Posts Tagged toronto
Self Portrait
It took about 30 shots to get this one. Self portraits are something I’ve never been good at, nor even interested in. However, after shooting a model today in the studio, the light streaming in from the windows was too good to pass up.
The biggest challenge was getting myself in focus, since I can’t see myself through the viewfinder. I put a Nikon D700 on a tripod with an 85mm f/1.4 lens. After a few attempts at guessing the focus and failing, I eventually removed the camera from the tripod and brought it with me to where I would stand for the portrait. I then pointed the camera at the tripod and focused on it, to simulate the distance. Initially I was trying shots at f/2.8 because I wanted to make sure the depth of field was shallow enough to throw the background out of focus. This left very little leeway for any mistakes in my distance from the camera, as even an inch or two closer or further away could render myself blurry. I eventually bumped up the aperture to f/4 which gave me a bit more room to play with, without impacting the background too much.
The light was very, very warm as the sun was setting, but I cooled it down and desaturated it using Adobe Lightroom.
Another Photographer: Maya Washington
Posted by Ryan in Other Photographers on February 10th, 2010
I can’t believe I’ve only ever talked about my friend Maya once on the blog before. Maya recently (like ten minutes ago) joined Flickr and you can see some of her work by clicking above. I met Maya waaay back in 2002 or so when she was a customer at my store and dropping off the odd roll of film here and there with some stunning images on them. I later hired her to work for me. She’s an energetic free spirit, having lived in Toronto and Vancouver (and soon New York City!) in the last couple years. In addition to being a stellar photographer, she’s also a fantastic model and actress, which means I’ll have to shoot her again before she heads down south. And now that I have a new Nikon D300s with HD video, maybe she can be my guinea pig for some video experiments too.
What has impressed me most about Maya’s photos over the years is her ability to do so much with so little. She started out with the most basic of basic digital SLRs and has very minimal amounts of lighting gear. She shot many of her photos in her Vancouver apartment (screw you, expensive studios) and makes trips to the thrift store part of her everyday life. Maya even has a blog devoted to her frugal ways: Frugal Artist.
To see more photos, check out Maya’s website.
Les Coquettes Present: Love Story
Posted by Ryan in In Studio, Time Lapse Videos on January 23rd, 2010
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
Posted by Ryan in On Location on October 6th, 2009
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.
Lauren in Playboy?
Posted by Ryan in On Location, Pretty Girls on September 11th, 2009
No way.
Lauren, seen here on the blog previously, has never been in Playboy. But someone out there thinks she has. See, it’s funny — every week when I check my server logs, I see that someone has searched for the term “lauren potts playboy” in Google and landed at my site as a result. The search always comes from the same place — Maryland. I can only deduce that it’s the same person, week after week, searching and clicking on my site.
Now, I’m not naive. There could very well be some hot girl in Maryland named Lauren Potts that this person is searching for. But it ain’t this one.
Here’s Lauren in her underwear, which is as close as she’s gonna get to Playboy. Sorry to disappoint.
Swimwear September: Samantha II
Posted by Ryan in On Location, Pretty Girls on September 3rd, 2009
Oh Samantha, how I love thee. And it’s a good thing she loves me back, otherwise our photos together would suck. I picked up Sam at Hooters in Whitby and we braved the rush hour traffic to make it to the downtown ferry terminal. We had a long walk to the beach at Hanlan’s Point after getting off the ferry, so we had to scramble as there was only about 20 minutes of sunlight left. We fired off about four different looks until it was too dark for the camera to even focus on Sam’s lovely face. The shot above is early on, before the sun went below the horizon.
Tech details: Nikon D200, f/2.8, 1/60 with an 85mm f/1.8 lens. Natural light. Cold water.
A bonus shot from the beach:
Les Coquettes @ Bread & Circus
Posted by Ryan in Events & Performances on August 16th, 2009
My favourite gal-pals (and a few boy-pals) from Les Coquettes did a little three-day run of a show titled The Long, Hot, Summer.
