It felt difficult to return to the portraits after a month long break, but I love these shots of Krista and the paper lanterns. They make me happy because they’re so wonderful and colourful.

I decided to experiment with processing the series in different ways and played around with a set of Photoshop actions I found on the internet. I’ve never really used Actions before because they lend themselves more to batch processing and I don’t really do much of that. I still had to do a considerable amount of tweaking.

I added a texture to the final shot I worked on last week. In some ways it suits the photo but I think the texture isn’t subtle enough and distracts from the shot. I may redo this one a bit.

This is the twenty-third portrait in the Imaginary Girl series. My original goal was the create twenty-five of them but I may keep going past that number.

I shot this portrait of Stephanie at the beginning of June and as of the beginning of July it will be in a group show at Gallery Gachet along with the portrait I took of Jess. (How’s that for putting new work to work.) This was taken on Granville Island with the giant leaves of a Gunera plant as the backdrop, and Alice in Wonderland as the inspiration.

June has not been a productive month for working on the portrait series because I’ve had other projects I’ve needed to concentrate on. There are numerous artists calls with summer deadlines coming up and it’ll mean more shows in the future if my work gets accepted. (Fingers crossed!)

I have used balloons once before in a photo shoot, with Siobhan in the studio back in November. I decided I wanted to use balloons again as a prop, this time with Eagranie as the model and with balloons of a different colour. Oh how I do love red!

From this shoot I learned that photographing balloons outside when it’s windy is like trying to photograph an uncooperative monkey that can’t stay still. Other than the tricky breezes, the weather was perfect with a lovely blue sky and fluffy clouds as a backdrop. I count these portraits among my favorites of the whole series (so far).

These are a few of the shots I took of Lauren a few weeks ago, when she came over for a portrait session in the old apartment. We had a lot of fun using the pocket doors as a backdrop and Lauren was terrific in front of the camera.

I first met Kirsten Chursinoff at Northern Voice a few years ago, when she came up to chat with me between sessions. She recognized me from Flickr and as we talked I realized I’d seen her textile work a few years before at The Secret Garden Tea Company.

This portrait session was very much inspired by the colourful fibre art Kirsten creates with fabrics and threads. She provided all of the objects I worked with and she brought over a large variety of things to choose from. She was also very patient as I placed layer upon layer of thread over her arms and upper body. I wanted these photos to be similar to the portrait of my sister. I was interested in exploring the theme of fibre arts further and feel there are many interesting ways to use thread as a prop.

The final shot is a composite pulled together from two photos. I created the set using spools of thread and a cute pincushion Kirsten brought over, and then had her pose separately holding the giant scissors made by Peter Kiss. It all came together nicely in photoshop – after a few hours of hard work that is.

Sometimes I don’t have a clear idea of how I want to photograph the person I’ve asked to pose for one of my portraits. This was the case with Kristi, though I did know I wanted to use a natural setting.

My original idea was to use her garden as the setting, but it was too early in the year for the garden to have much growth. I decided to improvise and scouted around for a location near her home just before the shoot. The ivy was located at the front of her house and proved to be the perfect setting for the portrait. The vines were thick enough to crawl into and I disentangled a few and layered them over her body.

I like the smaller series of nature portraits that is slowly taking shape within the larger body of work.

Nature is a way for me to recharge, clear my head, and become centred, but the influence of good people around me can do this too.

This is my friend Nicole Dextras, a skilled and talented artist in her own right. I consider her one of my mentors and I really wanted to include her in my portrait series. Like most photographers, she’s not a fan of having her picture taken so I’m really glad she agreed to sit for me.

It was Nicole’s suggestion to pose with the Camellia bush in her yard and the late morning light I found myself working with at the time was perfect. We started out with Nicole posed in front of the bush but I didn’t want the flowers to just be a backdrop, so we tucked her into the leaves. The portrait was so much stronger once she became part of the bush and she looks very at home in there.

The title is a play on a quote by Kahlil Gibran – “There is a space between man’s imagination and man’s attainment that may only be traversed by his longing”.

I really should do a better job of blogging the portraits I’ve been shooting because when I write about them weeks later I’m never sure what to say. I’m so much better about this with the altered books.

This particular portrait session was very exciting because it presented the opportunity to work with Petrina as a model, and with Shai as a hair stylist. I’ve never worked with a stylist on a shoot before and Shai did a wonderful job styling Petrina’s hair and wrangling the butterflies.

