Canvas to the Imagination

I was very excited when Opus Framing and Art recently announced their new digital canvas printing service. I’d been considering canvas printing for some of my recent photographic work so their timing couldn’t have been better. I selected two files from the portrait series and took them in to Opus to test out their print services. As you can see by the photos they did a fantastic job.

The colours and level of detail in the prints are really fantastic and the texture of the canvas plays nicely with the illustrative qualities of my work. Opus stretches the canvas in-house with a choice between 3/4″ or 1-1/2″ stretcher bars and four different styles of folding the corners. I went with the larger stretchers because it makes the finished print more substantial and I can hang it without a frame. I am really thrilled with these two prints and it’s only a matter of time before I have the rest of my portrait series printed on canvas as well.

I can’t say enough good things about the staff at the downtown location of Opus (which is the only location to offer this service) who are very knowledgeable and helpful. They were really great about answering my questions, and I was shown samples of digital files of varying quality printed on the canvas to give me an idea of how things would look. They also have their monitors calibrated to the printer for perfect colour accuracy. It took a week for my files to be printed and stretched, and they gave me a call when everything was ready. It’s a great service with even better results – especially when you start with high quality files.

As a side note, I had been planning to use Kickstarter to create a campaign to fund the cost of producing the canvas prints of my portrait series. I want to put together a show of this work but not beggar myself in the process. This morning as I started looking into it I discovered I need a US bank account and address because Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments Business accounts to receive funds and this is part of their policy. Now I’ll either have to figure out a way to make it work for me or come up with some other means to raise money to fund my art. Any suggestions?

I’ve fallen a bit off track with my portrait series the last few weeks because I’ve been very focused on other things. It’s also been tricky scheduling people during the Olympic craziness. This portrait features Andrea and was taken towards the end of January.

I bought three large pieces of transparent fabrics from Dressew in different colours to use as props for this shoot (and beyond). It was fun to figure out different ways to use them in the portrait, and I especially loved getting Andrea to move the fabric to create swirling bits of colour around herself. It was a hilarious part of the shoot, but the results are beautiful.

For Valentine’s Day I invited some of my friends over to pose for a Valentine-themed photo shoot. The idea was inspired by the work of Katie Sokoler and her “kiss in your pocket” flip book.

I cut hearts from red and pink paper to create a background, and picked up sparkly hearts and red tulips for props.

I asked people to ham it up for the photos. Valentine’s Day is afterall one of the cheesiest holidays ever, and standing in front of a wall of hearts calls for anything but serious expressions.

The portraits all turned out awesome and everyone looks very cute and funny. I love it when an idea comes together so well. A full set of my Valentine’s portraits can be found on flickr.

I think I’ve mentioned before that with the portrait series I’m trying to explore ideas I originally shot as self portraits. I’ve always wanted to redo the Mad Hatter shot of myself from two years ago because it’s a great idea and I felt I could do it better – and incorporate even more hats. And now…voilà!

Shai of Pome Studio is the model in the updated Mad Hatter portrait. I chose her because she’s not comfortable having her photo taken (typical for most photographers) and my thought was I could hide her under the many hats. It turned out to be the perfect concept for Shai because she’s a hair stylist by profession, and she knits lovely hats for sale at Pome (five of which were used in the portrait at the top of this post). In the final concept shot I used sixteen or seventeen hats, most of which were borrowed from friends. The hat pile was far too precarious to balance on it’s own so I had to call in Boris as the hat wrangler to prop things up from the side with a broomstick and remove it from the shot in post processing.

I love how this portrait of Julie came out in a wonderfully magical way that didn’t occur to me when I took the photo. As I was processing the shot I started imagining stars in the background and the blue backdrop became a midnight blue sky. Boris came up with the title after finding the lyrics from a song by Melissa Ferrick.

It’s been a month since I shot this portrait for the series. I decided I would only do one in December because it seemed like it would just be too crazy a time to try to scheduling people shortly before Christmas. But a whole month break from this project feels too long. In the meantime, even though I haven’t been shooting I’ve been working on ideas and figuring out who to photograph next. I can’t wait to get started again.