Jodi Renee

I first met Jodi in 2005 when she contacted me via my website. She was training for a fitness competition at the time, so we coordinated a shoot on the day of the competition, during a break in the action, in fact! I picked her up downtown at the Convention Centre and we navigated the horrendous downtown traffic to the east-end Beaches location that I love so much.

It was a hot — nay, sweltering — day in June and we were shooting at high noon which only made it worse. Mid-day sun is also the worst for photography, creating harsh, unflattering shadows on the face. Jodi’s tanning spray, necessary for the bright stage lights of the competition, had already started to melt off her skin after just a few minutes in the intense 31°C heat.

My equipment at the time was modest: I set up a Nikon SB-800 flash on a tripod close to Jodi, and used my Nikon D70 to trigger it wirelessly using Nikon’s awesome Creative Lighting System. Under the right conditions, this system works fairly well. But under the challenging conditions described above, it was much more of a chore to get everything working as it should. Any wireless flash system that relies on an optical trigger will often fail if there is an abundance of bright light, such as the sun. What this meant is that I couldn’t be much more than about five feet away from the flash, otherwise it wouldn’t fire properly (or at all!). I had to use a lens with a fairly short focal length (for me, anyway) since I was standing so close to Jodi. The 85mm lens that I chose meant a lot of 3/4-length shots and not much else — full-lengths were out of the question since I couldn’t move away from the flash.

Jodi’s yellow bikini top ended up being overexposed in most of the photos due to my inability to properly control the light in the difficult conditions. The SB-800 did an admirable job, filling in all the harsh facial shadows.

A photo from this series was eventually published in the January 2006 issue of Maxim magazine, which is awesome considering the difficult constraints we faced in terms of time and light. Despite what the Maxim headline reads, Jodi was not my girlfriend, but that’s a story that I’ll share in the future.

Today, Jodi has transitioned from model to big-shot people photographer. I’ve assisted her on many weddings over the last three years or so, and she does a phenomenal job photographing families and kids. See for yourself at Jodi Renee’s blog and her website.