I’ve wanted to do a portrait with butterflies for awhile, and since there was no way I could get real ones I settled for brightly painted fake butterflies. Dressew was my source for butterfly fakery. They have a have a whole section of them in the basement along one of the back corners, which was a pleasant surprise for me to discover.

This portrait features the lovely Casey. She came over to my home studio a few weeks back and did a great job of pretending there was a cherry tree in her hand. As I’ve mentioned before, the shoots I do often require lots of pretending on the part of the model, which can be hilarious. It definitely was in this case. At least it keeps things fun.

As I was working on the post-processing for this I started wishing there was something more in her hand for the tree to rest in. I briefly considered having Boris pose with a pile of dirt in his hand so I could add it into this shot (sans his hands). I decided I didn’t want to go that far with adding elements in photoshop, as it ends up being a ridiculous amount of work and the shot doesn’t REALLY need it. I’m sure Boris was relieved….

I really wanted to do a portrait full of eye-blasting colour because so many of the portraits in this series were shot against our plain white wall. This one features Sonia Ryan, the Coordinator of “Things” at Bootup Labs. Sonia was very keen to do a photo shoot with me. She came over with beautiful sari fabric to wear which (luckily) was nicely complimented by the rich red of the background. Neither of us knew how to properly put on a sari so we did a lot of careful draping with the fabric and I secured it at the back with clamps.

About the title…when trying to figure out a title I google words related to the photo and see where that takes me. This is how I often end up with wordy titles, but it works.

I love my portrait series, but oh does it ever take a lot of energy to come up with ideas and then wrangle people to do the shoots. I’ve been wavering on continuing with this project at all, but then I keep producing work I really like because of it.

This portrait features the lovely Shelly Roche. She came over to pose and did an admirable job of holding onto the strings I’d pinned to the wall and pretending there were birds attached to the other end. Originally I had planned to use Yuuki as the flying bird subject but I nixed that idea knowing how tricky he is to photograph when still, nevermind trying to photograph him while flying. I settled on the pigeon population of Granville Island for my birds and pulled this together from about five different shots. The results of hours of hard work are pretty magical.

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.

When I came up with the idea to do a portrait with goldfish swimming around my friend Kay, I realized the only way I could pull it off was to get real fish. I needed to be able to photograph them under the same lighting conditions I would be shooting Kay in order to make the fish shots and person shot match. So I went out and bought a pair of goldfish with the long term plan they’d be a permanent fixture in my home. Luckily Boris was okay with the acquisition of more pets and took it upon himself to name the orange fish “Buri“, while I named the speckled brown fish “Astrid“. (Not that either of them get called anything other than fish or fishes most of the time…)

The above image is the result of many hours of work in photoshop, cutting out multiple shots of individual fish to bring together and playing around with colour. I asked Kay during the shoot to pretend the fish were swimming around her and this was one of the expressions she came up with. It was very cute and perfectly suited to holding her breath under an imaginary sea.

This shot of Kay with the goldfish and bowl was early on in the shoot as we were just getting warmed up. It’s cute but I definitely don’t love it as much as the top shot.

When Kay came over to be photographed for the series a few weeks ago she brought a selection of Betsey Johnson dresses and crinolines with her to wear. They were all pretty specular but I loved this one the best because of the bright mix of colours. I usually ask my portrait subjects to bring a few different items to choose from and wear during the shoot. Part of the fun of inviting women friends over for these photo shoots has been getting to see their clothes.

The funny thing about the shoot with Kay, that I didn’t really think about beforehand, was that it didn’t really matter what she was wearing. I was shooting with a specific idea in mind and her clothing was mostly hidden from view. Towards the end of the shoot I decided the fantastic outfit just couldn’t go to waste and did these shots with Kay seated on the floor to showcase the dress. I love how this gave me the opportunity to try a different perspective from my usual style of portraiture.

Siobhan was an excellent model and working with balloons made us both laugh a lot. I decided to scrap the original idea I had in mind for this shoot – Sio standing on the chair and floating with the balloons – because I didn’t want to go all crazy and photoshoppy. Also, despite the fact that the ceilings in our apartment are about 12 feet high, I STILL didn’t have enough room to compose things in camera that way I wanted.

