool too, because the late show starts at 9:30.

This is awesome for me, the photographer, who usually can’t enjoy the full spectrum of the show when seeing it through my viewfinder. So I’ll get to watch one show and photograph the other.

The show is three weeks away, but tickets are already selling out. See you there!

Time lapse in Montreal, August 2008.

But before she did that, she did a lot of other things… I thought I’d share a few photos of Jessie over the years (pre implants).

I’ve known Jessie since 2004, when I met her as she competed in the Miss Molson Indy Toronto pageant. She won that contest and later claimed the national title in Vancouver.

Also featured in the photos above are Playboy Cyber Girl Lynne Allmendinger (nee Kush), Playboy cover model Zdenka Micka, Canadian radio/TV host Kathy Mueller, Canadian television personality Diana Ciccone, and Miss Oktoberfest Krystal Benesch.

Over the years, I’ve partnered with Jessie on various projects, one of which was a series of bikini contests in the Oakville area in 2007. Jessie organized and hosted the events with her friend Sarah Bradley, and I photographed them.

I won’t rehash all of her skills and accomplishments here on the blog, as information about her is easily available elsewhere on the web, but I will tell you that Jessie is a fine makeup artist (in addition to her acting and singing). When I photographed Brandi Latimer for the first time, Jessie was there to handle makeup duties and this is what we came up with:

Jessie shows off her crazy side in this photo from a 2005 Christmas party:

Lastly, I leave you with this amusing clip of Jessie doing a little Wii boxing from her 23rd birthday party:

Sarah has created a Facebook page for fans of Jessie, or you can check out Jessie’s website.