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Final Shot of Sam in the Studio

vtography — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:47:44 +0000

The last one. For reals.

The Last of Sam in the Studio

vtography — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:30:56 +0000

I’ve used Heather Windsor’s studio in Bowmanville, Ontario for the last year as my shooting home. And as any regular reader of this blog knows, Samantha is the one model I’ve photographed more often than any other in that space. So here’s a couple images from our last shoot before the studio was shut down.

Samantha in the Snow

vtography — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 14:10:51 +0000

If you recall, the last time I tried this particular shoot, myself and the model froze our asses right off. Sam and I were much luckier, as we picked a day where it was nearly 10°C. She barely shivered at all, and her only war wounds were some really red knees from crawling around in the snow.

Looks like we did this at juuuuust the right time, as it’s getting pretty warm now and all the snow is gone around the GTA.

Second Batch of Brandi

vtography — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 17:00:32 +0000

More from Brandi’s return to the studio. The light in the stairwell was so gorgeous!

Brandi is Back!

vtography — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 16:53:10 +0000

Almost five years to the day of our very first photo shoot, and over a year since our last one, Brandi Latimer is back!

We hung out in the studio for a few hours alongside the talented Elizabeth Martin, who did hair and makeup.

More to come from this shoot soon!

Samantha in the Studio

vtography — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 22:55:01 +0000

I’ve been using my friend Heather’s studio lately. Winter sucks for shooting as I’m pretty accustomed to shooting outdoors. And although our current Toronto winter is better than most, it’s still far too frigid to shoot outdoors on a regular basis.

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:

[RSS users, please click through to the blog so you can view the video.]

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.

Another Photographer: Heather Windsor

vtography — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 01:02:20 +0000

Meet Heather.

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.