I’m having a lot of fun inviting lovely female friends over to my home studio to pose for me. Everyone has taken to my invitation with enthusiasm so far, despite any misgivings about feeling unphotogenic. For this shoot I put together a flickr gallery of balloon images take by other photographers. You can check it out here. I really like using the new gallery feature for inspiration.

My friend Kai was the second out of town guest in Vancouver during the month of October, and of course I made sure to take her portrait for the series. Kai has a red winter coat just like I do and I wanted to include it in the shot. I hadn’t intended to fill the whole scene with red, but with coat, umbrella and Japanese Maple tree all in gorgeous shades of my favorite colour, red ruled the day. (As it should.)

The Japanese Maple I had in mind for this shot wasn’t fully turned at the time, so after I took a few shots and wasn’t satisfied with the results, Kai suggested another spot with red trees. She’d just happened to be in the Queen Elizabeth Park area a few days before and noticed a whole street with them. This turned out to be the perfect spot to shoot what I had in mind and it was wonderful to see so many Japanese Maple trees covered in red leaves all in a row.

In September I kicked off my new portrait series with a bang by shooting four of them in one month. In October I decided shooting two a month would be a more reasonable pace, and both subjects ended up being people from out of town. My sister Kathryn was in Vancouver visiting for eight days over the thanksgiving weekend so I took advantage of the timing to include her in my series.

The idea behind these shots was based on a suggestion by my friend Susie. She liked the idea of emphasizing my sister’s very thick and curly hair by making it crazy and nesty with birds and bugs in it. Since the only way I could pull of that idea was with a huge amount of photoshop work, I opted for something less elaborate but that still made use of her hair. My sister is a knitter so I went with knitting needles and yarn. I ended up having to string the yarn into different corners of the room for the shoot and then Kathryn had to sit VERY still while I took photographs. It was hilarious and we finished with the moustachio’d shot below.

The yarn draped over Kathryn’s shoulders is made by a local Vancouver yarn company called SweetGeorgia Yarns. Felicia Lo is the owner and she makes beautiful yarns in rich colours that even a non-knitter such as myself can covet.

Monique Trottier was the fourth person I photographed in my portrait series. She is a voracious reader of books and writes reviews of some of them on her SoMisguided blog. Of course I came up with an idea to photograph her with books – lots and lots of them.

The concepts I came up with for her shoot ended up being the most complicated so far and have required extensive post-production in photoshop to construct each of them. I had two ideas, one is the above shot with a tiny Monique sitting on a tall pile of books. The other idea is still in progress and involves EVEN more books than this one. Neither image worked as I’d originally planned and shot, which was frustrating, and I was going to reshoot until I finally came up with a solution. Sometimes art is about problem solving.

I love the final version of this shot because it’s cute, colourful and came out even better than I’d been picturing it in my head.

“Flowers have incredible power. Their fragile beauty ad brief life can teach us to enjoy without attachment, to experience deeply while knowing full well the experience is temporary. It is the same with all life. We will have pleasures and they too will be transitory. We are free when we are able to enjoy our pleasures without trying to hold on to them, when we are present without emotion-charged memories or looking forward to the next time. Life will have its joys and sorrows; to live fully we must live from the source, without attachment to either the pleasure of the pain.”
~ Open Mind by Diane Mariechild

I found the above quote a few weeks ago just as I was about to upload to flickr the dahlia portrait of Ariane. It seemed very appropriate given the subject matter of the shot and it also relates to some of my thoughts lately. I purchased the dahlias for the shoot from City Flowers Express at the Kitsilano Farmers Market earlier in the day. I chose dahlias specifically because both Ariane and I love them, and also they happen to have been in season at the time. Dahlias are amazing works of art in flower form, and they come in a wide range of colours and shapes.

This shot was inspired by the Spring is In the Air self portrait I did earlier in the year. I like how both shots are so happy and fun, and yet they each have a completely different feel. The photo below is a behind-the-scenes shot I took because it was amusing to have Ariane’s feet sticking out though the bunches of flowers.

I love this shot and it came about solely because Ariane put on her lovely green dress after I was finished photographing the main idea I had in mind for her shoot. (I’ll feature it in my next blog post.) I like it when things happen beyond what I had in mind and of course my ideas always evolve when I take them out of my head and make them a reality. I like how delicate this photo is. It was fun to experiment with moving the dress and shooting on a slower shutter speed combined with the flash.

The title of the photo, “Dancing on the Inside”, was suggested by Boris. It suits it very well.