Illustration by James Smith, based on photos by moi. L-R: Charity Dawn, Dante Inferno.
Bread & Circus was the venue — a tiny little 80-seat venue in Toronto’s Kensington Market neighbourhood. It’s much smaller than we were all used to — “backstage” was more of a hallway than anything else, the spotlights were dim, and shooting in such a cramped environment was challenging to say the least.
The upshot was that I had three days to get it right, so I was able to plant myself in a different spot every night to get a variety of shots from all angles.
See the whole set on Flickr!
First Thoughts on Nikon 10-24mm Lens
Posted by Ryan in Uncategorized on June 7th, 2009
Back in April, Nikon announced the AF-S DX Nikkor 10-24mm f/3.5-4.5G ED lens. The usual alphabet soup of letters and numbers is pretty meaningless if you just come here to see pictures, so let’s hop to it. I used the lens for the first time last weekend, at two weddings. First up, Jim and Ashley:
Nikon D200, Nikkor 10-24mm lens @ 10mm, f/4.5, 1/15th, ISO 800
This is a wide lens. It effectively replaces Nikon’s 12-24mm lens in the lineup and provides some competition for Sigma, Tamron, and Tokina, who all have 10mm offerings. Looking through a 10mm lens is a whole different experience. There were many times when I was in danger of colliding with my subjects because I didn’t realize how close I was to them!
Nikon D700, Nikkor 10-24mm lens @ 20mm, f/5.6, 1/10th, ISO 320
The lens focused quickly and accurately in the low light of the reception hall and provided sharp images at all focal lengths. The two shots above were illuminated with a Nikon SB-900 flash while dragging (slowing down) the shutter to get the colourful/blurry ambient light in the background. For much of the night, I stood on the dance floor, camera pressed to my eye, and circled the participants over and over again while pressing the shutter every so often. With ordinary photography, one would want to stay as still as possible to minimize vibration or blurriness; here, though, the flash freezes the subject and my circling movements combined with the slow shutter speed add a little pizzaz to the background.
But what happens when you put this DX lens on an FX (full-frame) camera?
Nikon D700, Nikkor 10-24mm lens @ 11mm, f/5.6, 1/10th, ISO 320
You get a crooked, wavy vignette which looks… kinda cool, I think. The lens doesn’t quite project enough light on to the full-frame sensor to completely cover it, hence some information at the edges isn’t recorded. Here’s another shot, zoomed in a bit to 12mm:
Nikon D700, Nikkor 10-24mm lens @ 12mm, f/5.6, 1/10th, ISO 320
A teensy bit less of the vignette is visible here. Zooming in to 15mm eliminates it completely. Nikon’s FX cameras have the ability to automatically crop the images when DX lenses are attached, but I prefer to disable this function and shoot images like the above. This maximizes the amount of control I have after the fact, allowing me to crop where and how I want, and getting images that are as wide as possible.
The edge distortion at the wider focal lengths is surely noticeable by now, but it can be put to good use if the bride and groom are willing to have a little fun, like Meghan and Mike:
Nikon D200, Nikkor 10-24mm lens @ 10mm, f/4.5, 1/400th, ISO 500
Nikon D200, Nikkor 10-24mm lens @ 10mm, f/5.6, 1/125th, ISO 200
Meghan and Mike luckily didn’t mind the funhouse-mirror approach to photographs and we got some unique shots as a result.
I’ll be taking this lens with me on my July trip to Nova Scotia, where it should excel at landscape images of the ocean and sky. Luckily it takes the same 77mm filters that my existing pro Nikon lenses use, so I won’t have to buy a new circular polarizer. The build quality of the lens isn’t quite the same as my 17-55mm or 70-200mm lenses, but it’s still really really decent for what is essentially an expensive but consumer-grade lens. I own a Sigma 17-35mm f/2.8-4 lens that cost about the same amount when it was new, and it feels very cheap by comparison. Nikon knows what they’re doing when it comes to fit, finish, and refinement.
I’d easily recommend this lens for anyone looking for a super-wide and I look forward to using it on my vacation.