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Les Coquettes Academy

Ryan — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 02:21:08 +0000

As part of my ongoing work with Les Coquettes, I was recently assigned to shoot some images for Les Coquettes Academy. The Academy is burlesque university, essentially — a six-week course on performing, creating characters, and costume design. I shot four girls in forty minutes with three lights, which was a challenge. We were pressed for time, and the four students weren’t exactly professional models. Lilli Bubalotovich, their instructor, helped out tremendously by suggesting poses unique to their characters, while I quickly snapped away.

These and many others were all shot on white seamless paper, which gave me the flexibility to change the background colour in post production, since there wasn’t enough time during the shoot to switch up coloured gels. Zack Arias, photographer extraordinaire, has a great video tutorial on this technique.

Les Coquettes Present: Love Story

Ryan — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:30:16 +0000

The 2010 Les Coquettes season is underway with their February production of Love Story. I once again photographed the poster art/ad campaign.

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!

Les Coquettes Present: Dark Places

Ryan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:03:59 +0000

The next Les Coquettes production is in full swing and coming to Revival on October 25th! Last week, we shot the poster image with three of the loveliest Coquettes: Billie Black, La Minouche, and Charity Dawn. And let’s not forget The Carpenter!

Photo: Ryan Visima (moi); Art Direction/Styling: Catherine Skinner, James Smith, Sarah Jamal; Makeup: Angela McQueen; Layout and Design: James Smith

Buy tickets online here or click the image above. And for more Les Coquettes goodness, check out:

photos from the last show on Flickr
videos on the YouTube channel
Facebook group

Lighting for this was pretty simple… sticking to my one-light-is-more-than-enough ethic, I only used an Alien Bees 400 strobe with a 40° grid. The camera’s white balance was set intentionally cool for the pale vampire effect.