Amy Kerr

January 6, 2011

This is going to get confusing.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

 

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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

The Blonde Bombshell Returns

November 15, 2010

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True story: the green lingerie above was far too small for Gillian and serves no practical purpose, which therefore makes it great for photos. The top just barely held her in boobs, and the bottoms, um, didn’t. That required a little extra Photoshop work. In fact, it was a bit of an ongoing theme throughout the shoot and there were a fair amount of photos that wouldn’t qualify for Gillian’s seal of approval.

The Other Brandi

November 9, 2010

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.

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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:

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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.

Alison

November 1, 2010

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Alison was another model I shot while in Halifax and I was so glad to finally shoot her after an aborted attempt in July to shoot at the beach. Her tall, thin build is definitely meant for fashion (there’s a reason Ford Models in Toronto was chasing after her) but I was happy we got to glam it up a bit in my hotel room. And can you believe she just put on fifteen pounds before our shoot?

Gorgeous beyond words.

The great part about hotels is how nicely furnished they generally are, which make for great sets. This combination wood and leather headboard at the Westin was a perfect contrast for Alison’s white lingerie. Although the lone window in the room was not huge, it provided ample light for these shots, which had no other light source involved.

Wendy in Colour

October 31, 2010

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Wendy’s wearing the best $10 I ever spent at H&M in Toronto ($6 for the bra, $4 for the bottoms).

Wendy started modelling later than most and has been at it, incredibly, for just under a year. That hasn’t hampered her abilities as she was right at home in front of my camera, hitting poses before I could even open my mouth to tell her how.

Wendy in Black and White

October 30, 2010

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I went to Nova Scotia in mid-October and Wendy was the first person I shot while I was there. After a fun argument over whether or not she was actually a D-cup (results were inconclusive), we had some fun in the bathroom of my hotel room. The lighting in the bathroom was really fantastic — all four sides of the bathroom mirror were bordered by fluorescent bulbs, giving the same effect as a ringlight. All of these were shot with that ambient source and nothing else. The bathroom door didn’t face into the room, but rather faced the hallway next to the entrance, meaning I had very little space to work with. I was scrunched up against the hallway wall, but the shots were worth it.

This was actually our second shoot of the day. We’d shot some stuff in the bed earlier in the day (I’ll post them soon) and then Wendy came back in the evening when we were both bored and had nothing else to do.

Beauty Shots, Ghetto Style

August 13, 2010

Amy’s back!

This is my first (and possibly last) foray into the genre of beauty photography. I don’t necessarily own all the proper equipment to do “real” beauty shots, but I figured it was a fun challenge to see how far I could get with what I have.

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Because I was travelling, I could only bring a minimum of gear with me. The three shots of Amy you see here were all lit the same way (see diagram below). I had Amy perch herself on the armrest of the couch in my hotel room, which was in a corner. The walls had a textured beige wallpaper but I needed that to be white, so I put a Nikon SB-800 flash (1/8th power) on a Cameron W-804 light stand behind Amy and aimed it directly into the corner. Next, I put a Nikon SB-900 on another stand to camera left with a Photoflex 30″ UM-RUT30 convertible white umbrella in shoot-through mode. I didn’t aim it directly at Amy, but rather just to her right, to feather the light slightly. The whole rig was fired wirelessly from the pop-up flash in my D300S.

The light stands and two umbrellas easily fit into a medium-sized suitcase for travelling.

Before I left Toronto to go to Halifax, I headed to Forever 21 to pick up some necklaces to use for the shoot. I found a cute owl and a neat peacock design — only $6.80 each, believe it or not!

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned Amy’s ridiculous blue eyes before, but I’ll point them out again for fun. They’re fantastic.

Makeup was courtesy of the wonderful Kaily Grist, who you’ll hear more about when I post the next batch of Amy photos.

All in all, I think the whole team did a pretty tremendous job considering the limitations on our resources. Who needs a studio?