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Charlotte with Glasses

vtography — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 14:06:14 +0000

She’s blind as a bat without them.

Charlotte’s one of the more unique people I’ve met, and I wish I could give you all something tangible to back that up, but it’s tough to put into words. I’ve said it before on this blog and I’ll say it again — one of the primary benefits of this little hobby is being able to get to know so many varied, interesting people.

Charlotte

vtography — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 20:04:40 +0000

Meet 18-year old Charlotte. This was our second shoot, though our third attempt. Our very first attempt got interrupted by incredibly heavy winds, which made picture-taking fairly impossible. We played it safe and stayed indoors this time at the Westin Harbour Castle in downtown Toronto.

For the camera nerds, lighting was an Alien Bees ABR800 Ringflash in front, with a AB400 in an umbrella for the rim light.

My Top 11 Photos From 2011

vtography — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 02:20:00 +0000

In no particular order, here are my eleven favourite photos that I shot during 2011.

The Rest of Samantha’s Return

vtography — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 08:08:51 +0000

I’d mentioned in my previous post that it’s been about six months since I last photographed Samantha. Was it worth the wait? You decide:

The Return of Samantha

vtography — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:36:04 +0000

There was a time where some of you probably thought I never photographed anyone but Sam, given her large presence on this blog. But it’s been almost six months since we last shot together! Enjoy the return of Samantha. More to come!

PM

vtography — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 05:01:38 +0000

Meet PM. PM is curvy. I like curvy.

PM is in LA this week to visit the Playboy Mansion! Say hi to Hef for me!

Amy Kerr

vtography — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 03:40:08 +0000

This is going to get confusing.

Meet Amy. Amy from Halifax. But not this Amy from Halifax.

The Amy you see here is actress and model Amy Kerr. And funnily enough, I met Amy Kerr after she saw my shots above of Amy Morris. She liked them so much that she friended me on Facebook and we quickly set about planning a photo shoot of our own when I returned to Halifax in October.

A few days before we shot together, I was headed out to dinner with Marietta, who you might remember from these photos in a really furry dress. As I was waiting on the sidewalk for Marietta to finish work, a car pulled up and two beautiful ladies sat inside, chatting. The blonde in the driver’s seat looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t quite place who she was. “That kinda looks like Amy Kerr,” I said to myself, unsure because I hadn’t met her at this point and because of the strange lighting tricks the reflective windshield was playing on my eyes. I busted out my BlackBerry and pulled up her Facebook profile to see if I could match the faces, but the results were inconclusive. A few moments later, Marietta arrived and said, “Hey, that’s Amy Kerr!” They exchanged a wave and we troddled off to dinner.

When I finally got to meet Amy for realz, we spent an afternoon shooting in the confines of my hotel room at the Westin, making sure to put every element of the room to good use. The windows provided some particularly lovely backlighting as the sun lowered in the sky.

I can honestly say that I don’t know a better looking 31-year old than Amy, who has spent half her life acting in movies, TV shows, and commercials, including some appearances on Trailer Park Boys.

The thing that amazed me most was that Amy gave birth to a son just eight months before we did this shoot! She looked faaaantastic for being a new mom.

Lastly, the YouTube video below gives you a little behind-the-scenes glimpse into our afternoon.

Check out more of Amy on www.amykerr.ca!

Hair and Styling: Kimberly Murphy
Makeup: Vicky Mina

Hotter Shots, Ghetto Style

vtography — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 06:54:20 +0000

Earlier in the summer I posted about my bare-bones ghetto beauty shoot with Amy that turned out spectacularly well given the circumstances. The shots of Erika above were done in much the same vein, but only because I didn’t know any better at the time.

These shots are from nearly five years ago, when I was armed with only a lowly Nikon D70 and a 24-85mm lens — not exactly high end gear by any stretch of the imagination. The shoot took place in my living room, where I set up a four-foot wide roll of white seamless paper. Four-foot seamless is barely wide enough to shoot a single person so every single photo had to be cropped and/or erased to eliminate the bookshelves that were creeping in from each side. Also, seamless paper + carpet = bad combination. Definitely need a hard surface to put that stuff on. You can imagine the damage that Erika’s heels did to the paper.

Lighting was simple (non-TTL) hot-shoe flash units in umbrellas. Most of the magic here comes via the post-processing, where I erased the bookshelves, made the background whiter, shifted the images to high key, and glued two together on one canvas.

It won’t exactly get published in the pages of W or anything, but it’s just another example of how good results can be achieved with sub-par circumstances.

This is the fantastic mess of images as they looked when they were straight out of the camera:

Brutal. I’m so glad I mostly know what I’m doing now, compared to then. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — I wish I could have another shot at shooting Erika. Alas, she moved back to her native Bermuda a while ago, so I’ll have to make a trip down there if I want to make it happen.

Justine In Heels…

vtography — Sun, 05 Dec 2010 09:01:46 +0000

…and not much else.

The Other Brandi

vtography — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 15:20:29 +0000

Meet the other Brandi. I only call her that because for the last five years I’ve been shooting a different gal named Brandi… apparently parents in the 80s and 90s weren’t that diverse with their naming.

This Brandi happens to be from Porters Lake, Nova Scotia, which I feel comfortable to tell you is a solid one hour drive from Halifax in rush hour traffic. It’s a breezy 35 minutes back to Halifax without traffic.

Anyhoo.

More pictures:

I struggled a lot to set up the light for this shoot. As I mentioned previously, I can only bring a bare minimum of equipment with me while travelling. On this trip, that consisted of two Nikon Speedlights, two small umbrellas, and two small light stands. That’s not a lot of flexibility, and because we shot this at night, I was without my favourite daylight streaming through the window. Poor Brandi sat and watched as I fiddled and struggled with positioning and intensity of the lights for what must have seemed like hours. By the time I got the light working the way I wanted it to at the end of the shoot, we had a whole ton of pretty images that will unfortunately never see the light of day due to some other problems — perhaps I’ll write about that in detail one day. Such is the life of a photographer.